author
Olympe de Gouges
1748–1793
A daring voice of the French Revolution, she used plays and political pamphlets to argue that women should be full citizens, not spectators. Her boldest writing still feels startlingly modern.
1 Audiobook
Les droits de la femme
by Olympe de Gouges
About the author
Born Marie Gouze in Montauban in 1748, Olympe de Gouges became a playwright, pamphleteer, and public thinker in Paris. Writing at a time when women were largely shut out of political life, she built a reputation for taking on questions that many of her contemporaries avoided.
She is best remembered for the 1791 Declaration of the Rights of Woman and of the Female Citizen, a direct challenge to the revolutionary claim of universal rights that excluded women in practice. She also wrote against slavery and addressed issues such as marriage, divorce, poverty, and social welfare, using both theater and political essays to reach a wide audience.
Her outspokenness made her a controversial figure during the Revolution. In 1793, amid the violence of the Reign of Terror, she was executed in Paris. Today she is widely remembered as an early feminist voice whose work pushed the language of liberty and equality to include women as well as men.