Marie Gouze AKA Olympe de Gouges (Credit: La Croix)

Born in 1748 — the bastard daughter of a butcher — Marie Gouze had even fewer rights than most French women of her class. Her petite bourgeois family kept her from absolute poverty, but “illegitimate” birth condemned her to low social status. In any case, girls from the provinces rarely gained the opportunity to achieve any kind of distinction.

Marie’s escape came via an arranged marriage to a minor government official from Paris deployed to her small town. She remembered, “I was married to a man I did not love and who was neither rich nor well-born. I was sacrificed for no reason that could make up for the repugnance I felt for this man.” During their one-year union, Marie gave her husband a child, and he reciprocated by dying.

Now liberated, the young widow inherited enough assets to finance a move to Paris in 1766.

There, she reinvented herself as Olympe de Gouges, a playwright and the world’s first feminist intellectual. Amid the cultural ferment of the late Ancien Régime, her scripts condemned slavery and promoted women’s rights.

With the outbreak of the French Revolution, de Gouges plunged into explicit activism. After sidelining King Louis XVI, the Constituent Assembly outlined male liberties in the 1789 “Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen.”

Noting a glaring omission, de Gouges responded in 1791 with the “Declaration of the Rights of Woman and of the Citizeness.”

In the first section, she asserted, “This revolution will only take effect when all women become fully aware of their deplorable condition, and of the rights they have lost in society.”

With those last few words, de Gouges expanded Enlightenment philosophy. Conventional scholars believed that men began in a state of nature, possessing natural rights to life, liberty and property — liberties later usurped by tyrannical governments. Here, de Gouges implied that women in a state of nature had enjoyed precisely the same freedoms as men, and had been robbed of them with equal injustice.

Next, she demanded to know the empirical basis for male claims of superiority:

“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 empire to oppress my sex? Your strength? Your talents? Observe the Creator in his wisdom; survey in all her grandeur that nature with whom you seem to want to be in harmony, and give me, if you dare, an example of this tyrannical empire. Go back to animals, consult the elements, study plants, finally glance at all the modifications of organic matter, and surrender to the evidence when I offer you the means; search, probe, and distinguish, if you can, the sexes in the administration of nature. Everywhere you will find them mingled; everywhere they cooperate in harmonious togetherness in this immortal masterpiece.

“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.”