ABSTRACT
Olympe de Gouges was born Marie Gouze in Montauban, a town near Toulouse, France, in 1748. Gouze, unlike many of her female peers, received an elementary education in a school run by the Ursuline religious order. At home she spoke Occitan, a romance language spoken in southern France, and, as for many people of the time, French was always a second language. Gouze's life might have progressed like that of most provincial middle-class women of the time, dominated by marriage, childbearing, and housekeeping. In Paris, Gouze changed her name, in a fashion typical for someone seeking a higher station in life at the time, to de Gouges, giving her simultaneously pretensions to aristocratic and French birth. In Paris, Gouze changed her name, in a fashion typical for someone seeking a higher station in life at the time, to de Gouges, giving her simultaneously pretensions to aristocratic and French birth.
