Today in Labor History December 29, 1939: Madeleine Pelletier died. She was a first wave feminist, psychiatrist, and anarchist. During her lifetime, she advocated for the right to sexual pleasure for women, and access to contraception and abortion. In July 1906, she and other suffragists, including Caroline Kauffmann, invaded the French Chamber of Deputies and rained down from the gallery pink slips of paper containing an appeal for the right to vote. She was the first woman in France to receive a degree in Psychiatry. She was a member of the French Section of the Workers' International. She became hemiplegic in 1937 due to a stroke. Nevertheless, she was still found guilty of assisting an abortion on a teenage survivor of incest, in 1939, despite being physically incapable of assisting in the actual procedure, and was forced to spend the rest of her life in a mental asylum, where she died of a second stroke.

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