Hi friends! It has been a month, hasn’t it? Smithsonian Women’s History Month ends today… and as you see we’ve got Katharine Ashe visiting with a guest post. If you don’t know anything about her, read her bio at the end, and you’ll see why she was a perfect gift this month. I hope everyone had fun, and learned something.  🙂 Thanks for sticking with us! <3

The Rights of Women

In December of 1789, an abolitionist play, The Slavery of the Blacks, or the Lucky Shipwreck by Madame Olympe de Gouges, debuted on stage in the tumult of Revolutionary Paris. After only three performances, the curtain fell on the play for the last time. Incendiary in its call for slave emancipation, the play infuriated colonial plantation owners, whose lucrative sugar industry in the West Indies (today’s Caribbean) depended entirely on the labor of slaves. The play went too far in criticizing their livelihood, and encouraged slaves to rise up violently against their owners, they complained. Who was a woman to demand change to a system she could not possibly understand?

Who was Olympe de Gouges? Continue reading →