The story
In September 1791 Olympe de Gouges, a French playwright and political writer, published the Declaration of the Rights of Woman and of the Female Citizen. It follows the 17 articles of the 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen, which spoke of 'men' and left women out, but rewrites them for women. Article 1 states that woman is born free and remains equal to man in rights. In Article 10 she wrote that a woman who has the right to mount the scaffold must also have the right to mount the speaker's platform.
De Gouges was born Marie Gouze in Montauban in 1748, moved to Paris as a young widow and wrote plays, including one against slavery. She dedicated the Declaration to Queen Marie Antoinette and attached a proposed marriage contract based on equality. The Revolution gave women many civil rights but no vote, and it banned women's political clubs in 1793. De Gouges criticized the Jacobins, including Robespierre, and her pamphlets landed her in prison. She was tried by the Revolutionary Tribunal and guillotined on November 3, 1793. Her text was largely forgotten for a century and then became an early landmark of feminist political thought, shown beside Mary Wollstonecraft's work of 1792.
Why it mattered
- It was among the first documents to demand full political and legal equality for women, setting out arguments used by later suffragists.
- It exposed the gap between universal rights and the exclusion of women in the French Revolution.
- It linked women's rights to abolition and to wider ideas of justice.
- Her execution became a symbol of the Revolution's limits on women.
Sources
- Olympe de Gouges, The Declaration of the Rights of Woman (September 1791) Liberty, Equality, Fraternity (CHNM/GMU)
- Gouges, Olympe de Encyclopedia.com
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