Gabrielle Petit (feminist)

Gabrielle Petit (née Mathieu; November 26, 1860 – 1952), was a French feminist activist, anticlerical, libertarian socialist, and newspaper editor.

[4] At the age of 14, Petit experienced her first encounter with the law for throwing stones on the railway track, at a moving train; she and her friend were fined.

She did not go to school and as she explained during her first trial:— "Until I was 20, I had no other teacher than nature, the fields, the meadows and the forest for my library, the book of life, the most complete and the newest because it has a new page every day.

After meeting Marguerite Durand, feminist activist and founder of the newspaper La Fronde, Petit became involved in journalism.

The newspaper "La femme affranchie", edited from 1904 to 1913 by Gabrielle Petit, a feminist, anti-militarist and anarchist, denounced the French police and their right to arrest prostitutes without a warrant.

In addition to publishing the newspaper, Gabrielle held conferences throughout France on the exploitation of women, notably with the neomalthusianist Paul Robin.

At her trial, on November 20, 1907,[10] she was accused of having made antimilitarist remarks during a lecture and of having, in a train, incited soldiers to become disobedient and steal weapons.

At the beginning of 1913, Petit and Bertrand, sensing the rising threat of war, wrote a special issue of La Femme affranchie, while the voice of the nationalists became more and more vehement and violent against the pacifists.