Louise Compain (also known as Louise Massebiau-Compain; 23 April 1869 – 7 December 1941) was a French novelist, journalist, freelance writer, feminist political activist, social reformer, and suffragist.^[1][2] She was the co-initiator of the feminist movement in France in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Mélanie Louise Massebiau was born in Vierzon, France,^[3] on 23 April 1869. She was the daughter of Jean Louis Adolphe Massebieau, professor at the Faculty of Protestant Theology in Paris, and Louise Françoise Marie Boissier.

Compain was a member of the French Union for Women's Suffrage. A writer and journalist, she became known at the beginning of the feminist movement by writing successful feminist novels. Compain was a social reformer who supported causes related to women's suffrage, women's unions, and women's labor struggles.^[4] According to Charity Organisation Society (London, England, 1899):—^[5]

" Compain observes that the humanitarian tendencies of to-day can only attain their end of drawing closer the social bond by really raising the mass of humanity to a higher standard, and that many difficulties would be smoothed away if employers and their dependents stood at a common moral level."

In Paris, October 1888, she married Luc Compain (1864-1889),^[6] Associate Professor at the Lycée de Chaumont who died accidentally on 17 November 1889^[7] while preparing a thesis on the history of Geoffrey of Vendôme, published posthumously in 1891.

Compain was the aunt of Georgette Hammel (née Roustain; Righteous Among the Nations), the great aunt of the feminist sociologist and writer Évelyne Sullerot, and the resistance activist, Élisabeth Quintenelle.

Compain died in December 1941 in Paris.

• Academy prize for L'un vers l'autre (1903)^[8]

• La Femme dans les organisations ouvrières, 1910
• La Vie tragique de Geneviève,1912
• L'Amour de Claire, 1915
• La Grand' Pitié des Campagnes de France, 1917
• Les Portes de la vie spirituelle, 1927
• La Robe déchirée, 1929
• Calendrier de la vie spirituelle ou les étapes de l'âme, 1938

• This article incorporates text from this source, which is in the public domain: Besant, Sir Walter (1911). The Author (Public domain ed.).
• This article incorporates text from this source, which is in the public domain: Charity Organisation Society (London, England) (1899). The Charity Organisation Review (Public domain ed.). Longmans, Green and Company.

• Barton, Nimisha; Hopkins, Richard S. (1 January 2019). Practiced Citizenship: Women, Gender, and the State in Modern France. University of Nebraska Press. ISBN 978-1-4962-1247-4.
• Offen, Karen (11 January 2018). Debating the Woman Question in the French Third Republic, 1870-1920. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-1-107-18804-4.

• Works by or about Louise Compain at the Internet Archive