Mary Wollstonecraft (1759 –1797) was an eighteenth-century British writer, philosopher, and feminist. During her brief career, she wrote novels, treatises, a travel narrative, a history of the French Revolution, a conduct book, and a children's book. Wollstonecraft is best known for A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), in which she argues that women are not naturally inferior to men, but appear to be only because they lack education. She suggests that both men and women should be treated as rational beings and imagines a social order founded on reason.

Olympe de Gouges (1748 –1793), born Marie Gouze, was a French playwright and political activist whose feminist and abolitionist writings reached a large audience. As political tension rose in France, de Gouges became increasingly politically involved and began writing political pamphlets. Today she is perhaps best known as an early feminist who demanded that French women be given the same rights as French men. In her Declaration of the Rights of Woman and the Female Citizen (1791), she challenged the practice of male authority and the notion of male-female inequality. She was executed by guillotine during the Reign of Terror.

Madame du Chatelet (1706 –1749) was a French mathematician, physicist, and author during the Age of Enlightenment. Her crowning achievement is considered to be her translation of Isaac Newton's monumental work Principia Mathematica, with her own commentary; it is still considered the standard translation. Voltaire, one of her lovers, declared in a letter to his friend King Frederick II of Prussia that du Châtelet was "a great man whose only fault was being a woman".

Marquis de Condorcet (17 September 1743 – 28 March 1794), was a French philosopher, mathematician, and early political scientist. Unlike many of his contemporaries, he advocated equal rights for women and people of all races. His ideas and writings were said to embody the ideals of the Age of Enlightenment and rationalism, and remain influential to this day. (dude)