The ten extraordinary women whose statues were featured at the opening ceremony Olympic Games in Paris
By Rai d’Honoré
As the Paris Olympic Games closed this week, guest writer Rai d’Honoré reflects on the heroines depicted during the opening ceremony. Athara Adventures salutes generations of strong women.
Olympe de Gouges
Alice Milliat
Gisèle Halimi
Simone de Beauvoir
Paulette Nardal
Jeanne Barret
Louise Michel
Christine de Pizan
Alice Guy
Simone Veil
Olympe de Gouges
"Woman has the right to climb the scaffold; she must also have the right to climb the podium,” declared Olympe de Gouges in her September 1791 Déclaration des droits de la femme et de la citoyenne. A feminist manifesto addressed to Marie-Antoinette, it challenged the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen and insisted that women have the same natural, inalienable, and sacred rights. In 1973, she accused Robespierre and his followers of indiscriminate violence and wanting to establish a dictatorship; she was arrested, tried on November 2, and climbed the scaffold the following day.
Alice Milliat
“Deliberately left out,” insisted Alice Milliat about the exclusion of women in the modern Olympic Games. She founded the International Women’s Sports Federation (FSFI) in 1921. When the International Olympic Committee refused equal access to women, she was inspired by the Herean Games in the sixth century BC in honor of the Greek goddess Hera, wife of Zeus, to organize the first Women's Olympic Games in Paris in 1922. It was such a success that women were allowed to take part in the Amsterdam Olympic Games in 1928.
Gisèle Halimi
In October 1972 “Bobigny trial,” Gisèle Halimi defended a 16-year-old girl who had an illegal abortion following a rape and convinced the court to acquit the girl. When her mother, friends, and “abortionist” were later tried, the president of the court exclaimed, "We're not putting a law on trial!" "Personally, I will," retorted Halimi, as her key witnesses included Nobel prize-winning medical professors, philosophers, politicians, and actresses. In January 1975, abortion was legalized. In 1978 in Aix-en-Provence, Halimi represented two women who had been raped. "It's not a rape trial that's at stake, it's not a conviction or an acquittal that's at stake, what's at stake is changing the fundamental relationship between men and women,” declared Halimi. The resultant law of December 23, 1980, defined and criminalized for the first time the offense of rape.
Simone de Beauvoir
“One is not born, but rather becomes a woman…her wings are cut and then she is blamed for not knowing how to fly,” wrote Simone de Beauvoir in 1949. Her groundbreaking philosophical essay Le Deuxième Sexe (The Second Sex) laid the foundation for the Second Wave 20th century feminist movement. Arguing that women’s inferior position to men is merely a historical construct, she illustrated their oppression and the workings of sexism in modern society. It was immediately banned by the Vatican. De Beauvoir was one of the witnesses in the Bobigny trials.
Paulette Nardal
Born in Martinique, - Paulette Nardal was the first black woman to study at the Sorbonne and ran a literary salon that focused on women's emancipation, laying the foundations for the theory of Négritude – black literary consciousness. Members of her salon included students Léopold Senghor, Aimé Césaire, Marcus Garvey and others from the Harlem Renaissance. Her 1931 “La Revue du Monde Noir" was a bilingual French/English magazine featuring artistic, literary and scientific works. Yet Nardal was never celebrated as were the men. “The idea that I've often thought and said, about the beginnings of negritude, that we were just unfortunate women, my sister and I, and that's why they never talked about us. It was minimized by the fact that it was women who were talking about it…we were all women! We paved the way for the men."
Jeanne Barret
In the 18th century, the French Royal Navy forbade any women on its ships, so Jeanne Barret (1740-1803) posed as a male assistant to the explorer and botanist Louis-Antoine de Bougainville. She was mainly responsible for the expedition and collecting specimens, one of which was a climbing plant with brilliantly colored flowers, which Commerson, the ship’s surgeon, named Bougainvillea. "However, how could we recognize a woman in this indefatigable Barret…she will be the first woman to have traveled completely around the globe,” he wrote. On their return, Bougainville asked King Louis XVI to name Jeanne Barret as “extraordinary woman.”
Louise Michel
Louise Michel, a teacher, was one of the founding figures of the short-lived Paris Commune (18 March-28 May, 1871) that attempted to institute social democracy, including separation of church and state, remission of rent, abolition of child labor, employees’ rights, and self-policing. When the Commune was overthrown, she was deported to New Caledonia. Nine years later, she returned to Paris and went on speaking tours across Europe, campaigning for women’s rights and livable wages, rejecting the class system, oppressive institutions, and political parties. “The task of teachers, these obscure soldiers of civilization, is to give people the intellectual means to revolt,” she wrote in her 1886 Memoires.
Christine de Pizan
The first woman in France to earn a living by her writing, Christine de Pizan was widowed with three children at the age of twenty-five in 1389. Destitute, she was forced to either remarry or support herself. She chose the latter and became the first feminist intellectual of the modern age, penning poetry, novels, biography, an autobiography, literary, political and religious commentary and challenging the misogynistic male writing of her day. Her famous Book of the City of Ladies describes an allegorical city peopled by famous women throughout history. “Lady” is defined by a woman of noble spirit rather than noble birth.
“Just as women's bodies are softer than men's, so their understanding is sharper,” she wrote. Women don’t need rescuing, they are their own source of liberation, and can ensure and extend freedom to those around them.
Alice Guy
My youth, my inexperience, my sex, everything conspired against me,” wrote Alice Guy in her Autobiography of a Pioneer of Cinema. From 1896-1906, she was probably the only female filmmaker in the world and the first filmmaker to systematically develop narrative filmmaking. In 1910, she founded her own production house in the United States, Solax, to make the films she wanted, directing between forty and fifty films and supervising the production of nearly three hundred others. She participated in the first tests of what would become talking cinema.
Simone Veil
Deported from France at the age of 16 to Auschwitz-Birkenau then to Bergen-Belsen, Simone Veil, number 78651, survived the concentration camps to pursue a career in law where in 1970, she eventually became the first woman to serve as the General Secretary of the Supreme Magistracy Council. Facing fierce opposition, she drew up the law to legalize abortion, which became known as the Veil Law. “To be a free woman is to be oneself, to stand up for oneself,” she said. The first woman to hold the position, she was President of the European Parliament from 1979 to 1982. Throughout her political career, she pushed for further integration and cooperation among member states and was a vocal advocate for human rights and gender equality. “The fight for women's rights is not just a women's fight; it is a fight for a more just and equal society.”
Thumbnail Image Photo by Louis. Olympe de Gouges. Alice Milliat. Gisèle Halimi. Simone de Beauvoir. Paulette Nardal. Louise Michel. Jeanne Barret. Christine de Pizan. Alice Guy. Simone Veil.