Marguerite Durand (1864–1936)

Margeurite Durand was born into a middle-class family in Paris and educated in a Catholic convent. She trained to become an actress and was accepted into the Comédie-Française. In 1888, she abandoned this career and married George Laguerre, a lawyer, from whom she was divorced a few years later. She got a job working as a reporter for the newspaper Le Figaro, which in 1896 sent her to cover the International Feminist Congress, and came away from the event a committed feminist. In 1897 she founded the first all-women's daily paper, La Fronde, with Paule Minck and others. Madame Durand also served as vice-president of La ligue francaise pour le droit des femmes and campaigned vigorously for improved working, economic, and legal conditions for women. With Hubertine Auclert, she ran as an illegal candidate for French parliamentary elections in 1910. In 1931, she founded the archive in Paris known as the Bibliotheque Margeurite Durand with a gift of her huge collection of papers. It remains one of the best sources in the world for research into feminism and women's history.