Marie-Madeleine Jodin

After a childhood of forced imprisonment and religious conversion, she eventually became an actress performing in the Comedie Francaise in Paris and then in Warsaw, Dresden, and Bordeaux during the 1760s.

When her father died she became the ward of his friend, the encyclopedist, and art critic Denis Diderot, who would become her mentor.

Diderot's help would shape the course of her adult acting life and many of her feminist theories that she would later present in her treatise Vues Legislative Pour Les Femmes to the French National Assembly.

Due to the nature of his marriage his artisan family was wary of his new wife's ability to be a fit mother and suitable wife,[3] Through letters that Jean Jodin wrote to his sister it is known that Marie Jodin was a troublesome child; her own father called her a “monster clothed in a human face”.

Families like the Jodins were able to gain extra money by making children renounce the Protestant faith, or forcing a conversion.

[6] Her violent behavior and her constant rejection of her Catholic conversion led to Jodin being sent to many convents throughout her childhood, as a way to fix her problems.

[9] This period of two years at which Jodin was imprisoned in Salpêtrière Hospital had a profound effect on her life, and her later political writings.

Conditions were deplorable even for 18th century standards; girls lived in cramped overcrowded rooms and only received blankets during the cold winter months.

It was said by a member of an acting troupe, which Jodin would later belong to, that her shoulders showed visible signs of abuse and whippings that she received during her time at Salpêtrière.

[10] After her release from the hospital in 1760, Jodin was able to get back on her feet quickly largely in part to her late father's close friend, Denis Diderot.

As a mentor Diderot encouraged her to reform her life through rebuilding her character according to his dramatic and ethical theories.

Although Diderot was one of Jodin's closest friends and helped influence her life as well as her own theories on feminism, his name was never mentioned in her treatise, due to his conflicting views with Jean Jacques Rousseau.

In 1766 when she was working in Warsaw there was an incident where she was arguing violently with her manager and another actor because a satirical pamphlet had come out about the French troupe that many thought Jodin had written.

[16] All of these quarrels that she had with her managers and her co-workers were attempts to assert her rights “and to gain some form of symbolic or legal reimbursement in the face of indiscriminate power”.

[17] In 1790 she presented a treatise, entitled Vues Législatives Pour Les Femmes, or Legislative Views for Women, in front of the French National Assembly.

Marie Jodin's treatise allowed for the understanding of social and gender composition of the time and demonstrated that a feminist agenda was already securely in place during the early days of the French Revolution.