Jenny d'Héricourt

Jenny d'Hericourt (1809 - 1875) was a feminist activist, writer, and a physician-midwife. She was born Jeanne-Marie-Fabienne Poinsard, in Besançon, France to Protestant parents. After running a private girls' school, she married Gabriel Marie. However they soon separated (divorce did not exist under French law at that time). d'Hericourt wrote her first novel, "Le fils du reprouve" (1844), under the pseudonym Fèlix Lamb. She was an enthusiastic supporter of Etienne Cabet, the French socialist , and took part in the Revolution of 1848. She studied medicine privately in Paris in the 1850s, and later practiced midwifery both in Paris and Chicago. She lived in America from 1863 to 1873 and was active in the feminist movement there also.

D'Hericourt had at least two lasting influences on the feminist movement. First, she helped develop an unofficial international network of feminists during the first half of the 19th century. They provided each other with moral support and exchanged ideas. Second, she wrote an influential rebuttal to the misogynist works by the prominent anarchist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon and Jules Michelet.