♀️ Feminist Friday ♀️ Olympe de Gouges Olympe de Gouges (..

♀️ Feminist Friday ♀️ Olympe de Gouges Olympe de Gouges (1748 – 1793) was born Marie Gouze, in southern France. As a you ng woman of 16, she was forc ed into an arranged marriage by her family. When her husband died a year later, she chose not to remarry. Instead, she moved to Paris where she reinvented herself and adopted the name ‘Olympe de Gouges’. Here she began formulating her ideas and campaigning for a more equal society. Olympe de Gouges believed women should have the same rights as men – a revolutionary idea at the time. She wrote prolifically about this, most famously in her Declaration of the Rights of Woman and the Female Citizen (1791). Here she bravely drew attention to the fact that, while the French Revolution called for liberty and freedom, this did not apply to women. De Gouges also wrote plays – performed by her own theatre company – calling for an end to slavery and raising awareness of social issues. Ultimately, her views and active campaigns were deemed a threat to the ideals of the Revolutionary government and she was arrested, during what became known as the Reign of Terror. Refusing to stay quiet, de Gouges wrote two new works while she was imprisoned, that her friends secretly published. In October 1793 she was finally tried, condemned to death and executed at the guillotine, all on the same day. ***** Disclaimer: It is important to remember that some of the women you will read about during Feminist Friday will have done unsavory, bad, and sometimes even terrible or unforgivable things during their lives. I have decided to include any women found to be problematic rather than disregard them entirely because I believe that it would be a disservice to do otherwise. The different women discussed here have lives that span over thousands of years during which life on Earth and humanity in general changed immensely and unrecognizably. Some of their values will be outdated. Some will be laughable. Some offensive. However, I implore you to try and look at these women as individual members of a world made to tame, shame, shackle, subjugate, abuse, and kill them. Do not ignore the horrors of the past. You are free to dislike them (I dislike many!) but recognize their achievements within the context of their time and place in the world.