Olympe de Gouges

Olympe de Gouges (born Marie Gouze; 1748 – 1793) was a French playwright, political theorist, and feminist pioneer during the Enlightenment. An ardent opponent of slavery, she wrote the play Zamore et Mirza in 1784, denouncing the horrors of colonial sugar slavery at the Comédie-Française, which resulted in boycotts and personal threats from colonial merchants.

In September 1791, in response to the revolutionary National Assembly's Declaration of the Rights of Man which excluded women, she published the historic *Déclaration des droits de la femme et de la citoyenne* (Declaration of the Rights of Woman and of the Female Citizen). In it, she famously proclaimed: 'Woman has the right to mount the scaffold; she must equally have the right to mount the speaker's rostrum.' A moderate Girondin who opposed the execution of King Louis XVI and condemned the totalitarian violence of Robespierre and Marat, she was arrested during the Reign of Terror and executed by guillotine on November 3, 1793.