Olympe de Gouges

With her "Declaration of the Rights of Woman and Citizen," rediscovered by feminist research in 1791, the French writer Olympe de Gouges—born around 1748—protested against the fact that the human rights established during the Enlightenment were solely male rights and that the "equality" proclaimed during the French Revolution did not aim to abolish the gender hierarchy. "If women have a right to the scaffold, then they also have a right to the speaker's platform," she asserted. The Revolutionary Tribunal only granted Olympe de Gouges the former. She died on November 3, 1793, under the guillotine.