Madeleine Pelletier

Madeleine Pelletier (Paris, 1874-1939) was a French psychiatrist, feminist activist and political militant. She belonged to the first generation of French feminism and to the socialist and anarchist movements of the early twentieth century. She is remembered above all for demanding full access for women to medicine and psychiatry, and for defending without reservation the right to vote and the right to abortion in a France that denied both.

Pelletier first trained in anthropology, alongside Charles Letourneau and Léonce Manouvrier, studying the link between skull size and intelligence. When she left that field she attacked the idea that skull size determined intellectual ability, particularly in relation to differences between the sexes. She then turned to psychiatry and in 1906 became the first French woman to sit the examination for that specialty. She was also the first woman to work as an intern in a psychiatric hospital.

Her political activity was intense and sustained. She joined Freemasonry, helped found the French Socialist Party in 1905 and served as secretary of La Solidarité des femmes, one of the most radical feminist organisations of its day. In 1906 she took part in the invasion of the Chamber of Deputies by suffragists. During the First World War she worked for the Red Cross, treating wounded soldiers from both sides. In 1921 she travelled illegally to the Soviet Union, an experience that left her disillusioned and that she described in Mon voyage aventureux en Russie communiste. After breaking with the Communist Party in 1926 she turned to anarchism.

She wrote extensively on women's rights, education, sexuality and abortion, in works such as La femme en lutte pour ses droits (1908) and Le Droit à l'avortement (1913). In 1937 she suffered a stroke that left her partly paralysed. She was arrested in 1939 for performing abortions, placed in an asylum, where her health declined, and died that same year. Her legacy has been reassessed over time as part of the history of radical French feminism, though her work remained in the background for a long time.