also brought the term feminism, a term first coined by Charles Fourier, into the English language in the 1890s. At the Socialist Workers' Congress in Marseille in 1879, Auclert made passionate pleas for women's rights, but argued that they needed economic independence due to their "natural" motherhood. Auclert was on a special committee to consider the equality of women and was given an hour to speak to the congress on the subject. After her speech, she was invited to head a committee to prepare a statement on women's rights. The statement, which said women should have the same social, legal, political and working rights as men, was approved by the congress. In 1884, the French government finally legalized divorce, but Auclert denounced it because of the law's blatant bias against women that still did not allow a woman to keep her wages. Auclert proposed the radical idea that there should be a marriage contract between spouses with separation of property. Algeria and feminism Auclert, and her husband, moved to Algeria in 1888 where they would remain for four years until he died and she returned to Paris. While in Algeria, Auclert extensively studied and recorded the daily lives of Arab women. Auclert paralleled the male prejudice against women in France with the racial prejudice against the colonized in Algeria as the "French Algerians… do everything possible to keep the Arabs in a state of ignorance so conductive to exploitation and domination." Her activism for the rights of Algerian women paralleled the "familial" or "maternalist" feminism that she advocated for in France. Such prejudice took form as French collusion with Arab males to suppress Arab women's education and to respect Islamic practices of child marriages, polygamy, and bride trade which restricted the rights of the Arab woman. Auclert acted out of a moral duty to elevate the status of Arab women to make it possible for them to obtain the same dignity of French women. In Algeria and on her return to France, Auclert pursued legal action to acknowledge the rights of Arab women, such as petitions for improved education, and the abolition of polygamy. While her thoughts on Islamic culture were entrenched in imperial thinking, she made clear the negative influence of French colonialism on the societies in which they settled. She claimed that the oppression from Islamic law was made worse by collusion between the French administrators and Arab