OLYMPE DE GOUGES THE DECLARATION OF THE RIGHTS OF WOMAN

Having read most of the texts of this weeks reading, the one that prominently grab my attention was De Gouges Declaration of the Rights of Women. The text is valuable not only because having been written in 1790 still has prescient demands that have not been met yet, but also because it is written in the language and manner of most of the declarations of the time. One of the first impressions upon reading the texts is that it is written in the language and logic of the Enlightenment, through the questioning of the conclusions that those who promulgated the rights of the man and the citizen had used. She has taken to the logical conclusion the arguments of the Declaration of the right of the man and the citizen and question why the liberty and justice that was meant to be restored to men is denied to women.

What she does is to invite people to observe nature and see how throughout nature sex is equally distributed. So it follows, or so her argument entails that to the same extent that the two sexes are equally distributed through nature, the same should occur in the new political arrangement of France. For, if the argument that lies beneath the enactment of the Rights of the man and the citizen is that there are inalienable rights that are bestowed on people by nature, women should also have the same rights as men, for there is no rational argument that can leave one of the sexes without the same rights. In other words, if it is truth that “liberty and justice consists on restoring what belongs to others” and that process of restoration is what occurs at the enactment of the rights of rights of men and the citizen, there is no rational argument to withhold equality for women.

She also mentions the hypocrisy with which men “have raised their exceptional circumstances to a principle” because in an age of Enlightenment, science and critical evaluation of tradition, they insists on commanding a sex, which in is full intellectual capacity. Those exceptional circumstances to which she makes reference is the fact that the Enlightenment is meant to move beyond prejudices and established truths towards the emporium of logic, reason and proof, but instead of looking at the issue of equality with a critical eye, men have decided to raise their peculiar circumstances to a principle, justified in no other way, than in the tradition from which they were meant to move away.

There is also the fact that the text is so revolutionary and yet so common. Particularly in article III where she argues that the essence of the nation “is nothing but the union of a woman and a man…” Perhaps she is too much a daughter of her time, perhaps I am reading her arguments with the eyes of another time, but she does not even conceive the possibility of same sex couples being also at the foundation of the nation.

Perhaps for the actuality of the arguments and the fact that most of them remain unfulfilled, perhaps because today King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia granted women the right to vote and run in future municipal elections this texts was the most relevant of them all.