Where Did Women's Rights Begin?

Olympe de Gouges, The Declaration of the Rights of Women

Maybe it reflects my American public-school education, but for years I didn't know organized Feminism existed before the Seneca Falls Declaration. I read excerpts of Mary Wollstonecraft and John Stuart Mill in college, but thought them outliers. I had no idea anyone published a bestselling Feminist pamphlet as early as 1789.

According to the introduction, Olympe de Gouges, a renowned literary stylist and abolitionist in her day, greeted the French Revolution as a necessary tonic to systematic oppression. Yet when the revolutionary National Assembly passed its Declaration of the Rights of Man, she read it and realized it meant “Man” in the narrowest, most literal sense. Clearly the revolution still had no place for people like her.

So she published this pamphlet as a rejoinder. Structured in the form of a legislative resolution, it consists of seventeen straightforward articles, most only one sentence long. But these articles are bookended between de Gouges’s poetically styled prologue and epilogue, in which she lays out the idea that citizenship means little of it excludes half the population. If only men are free, she asserts, freedom remains an illusion.

These ideas are surprisingly mild by today’s standards. Besides insisting that women have the right to vote, hold office, and own property, de Gouges asserts such positions as, that women who commit crimes should face trial and serve sentence like any man. It’s amazing this was ever controversial. Yet her ideas were so dangerous that when the Terror of 1793 struck, she was beheaded, alongside Robespierre and Marie Antoinette.

This declaration of women’s identities, rights, and responsibilities might profitably revitalize modern gender debates, and excite feminists. Sadly, this book might not. This book reproduces de Gouges’s Declaration in full, with biographical notes and a brief introduction to context. Each article of her declaration is illuminated by a thematically relevant contemporary art. And there’s where we run into the problem.

Portrait of Olympe de Gouges

De Gouges’s articles, printed in gigantic 48-point type that looks thin on the page, get lost between the brightly colored art panels. Printed in an exaggerated four-color style, the art looks like 1980s-era comic book pages. Their style ranges from what look like construction-paper collages, to New Yorker cartoons, to elaborately detailed watercolors. It’s hard to focus on the tall, skinny sans-serif type when brightly colored pictures draw our attention.

Then, between each article and its matching art, the uncredited editors have sandwiched a selection of open-source quotes which are, more or less, relevant to the preceding article. From famous names like Emma Goldman, Simone de Beauvoir, and Victor Hugo, to young and dangerous thinkers like Virginie Despentes, Naomi Wolf, and Julia Kristeva, these quotes spotlight feminist thinking through the ages. As the names suggest, the French are overrepresented.

Sadly, this results in what rhetorician Gerald Graff calls “hit and run quotes,” lines and passages (some exceedingly long) just thrown out there without context or clarification. Presumably the editors thought this mass would accumulate into some kind of point. Without linking text, it’s not only sloppy, but it also vastly exceeds in length the Declaration it’s meant to supplement. Olympe de Gouges gets lost in her own book.

Included with this volume is the 1967 United Nations Declaration on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women. This declaration is structured remarkably similarly to de Gouges’s declaration, and that isn’t coincidental: a mere 176 years later, her ideas had become commonplace and acceptable. Though the UN declaration was non-binding, it became a basis for international legislation improving women’s lot worldwide.

Yay for progress, I guess.

These two declarations together represent the progress of women’s rights from the Enlightenment to the modern era, a progress that has been violently irregular, and cost one of its pioneers her life. This is important. Notwithstanding the current #MeToo moment, women’s rights have historically taken a back seat to racial and economic struggles. Perhaps the time is right again for Olympe de Gouges to become the worldwide sensation she once was.

I just wish this book was better organized. This edition looks like half coffee-table art book, half disorganized information dump. De Gouges’s important, ever-relevant content gets lost between the images, quotes, and other content. I might have liked more context for de Gouges herself; if a well-informed reader like me knows little about her life and times, general audiences, distracted by news blurbs and mass media, probably knows less.

In short, I like the idea of this book. But it seems designed to lose its message amidst the spandrels. That’s a shame.