Gouges' exhortations were dismissed out of hand, according to Lucy Moore's Liberty: The Lives and Times of Six Women in Revolutionary France. Indeed, Gouges died on the guillotine in 1793. Of the womPreamble. ... Considering that ignorance, forgetfulness or contempt of the rights of women are the sole causes of public miseries, and of corruption of governmen
ts, they have resolved to set forth in a solemn declaration, the natural, unalterable and sacred rights of woman ....
Article 1. Woman is born free and remains equal to man in rights. ...
Article 2. The aim of every political association is the preservation of the natural and imprescriptible rights of man and woman. These rights are liberty, prosperity, security and above all, resistance to oppression.
Article 4. Liberty and justice consist in giving back to others all that belongs to them; thus the only limits on the exercise of woman's natural rights are the perpetual tyranny by which man opposes her; these limits must be reformed by the laws of nature and of reason.
Article 7. No woman can be an exception: she will be accused, apprehended and detained in cases determined by law; women, like men, will obey the rigorous rule.
Article 10. No one ought to be disturbed for one's opinions, however fundamental they are; since a woman has the right to mount the scaffold, she must also have the right to address the House, providing her interventions do not disturb the public order as it has been established by law.
Article 13. For the upkeep of public forces and for administrative expenses, the contribution of woman and man are equal; a woman shares in all the labours required by law, in the painful tasks; she must therefore have an equal share in the distribution of offices, employments, trusts, dignities and work.
Afterword. Women, wake up! The alarm bell of reason is making itself heard throughout the universe; recognize your rights. ... The enslaved man multiplied his forces but has had to resort to yours to break his chains. Once free he became unjust to his female companion. O women! women, when will you stop being blind? What advantages have you received from the revolution? A more pronounced scorn, a more marked contempt? During the centuries of corruption, your only power was over the weaknesses of men. Your empire is destroyed, what then is left to you?
en profiled, Judith Warner wrote in review of Moore's "marvelous new book," only 1 "escaped the revolution more or less unscathed." "The revolution," Warner writes, "brought women many tributes to their maternal graces, their high-minded morals, their 'natural' homebound virtues. Yet veneration of Woman and hatred of real women were one and the same." Her review concludes with a quote about men that, though from Lucile Duplessis (left), another Revolutionary woman, could well have come from Gouges' pen: "'That they would worship us less and set us free!'"
