The Declaration of the women's rights and of the citizen is a French legal text, requiring the full legal, political and social assimilation of the women, written in September 1791, by the écrivaine Olympe de Gouges on the model of the proclaimed Déclaration of the human rights and the citizen of 1789 the August 26th 1789. First document to evoke the legal and legal equality Woman S compared to the Man S, the Declaration of the women's rights and of the citizen was compiled in order to be presented to the National Assembly to be adopted there.

The Declaration of the women's rights and of the citizen constitutes a critical pastiche of the Déclaration of the human rights and of the citizen , who enumerates rights applying only to the men, then the women did not have of the right to vote, the access to the public institutions, professional freedoms, the rights of possession, etc the Auteure defends there, not without irony with regard to the male prejudices, the cause of the women, writing thus that “the woman is born free and remains equal in rights to the man”. Thus saw itself denounced the fact that the Révolution forgot the women in her project of freedom and equality.

Origins

The evolution of the concept of human rights was carried out conformément with the age of the Lumières and with the events which he knew. Although this notion was launched for the first time in 1776 in the Déclaration of the Rights of Virginia then to the Revolution in the Déclaration of the Human rights and the Citizen (1789), none of these documents takes into account the women.

Analyzes

Being inspired narrowly by the Declaration of the human rights and the citizen , the Declaration of the women's rights and of the citizen is also composed of a preamble (addressed to Marie-Antoinette) and of 17 articles, but with a prelude and a postambule. It is not a question simply of a counter-project for the women. It is clear that the nation is formed by the two joint sexes (Article. III ). In many places, Olympe de Gouges replaced “the man” by “the woman and the man”, in order to make clear the agreement between the two sexes. The article VII state firmly that there are no special rights for the women: “Null woman is not excluded; she is shown, stopped, and held in the cases determined by the Law. ”

Whereas, in the articles I and II , the claims correspond largely in accordance with freedom, the equality, safety, the right to the property and the right to resist oppression, the concept of freedom at Gouges is different from the paradoxical definition from 1789 (“freedom consists in doing all that does not harm others”). The article IV stipulate indeed that “freedom and justice consist in returning all that belongs to others”. Thus, freedom is related to justice and the women want less one increase in their freedoms which the natural rights which fall to them to the birth.

The Declaration of the women's rights and of the citizen deviates also considerably of the Déclaration of the human rights and the citizen , as in the article XI where the freedom of thought and of opinion must specifically allow, according to Gouges, to the mothers “to say freely, I am mother of a child who belongs to you, without a barbarian prejudice the force to dissimulate the truth”.

A basic principle of Gouges is that the identity of the duties must involve that of the rights (like, for example, the imposition) (Article. XIII with XV ). Olympe claimed a levelling treatment towards the women in all the fields of the life, so much public like private: right to the vote and the private property, capacity to take share education and with the army, and to exert public offices, while managing even to ask for the equality of be able in the family and the Church. The most famous declaration of its Declaration is: “the woman has the right to go up on the scaffold; she must have also that to go up to Platform” (Article. X )

It appears however that Olympe de Gouges did not believe in the equality of the women and the men. Of the difference of the majority of the theories on the equality, she thought that male nature and female nature were different, and that of the women was higher. This conviction of two distinct nature is obvious in the text which precedes the declaration.

The men who directed the Revolution were, with rare exceptions, even for most radical among those, far from sharing this feminist approach. Its opposition to the capital punishment, its support posted for the Of Gironde S after their fall, inter alia, will be worth to him to be stopped and guillotinée the November 3rd 1793.

Posterity

This Déclaration is without legal authenticity because she was refused by the Convention to which she had been proposed and remained with the state of project. On the one hand, it appeared only in five specimens and was politically completely ignored while, other, it was known as that “the Declaration created sensation in all France, and even abroad. ”

Range

The historical importance of the Declaration of the women's rights and of the citizen lies in her statute of first universal declaration of the human rights which raises a universally valid requirement at the same time for the men and the women. In this way, the Declaration of the human rights and the citizen of 1789 which had been stopped only for one half of humanity, without to be legitimated by other half, found, actually, exceeded whereas it continues to be transmitted, in the modern historical conscience, as the base of the rights of the man . The Declaration of the women's rights and of the citizen constitutes, so a brilliance radical plea in favor of the female claims and an authentic proclamation of the universalization of the human rights.

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