workingclasshistory:

On this day, 29 December 1939, French physician, libertarian socialist and women’s rights activist Madeleine Pelletier died in an asylum where she had been interned after openly assisting an abortion for a teenage survivor of incest. Born into a poor family in 1874, Pelletier became a feminist and socialist, and was arrested for breaking a window at a polling place after she and other women were denied entry. While never admitted into intellectual circles, she was a pioneer of advanced feminist ideas, like gender roles being largely determined by society, rather than biology. While expressing no interest in sex in her personal life, and so possibly asexual, Pelletier advocated for women’s rights to sexual pleasure, as well as to contraception and abortion. Despite all the misfortune she experienced, Pelletier declared: “I remain a feminist. I will remain one until my death even though I don’t like women as they are now any more than I like the working class as it is. Slave mentalities revolt me.” https://www.facebook.com/workingclasshistory/photos/a.296224173896073/1886604231524718/?type=3