Olympe de Gouges

Olympe de Gouge (7 May 1748 – 3 November 1793), born Marie Gouze, was a French playwright and political activist who championed numerous political causes of the time including the rights of women, the abolition of slavery, and the support for the French First Republic.

Olympe de Gouges

Quotes

Declaration of the Rights of Women (1791)

• Article 1. Woman is born free and lives equal to man in her rights. Social distinctions can be based only on the common utility.
• 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 oes 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"