Olympe de Gouges rewrote the Rights of Man to include women, two years in
In 1791, when revolutionary France proclaimed equal rights and quietly left women out, a playwright from Montauban answered with her own declaration. If a woman could be sent to the scaffold, Olympe de Gouges argued, she deserved the speaker's platform too. Her politics, not her feminism, eventually cost her life.
She was born Marie Gouze in 1748. Her legal father was Pierre Gouze, a butcher, though she encouraged talk that her real father was the Marquis de Pompignan, a claim historians call plausible but impossible to verify. Married against her will at seventeen to a caterer, she was widowed within about a year when a Tarn flood killed him, leaving her with a baby son. She never remarried, calling marriage the grave of trust and love, and reinvented herself as Olympe de Gouges, borrowing her mother's middle name.
Backed by a wealthy Lyon businessman, she moved to Paris in 1768 and moved through the salons, meeting Condorcet, Brissot and Mercier. She reportedly could not read and dictated her work to a secretary, yet published a novel in 1784 and then a stream of plays and pamphlets on divorce, children's rights, unemployment and social security. Her anti-slavery play L'Esclavage des Noirs drew threats; slave-trade interests ran a press campaign, and after she sued to force the Comédie-Française to stage it, paid hecklers closed it after three performances. One critic sneered that she deserved a gift of razor blades. She vowed to succeed despite her enemies.
The Revolution thrilled her until she saw that equality stopped at men. Inspired by Locke and working with the reforming Social Club, which sometimes met at Sophie de Condorcet's home, she wrote her Declaration of the Rights of Woman, then a Social Contract proposing marriage between equals.
She aligned with the moderate Girondins and opposed executing Louis XVI, partly because she rejected capital punishment and partly because she favoured constitutional monarchy; she even offered to defend him, calling him guilty as a king but innocent as a man. Her open letters condemning Robespierre's Montagnards and promoting federalism led to her arrest, and she was guillotined in November 1793.
Source: Olympe de Gouges
