Olympe de Gouges

Also known as Marie Gouze

EnlightenmentFrenchFeminist

Born 1748 CE

Died 1793 CE

She answered the Revolution's Rights of Man with the Rights of Woman, and went to the guillotine for taking liberty at its word.

A butcher's daughter who became a playwright and pamphleteer, Olympe de Gouges threw herself into the French Revolution and then held it to its own promises. In 1791 she published the Declaration of the Rights of Woman and the Female Citizen, rewriting the famous Declaration article by article to include women: if a woman may mount the scaffold, she wrote, she must equally have the right to mount the rostrum. She campaigned against slavery and for the poor, and attacked the Terror. In 1793 the revolution she had served sent her to the guillotine: proof, and indictment, of the rights she demanded.

Olympe de Gouges posts Declaration of the Rights of Woman in Paris, revolution charter rewritten for all citizens. — Woman, awake.

Places

Ideas

Equality Natural Law

Words

“A woman has the right to mount the scaffold; she must equally have the right to mount the rostrum.”
— Olympe de GougesShare

Works

Declaration of the Rights of Woman and the Female Citizen

1791 CE·French

Olympe de Gouges's article-by-article rewriting of the Revolution's Declaration to include women, demanding equal rights in law, property, education, and public life. She paid for it with her life, and the document became a founding text of feminism.

Life & Moments

1748 CE

Born in Montauban

Born Marie Gouze in the south of France, she took the stage name Olympe and walked to Paris to write and act.

c. 1785 CE

Playwright of the Revolution

Wrote plays and pamphlets from Paris that put slavery, divorce, and women's rights on the public stage.

1791 CE

Rights of Woman

Published the Declaration of the Rights of Woman and the Female Citizen, rewriting the Revolution's charter to include women.

1793 CE

Guillotined in the Terror

Sent to the guillotine by the revolution she had served, for attacking the Terror and demanding women's rights.

Influence

Influenced by

Condorcetthe case for women's citizenship
Condorcet published his argument for admitting women to the rights of citizenship in 1790, a year before Gouges issued her Declaration, and the two belong to the same brief moment when the question was live in Paris.
Jean-Jacques Rousseauthe Declaration turned against its own exclusions
Gouges wrote her Declaration of the Rights of Woman in the language of the revolution's own founding documents, using the vocabulary of natural rights and the general will to expose whom that vocabulary had quietly left out.

Influenced

Mary Wollstonecraftkindred contemporaries
In France and England within a year of each other, Gouges and Wollstonecraft made parallel demands for the rights of women.