Letter: Double-edged rights

As you say (leading article, 2 February), women still experience discrimination in the area of capital punishment, being far less likely than men to suffer it.

As it happens, Olympe de Gouges, the early French feminist, not only noticed but opposed this fact. In the Declaration of Rights of Woman and Citizeness, which she published in 1791, Articles 7-10 insist that women have the same right as men not only to make laws but to suffer under them. And two years later she did so herself, being guillotined during the Reign of Terror.

JEAN RAISON

London N19