Olympe de Gouges

Born Marie Gouze in Montauban in 1748, she later became known as Olympe de Gouges and built a public life in Paris as a playwright, pamphleteer, and political thinker. She wrote on some of the most urgent issues of her time, including women's civil and political rights, the abolition of slavery, and reform of marriage and divorce.

Her most famous work, the Declaration of the Rights of Woman and of the Female Citizen, answered the language of the French Revolution with a direct demand that women be included in its promises of liberty and citizenship. She also wrote for the theater, using drama as a way to argue about injustice and social reform.

De Gouges took outspoken positions during the Revolution and criticized powerful figures, which made her increasingly vulnerable in the violent political climate of the early 1790s. She was executed in Paris in 1793, but her writing has since made her one of the most remembered early voices for women's rights.