User:TokidokiB21/Arria Ly

Arria Ly (1881-1934), born on March 24, 1881 in Cayran in Lot (France), died on December 19, 1934 in Stockholm (Sweden).

From her real name Joséphine Gondon, Arria Ly was a French feminist, active at the end of the Belle Époque and during the interwar period.

Representative of the French feminist movement radical wing, she campaigned for absolute equality between men and women. Alongside the classical demands for the time, such as the right to work or women’s suffrage, she also claimed the right of women to self-defence against male aggression and campaigned for women’s military service and the creation of an army corps of female volunteers. Wearing a revolver herself, she made herself known by dueling several of her male opponents. Like her sister Madeleine Pelletier, she moreover advocated a militant virginity, signifying both her refusal to marry and her free love.

Contributions

 * From 1902 to 1903, she wrote a weekly column on feminism, entitled Le Réveil du Dauphiné
 * From 1905 to 1912, she lived in Toulouse and participated in conferences, as well as the writing articles in various newspapers.
 * In 1908, she was appointed editor-in-chief of La Rénovation féministe, a thematic extension of Adolphe Morel’s Parisian newspaper La Rénovation morale.
 * Her own newspaper, edited for few months from 1912 to 1913, from Fronsac in the Haute-Garonne, was called Combat féministe.

Media Figure
She distinguished herself in the media by engaging in duels of honour with men whose attitude she deemed disrespectful. Following the death of her father, convinced of the responsibility of a prominent Grenoble doctor in it, she slightly injures him with a gun. A mediatized trial is initiated between the two parties. The accused uses the service of one of the first French female lawyers, Marguerite Dilhan. She is acquitted on February 28 1904, but is forced to leave the city of Grenoble.

As a result of this event, she moved with her mother to the city of Toulouse, where she began lobbying. In 1909, she launched, among others, a local media campaign to collect signatures for a suffragist petition. The 3000 signatures obtained were taken to the General Council of Haute-Garonne. A year later, she ran for the parliamentary elections.

Her fame in the press is greatly increased by the radical aspect of his activism and in many magazines, her attitude is criticized. More than that, the press of the time showed some violence against Arria Ly, as evidenced by the conclusion of this article in a 1911 Parisian weekly : "Miss Ly! You are no longer of the happy age, where the offences are corrected by spanking. You have one where frequent showers can restore the body’s balance. I would advise you to use it...”.

Following the publication of slanderous remarks against her in 1911, she dueled at a conference, Prudent Massat, editor-in-chief of the Rappel de Toulouse.