Déclaration des droits de la femme et de la citoyenne: Making the Exclusion in Universal Rights Visible

Published on 5 September 1791, Olympe de Gouges’s Déclaration des droits de la femme et de la citoyenne turns the structure of the 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen back on the Revolution. If rights belong to universal human beings, why does “citizen” in political practice still point chiefly to men? De Gouges does not make an abstract request for inclusion from outside the debate. She borrows the Revolution’s legal idiom so that its exclusions become visible. A preamble, seventeen articles and a postscript stage the question: do rights described as natural and inalienable apply to women too?

This is more than inserting “woman” into a supposedly neutral blank. Article I places women alongside men as free people with equal rights; Article VI asks why women cannot participate in making the law or enter public office on equal terms. Article X joins a right to its cost: if a woman can be sent to the scaffold for her opinions, she should also be able to speak from the tribune. Article XI shifts from public speech to parenthood, exposing the unequal legal risks women face when acknowledging maternity and children. Political representation, expression, property, taxation and family law appear together; the text shows that what is called private life is already structured by citizenship.

The declaration’s force lies in presenting women’s exclusion as a contradiction within revolutionary principles, not evidence that women are unready for politics. Articles XIII to XV return to public burdens and power: if women pay taxes and perform social labour, why should they not claim public office, help make the rules and hold government accountable? Yet this is a political intervention in revolutionary debate, not an enacted constitution or a complete institutional programme. It speaks through contemporary languages of citizenship and property and remains situated within the hierarchies, colonial order and racial boundaries of revolutionary France. It should not be treated as a universal platform that has already resolved differences among women. Scholarship on France and its colonies is a reminder that arguments about gender equality cannot be separated from racialized boundaries of citizenship.

Attend to the form as well as the propositions. Rewriting a familiar rights document makes readers ask who defines the universal and who is left outside that definition. Read it beside Mary Wollstonecraft’s 1792 A Vindication of the Rights of Woman: both contest women’s exclusion from reason, citizenship and education, but their arguments and political contexts are not interchangeable. Read it also with Sor Juana’s reply to Sor Filotea to see a different strategy across time: when a public language of equal rights is not yet available, women can still negotiate for intellectual space within religious authority.

Primary text and further reading

• French National Assembly: full declaration and historical note
• Research record on citizenship and gender in revolutionary France
• Study of dependency, race and gender in revolutionary France and the French Caribbean
• Further reading: Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman; Sor Juana’s reply to Sor Filotea