Flora Tristán (1803–1844)

Flore-Celestine-Therèse-Henriette Tristan-Moscoso -- known as Flora Tristan -- was born in Paris to a French mother and a Peruvian father who was an officer of the Spanish Navy in Peru. Her father died when she was four years old, and the family fell into poverty. In 1821, at age 17, she married her employer, Andre-Francois Chazal, a lithographer, with whom she had three children. Her husband was violent and Flora left him while pregnant with her third child. She began a fight for a divorce, and it was only after an incident in which her husband shot and wounded her that she was granted a legal separation. In 1833-1834, she traveled to Peru in an failed attempt to claim her paternal inheritance. On her return, she wrote a book that was part travelogue and part personal diary of her marriage, published as Pérégrinations d’une paria (Pilgrimage of a Pariah) in 1838. She began to write for the Gazette des Femmes, and after a visit to London she published her observation of working-class conditions there in an influential essay called L’Union Ouvriere (The Worker’s Union). She was a political activist and pioneering feminist who was involved with socialist and utopian movements that flourished in France prior to the Revolution of 1848. She died suddenly at age 41 in 1844.