page_title: Olympe de Gouges
section_title: Women's rights
hierarchical_section_title: Olympe de Gouges / Plays and writings / Women's rights
caption_attribution_description: English: Declaration of the Rights of Woman and the Female Citizen, 1791 Français&#160;: Déclaration des droits de la femme et de la citoyenne, 1791
context_page_description: Olympe de Gouges, born Marie Gouze, was a French playwright and political activist whose writings on women's rights and abolitionism reached a large audience in various countries.
  She began her career as a playwright in the early 1780s. As political tension rose in France, Olympe de Gouges became increasingly politically engaged. She became an outspoken advocate against the slave trade in the French colonies in 1788. At the same time, she began writing political pamphlets. Today she is perhaps best known as an early women's rights advocate who demanded that French women be given the same rights as French men. In her Declaration of the Rights of Woman and the Female Citizen, she challenged the practice of male authority and the notion of male-female inequality. She was executed by guillotine during the Reign of Terror for attacking the regime of the Revolutionary government and for her association with the Girondists.
context_section_description: Gouges wrote her famous Declaration of the Rights of Woman and the Female Citizen shortly after the French Constitution of 1791 was ratified by King Louis XVI, and dedicated it to his wife, Queen Marie Antoinette. The French Constitution marked the birth of the short-lived constitutional monarchy and implemented a status based citizenship. Citizens were defined as men over 25, were "independent" and had paid the poll tax. These citizens had the right to vote. Furthermore active citizenship was two-tiered, with those who could vote and those who were fit for public office. Women were by definition not afforded any rights of active citizenship. Like men who could not pay the poll tax, children, domestic servants, rural day-laborers and slaves, Jews, actors and hangmen, women had no political rights. In transferring sovereignty to the nation the constitution dismantled the old regime, but Gouges argued that it did not go far enough.
  Gouges was not the only feminists who attempted to influence the political structures of late Enlightenment France. But like the writings of Etta Palm d'Aelders, Theroigne de Mericourt, Claire Lacombe and Marquis de Condorcet, her arguments fell on deaf ears. At the end of the 18th century influential political actors such as Honoré Gabriel Riqueti, Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord and Emmanuel Joseph Sieyès were not convinced of the case for equality.
caption: First page of Declaration of the Rights of Woman and the Female Citizen
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