Olympe de Gouges Quotes on Justice
Olympe de Gouges (1748–1793) — the French playwright, abolitionist, and political pamphleteer guillotined under the Jacobin Terror — gave the early Revolutionary moment its most consequential feminist intervention in the Declaration of the Rights of Woman and the Female Citizen (1791), modeled article by article on the 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man and addressed to the Queen, the National Assembly, and the male signatories whose universalist rhetoric had quietly excluded women. The seventeen articles, with their accompanying preamble and postamble, demand the equal civil and political standing of women — the right to mount the scaffold and equally the right to mount the tribune — and frame the fundamental injustice of the Revolutionary settlement as its failure to extend its own founding principles to the half of humanity it silently excluded. Recovered through twentieth-century feminist scholarship, the Declaration is the principal early statement of the modern political philosophy of women’s rights.
Quotes
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“Woman is born free and lives equal to man in her rights.”
Declaration of the Rights of Woman -
Attributed to Olympe de Gouges:
“If a woman has the right to mount the scaffold, she must equally have the right to mount the rostrum.”
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Attributed to Olympe de Gouges:
“The exercise of natural rights has no limits except those that the natural rights of others impose upon it.”
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Attributed to Olympe de Gouges:
“The forgetting of women's rights is the cause of public misfortune and of the corruption of governments.”
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“Marriage is a tomb of trust and love. The married woman can with impunity give bastards to her husband, and also give them the wealth which does not belong to them. The woman who is unmarried has only one feeble right; ancient and inhuman laws refuse to her for her children the impossibility on my part to try to give my sex an honorable and just consistency, I leave it to men to attain glory for dealing with this matter; but while we wait, the way can be prepared through national education, the restoration of morals, and conjugal conventions.”
Postscript -
“Man, are you capable of being just? It is a woman who poses the question, you will not deprive her of that right at least. Tell me, what gives you sovereign over empire to oppress my sex? Your strength? Your talents?”
The Rights of Women -
“Man alone has raised his exceptional circumstances to a principle. Bizarre, blind, bloated with science and degenerated - in a century of enlightenment and wisdom - into the crassest ignorance, he wants to command as a despot a sex which is in full possession of its intellectual faculties; he pretends to enjoy the Revolution and to claim his rights to equality in order to say nothing more about it.”
The Rights of Women