Olympe de Gouges

Olympe de Gouges was born Marie Gouze in the South of France in 1748. Her mother came from a bourgeoisie background, and the identity of her father remains the subject of speculation. He could have been her mother’s husband, Pierre Gouze, but Olympe encouraged the rumour that she was, in actuality, the illegitimate daughter of playwright and the Marquis de Pompignan, Jean-Jacques Lefranc. At the age of seventeen she was unhappily married to a much older business associate of her father and gave birth to his son. In the same year, she was widowed (although, again, it is speculated that Olympe fled and fabricated the story of her husband’s death).

Instead of living as a widow by her husband’s name, Olympe adopted her mother’s middle name, changed the spelling of her father’s name, and added the aristocratic “de”. This new and audacious self-proclaimed name may also have been a reference to the Occitan word “gouge” – an offensive term used to refer to lowly and lewd women.

Installed in Paris with a comfortable income by her new well-to-do businessman lover, de Gouges held salons and began writing: poetry, novellas, pamphlets and plays. She adopted the very masculine habit of dictating her writing to a secretary. She attended the meetings of political clubs and criticized the monarchy, supported abolitionism and campaigned for women’s rights. After the storming of the Bastille in 1789, de Gouges became radicalized: she produced pamphlets and broadsides that called for, among other things, houses of refuge for women and children at risk; a tax to fund workshops for the unemployed; the legitimation of children born out of wedlock; inheritance equality; the legalization and regulation of prostitution; the legalization of divorce; clean streets; a national theater and the opening of professions to everyone regardless of race, class or gender. She also began to sign her letters “citoyenne,” the feminine version of the conventional revolutionary honorific “citoyen.”

On the release of the “The Declaration of the rights of man and citizen”, de Gouges famously responded with her pamphlet “The Declaration of the rights of woman and of the female citizen”. She reproduced a large body of the original text, replacing the word “man” with “woman”, adding specific demands that demonstrate how many universal rights are often implicitly masculine. For example, the inalienable right to free speech for a “citoyenne” would mean she could name the father of her children without question.

Joining the Girondist faction during the French Revolution, she advocated for a constitutional monarchy. She was arrested and executed by guillotine on the 3rd of November 1793 during the Reign of Terror.