Madame d' Héricourt

Jenny d'Héricourt, born Jeanne-Marie Poinsard in Besançon in 1809, was a French writer, feminist activist, and physician-midwife. Writing under the name Jenny d'Héricourt, she became known for challenging prominent male thinkers who argued against women’s equality.

She is especially remembered for her vigorous replies to figures such as Pierre-Joseph Proudhon and Jules Michelet, and for the way she connected women’s rights to broader social questions. Modern scholarship also treats her as an important social thinker, not only a polemicist, because her work engaged seriously with the intellectual debates of her time.

She died in Paris in 1875. Though less widely known today than some of her contemporaries, her writing stands out for its clarity, courage, and refusal to accept that women should be confined by custom or pseudo-science.