Eugénie Niboyet was a French author, journalist and early feminist. She is best known for founding La Voix des Femmes (The Women’s Voice), the first feminist daily newspaper in France.
Niboyet was born in 1797 in Montpellier, France and raised in a Protestant household. During the Bourbon Restoration following the fall of Napoleon in 1814, the family lived in Lyon. Niboyet’s family were loyal supporters of Napoleon, and she saw many of her family members arrested because of this and would visit them in prison. This did not deter her from her belief in Napoleon, and she stated that “during that time, my religion was The Empire, my idol was Napoleon I.”
In 1822, Niboyet married Paul-Louis Niboyet, partly because of their shared loyalty to Napoleon. The couple moved to Mâcon, in the Burgundy region of France where her husband practised law. In 1829, Niboyet moved to Paris and began working as a writer. She also joined la Société de la morale chrétienne (the Society of Christian Morality), where she became involved in campaigning for prison reform, education reform and the abolition of slavery in French colonies. In 1830, she entered the society’s writing contest, and her piece entitled “The blind and their education” won. That same year, she began attending sermons of the Saint-Simonians, a a French political and social movement. Niboyet was one of four women appointed as members of the college along with Aglae Saint-Hilaire, Caroline Simon and Madame Collard. Niboyet and Sebastien Bottiau were in charge of the Saint-Simonian section of the 4th and 5th arrondissements of Paris.
She later left the movement after disagreements between Saint-Amand Bazard and Barthelemy Prosper Enfantin, the founders of the movement over the position of women and the increasingly religious message Enfantin wished to push.
During her time with the Saint-Simonians, Niboyet participated in La Femme Libre (The Free Woman), created by Marie-Reine Guindorf and Desiree Veret the periodical was the first to be written entirely by women.
In 1833, Niboyet returned to Lyon and founded the first feminist periodical outside Paris entitled Le Conseiller des femmes (The Women’s Advisor), a year later she followed this with la Mosaïque, a literary journal and L’Athénée des femmes (The Athenaeum of Women). She then moved back to Paris, and in 1844 served as Editor in Chief of Peace of the two worlds, echo of peace, commerce, industry, sciences, literature and arts society” (La Paix des deux mondes, écho des sociétés de la paix, du commerce, de l’industrie, des sciences, de la littérature et des arts).
In 1848, Niboyet took advantage of the suspension of a security bond for newspaper publishers and stamp tax for subscribers by the Provisional Government. She founded the first daily feminist newspaper, La Voix des Femmes which advocated the Saint Simian principle of the full moral, intellectual and material development of women and included articles which demanded civil, educational and economic rights for women including women’s suffrage. To further promote the message of equality and to counter the unequal provision of education for women, Niboyet offered a series of lectures open to women and advocated for the opening of lycées to women with separate classes, female teachers and a women’s reading room at the national library. She felt that “Women must be taught by women, the most pressing matter therefore is to restore instruction to them; to stimulate by examinations, teachers, and pupils, to make both sexes march together on different rails but in an analogous locomotion. If it is important to teach a young boy what freedom is, it is perhaps even more important to teach a girl.”
The revolution of 1848 had lifted of restrictions on meetings,which allowing the development of groups that advocated for women’s rights and as the newspaper became popular, the committee that ran La Voix des Femmes comprised of Niboyet, Desiree Gay, Jeanne Deroin, Josephine Deland, Amelie Pray, and Jeanne Marie Monniot established the Société de la Voix des femmes to fight for women rights. Men began to grow fearful of the club, and began to misrepresent her in the media in order to destroy her reputation and invalidate her ideas. Niboyet wrote “You don’t want to hear us because you are beginning to fear us,” she wrote. “It seems easier for you to oppress rather than to do justice. Your jeers cannot hide your despotism; your interruptions betray your malice. Are we asking for more than is due to us? What is our aim if not the interests of those who suffer? To working women we speak of association, for partnership will ensure the well-being of all. Have we spoken a single word which might frighten the family? Our aim is harmony; we never breach what God has united; let us sanctify the principle of fraternity; let us be free; let us be equal. Equality is justice.”
In May that year, Gay and Deroin left the paper after disagreements over their working-class radicalism and Niboyet’s middle-class moderation. Following the denial of women’s suffrage by the provisional government who had promised universal suffrage, Niboyet rallied against the male democracy in her writing. La Voix des Femmes nominated the candidacy of George Sand to the French Constituent Assembly. Sand distanced herself from the publication, claiming not to know them and the backlash against La Voix des Femmes grew, leading to the government banning women’s clubs. In June, the publication ceased and feminists dispersed to avoid repression.
Niboyet retired from public life and lived in exile in Geneva, where she translated Charles Dickens and children’s books by Lydia Maria Child and Maria Edgeworth to support herself after her literary allowance was withdrawn.
In 1860, Niboyet returned to France and published Le Vrai Libre des Femmes (The True Book of Women) three years later. She continued to maintain an interest in the feminist movement, and in 1878 was honoured at the feminist congress in Paris. She died in 1883, after having suffered for eleven years for her determination to defend the cause of equality in 1848 in conformity with universal rights proclaimed by the provisional government.