Flora Tristan
French-Peruvian writer, socialist activist and feminist pioneer (1803–1844), born in Paris as the daughter of a Peruvian officer and a Frenchwoman in a marriage not legally recognised in France, which left her in economic and social precariousness throughout her childhood and youth, worsened by an unhappy early marriage to a violent lithographer from whom she had to flee with her children, an experience that marked her deeply and led her to denounce for the rest of her life the legal and economic subordination of women within marriage. Her journey to Peru to claim a family inheritance, recounted in Peregrinations of a Pariah (1838), brought her literary fame and allowed her to observe firsthand the colonial and class inequalities of Latin America. Tristan is regarded as a pioneering figure because she was among the first to explicitly articulate the connection between the liberation of the working class and the liberation of women, arguing in her most influential work, The Workers' Union (1843), that women were 'the proletarian of the proletariat', doubly oppressed by their class and their sex, and that no social revolution could succeed without their complete emancipation. This work also proposed, years before Marx and Engels, the creation of an international organisation of workers of all nations and trades as a means of overcoming the fragmentation of the labour movement in the face of concentrated capital power. Tristan physically travelled across France proselytising among workers, organising local committees and delivering speeches in factories and workshops, in an exhausting campaign that undermined her health and ended with her premature death at forty during a propaganda tour of Bordeaux. Although often overshadowed by later socialist figures, her original synthesis of feminism and internationalist socialism makes her an essential precursor of utopian socialist thought and nineteenth-century working-class feminism.