Olympe de Gouges
The rights of man apply to women too: if a woman can be sent to the scaffold, she must also be allowed to speak in parliament.
Placement
Playwright and pamphleteer of the French Revolution, guillotined under the Terror: her “Declaration of the Rights of Woman and of the Female Citizen” rewrote the Declaration of 1789 article by article for women.
Key ideas
- Rights of woman and of the female citizen
- “Woman has the right to mount the scaffold; she must equally have the right to mount the rostrum”
- Against slavery
Influence
Influenced by 1
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
influenced by
Gouges’ Declaration of the Rights of Woman (1791) ends with a ‘Form for a Social Contract between Man and Woman’ that, echoing Rousseau, recasts marriage as a contract. O. de Gouges, Déclaration des droits de la femme et de la citoyenne (1791), postscript; J. W. Scott, Only Paradoxes to Offer: French Feminists and the Rights of Man (1996)
Evidence: AI draft
Jean-Jacques Rousseau › 1712–1778
Works
The Declaration of 1789 rewritten for women in seventeen articles – with a postscript: “Woman, wake up!”
Position
Her “Declaration of the Rights of Woman and of the Female Citizen” takes the Declaration of 1789 and rewrites each of its seventeen articles so that it applies to women: woman is born free and equal to man in rights; the nation is the union of women and men; the law must be the same for all, so that if woman may mount the scaffold she must equally be able to mount the rostrum. A postscript tells women to wake up. De Gouges was a pamphleteer, not a systematic philosopher; but her text is the clearest early statement that the universal rights of 1789 were not universal.
Life & context
Olympe de Gouges (1748–1793), born Marie Gouze in Montauban, was widowed young and moved to Paris, where she wrote plays – including one against the slave trade staged by the Comédie-Française – and political pamphlets. She welcomed the Revolution but opposed the execution of the king and attacked Robespierre. Arrested in 1793 for a poster proposing a referendum on the form of government, she was guillotined on 3 November.
Further main works
- Reflections on Black Men (1788)
Appears in
- Journey ‘Thinking Freedom’ · Stop 2 of 9
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