In 1789 the French Revolution declared that all men are born free and equal in rights. Olympe de Gouges read it, noticed who had been left out, and did something audacious: she rewrote the whole thing.
The word that was doing all the work
The Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen was the founding document of the Revolution — soaring, universal, and, in practice, for men only. Women were citizens enough to be taxed and to be executed, but not enough to vote, hold office, or speak in the assembly. De Gouges thought that was not a universal principle at all. It was a loophole.
The Declaration of the Rights of Woman
So in 1791 she published the Declaration of the Rights of Woman and of the Female Citizen, mirroring the original article by article and simply insisting that women were included. "Woman is born free and remains equal to man in rights," her first article begins. And then the line that has outlived everything else she wrote: "Woman has the right to mount the scaffold; she must equally have the right to mount the rostrum." If the state can execute a woman, she argued, it can damn well let her speak.
Who she was
De Gouges was a butcher's daughter from Montauban who became a playwright and pamphleteer in Paris. She campaigned against slavery when that was dangerous, argued for divorce and the rights of children born outside marriage, and attacked the Revolution's leaders when she thought they had betrayed their own ideals. She was, in the fullest sense, impossible to shut up.
The scaffold, as promised
That made her enemies. During the Terror she was arrested for her politics, denied a lawyer, and on 3 November 1793 she was guillotined — one of the few women executed for her written words rather than her birth. Her most famous sentence turned out to be a prophecy of her own death. She had claimed the right to the scaffold and the right to the rostrum. The Revolution gave her only the first. History has slowly been handing her the second.
Wear it
Our Olympe de Gouges tee sets a laurel-framed classical portrait on the chest, with her articles printed along the back in both French and English — Les Droits de la Femme beside the Rights of Woman. A quiet way to carry a very loud idea. Garment-dyed cotton, made to order.
Read next
Sappho's oldest argument that love beats glory · Invictus, written in defiance from a hospital bed · Why we print words a regime tried to erase — or browse the tees.
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