De Gouges Declaration Of The Rights Of Women

Throughout most of history women had a very limited voice when it came to being published and especially when it came to the subject of woman's rights. Most women did not have the ability to become authors due to the lack of formal education given to the general populace and limited even further by the topics which women who could afford to be educated were taught. If women were published they wrote about specific topics that they knew well, but that usually had no political or social agenda. Men were publishing quite often and they had a much larger pool of topics that they wrote about. As the years went on and more women were educated, though still not a terribly large number of women, were able to be published and they began talking about
It has different sections to it such as "The Rights of women" and a preamble before she goes on to list seventeen articles. In these articles she kept up her legal and strong language and said the rights that women should have, which included rights of trials. In Article VI she says that women should be treated equally to men when they break the law and that women should not be sheltered from punishment for a crime that they committed. This was not a topic that had been addressed much, but de Gouges was adamant that when she advocated for equality for men and women she advocated for absolute equality between the two
She did not specifically write that women needed these rights because they were women, but they needed these rights because men had these rights and because fundamentally if men had them women should have them as well. This gave her argument more body because she was making it on the fundamental basis that women and men are of the same species and in every other species in nature the male and female creatures are equal. "Everywhere you will find them; everywhere they cooperate in harmonious togetherness in this immortal masterpiece." (de Gouges, 261). By using this argument de Gouges is telling men that as long as women are not their equal in the rights of society then they were breaking the laws of nature and it must be remedied. To stretch this argument further one could even say that since God created everything men were going against God by not allowing women to be