Why did Olympe de Gouges write a Declaration for women, and what really cost her her head?

Olympe de Gouges wrote a Declaration for women because the Revolution's own declaration left them out. She greeted the Revolution with hope and joy, but soon became disenchanted when equal rights were not extended to women. The 1791 Constitution made it official: women were by definition not afforded any of the rights of active citizenship.

So on 15 September 1791 she published the Declaration of the Rights of Woman and of the Female Citizen, modelled on the 1789 Declaration. Where the original said men are born free and equal in rights, hers said woman is born free and remains equal to man in rights. In it she wrote the line she is best remembered for: a woman has the right to mount the scaffold, so she must equally have the right to mount the speaker's platform. She dedicated it to Marie Antoinette.

De Gouges was a playwright, and one of France's earliest public opponents of slavery. In 1788 she argued that just kings do not want slaves, because they know they have submissive subjects.

What cost her her head? One account says she did not go to the guillotine for her feminism, as many might think. Her crime was spreading Federalism as a replacement for Montagnard central rule. She opposed the execution of Louis XVI, and her poster The Three Urns demanded a plebiscite among three forms of government, including a constitutional monarchy, when revolutionary law made it a capital offence to publish a pamphlet encouraging the re-establishment of the monarchy. On 3 November 1793 she was sentenced to death.