Olympe de Gouges

A butcher's daughter who became a playwright and pamphleteer, Olympe de Gouges threw herself into the French Revolution and then held it to its own promises. In 1791 she published the Declaration of the Rights of Woman and the Female Citizen, rewriting the famous Declaration article by article to include women: if a woman may mount the scaffold, she wrote, she must equally have the right to mount the rostrum. She campaigned against slavery and for the poor, and attacked the Terror. In 1793 the revolution she had served sent her to the guillotine — proof, and indictment, of the rights she demanded.