October 10
On October 10, 1793, Olympe de Gouges was imprisoned in Paris, charged with sedition for writing political pamphlets. She had been writing them for four years. She was executed by guillotine on November 3, 1793, seven weeks later.
De Gouges was born Marie Gouze in 1748 in Montauban, France, the illegitimate daughter of a butcher — or, as she claimed, of a nobleman and playwright. She moved to Paris after the death of her husband, took a pen name, and began writing plays, pamphlets, and political manifestos in an era when women were not supposed to be doing any of those things publicly.
In 1791, while the Jacobins were producing the Déclaration des droits de l'homme et du citoyen — the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen — de Gouges produced the Déclaration des droits de la femme et de la citoyenne — the Declaration of the Rights of Woman and of the Female Citizen. It is one of the first documents in history to demand that women's rights be recognized as equivalent to men's. It addressed itself to Marie Antoinette. Article 10 read: "Woman has the right to mount the scaffold; she must equally have the right to mount the rostrum."
She dedicated the pamphlet to the National Assembly. They ignored it.
She was not executed for the women's rights declaration. She was executed for a pamphlet criticizing Robespierre and the direction of the Revolution. The charge was seditious royalism.
De Gouges wrote the first systematic demand for women's political equality in the Western tradition in 1791, addressing it directly to the body that was simultaneously producing documents declaring the universal rights of man. They ignored her entirely. She was executed two years later for different political speech. The Declaration she wrote was rediscovered in the twentieth century; for most of the intervening period it was out of print.
A new forgotten woman, every day. Direct to you.