While not a philosopher in any strict sense, she deserves attention for her morally astute analysis of women’s condition in society, for her re-imagining of the intersection of gender and political engagement, for her conception of civic virtue and her pacifist stance, and for her advocacy of selfhood for women, blacks, and children (especially in their right to know their origins). Despite harsh criticism for using her voice in the political arena and thus challenging deeply entrenched gender norms (“having forgotten the virtues that belong to her sex,” wrote Pierre Gaspard Chaumette, then-President of the Paris Commune, warning other politically active women of Gouges’s fate), she was certainly the author of 40 plays (12 survive), two novels and close to 70 political pamphlets. Her name appears in the Almanach des addresses (a kind of social registry) from 1774-1784.
Still, she was recognized among the fashionable and intellectual elite in Paris, and she was well-versed in the main themes of the most influential thinkers of her day, at least for a time. Her biographer Oliver Blanc suggests yes historian John R. There is disagreement on whether she participated in or even occasionally hosted some of the literary and philosophic salons of the day. Defying social convention in every direction and molding a life evocative of feminism of a much later age, Gouges spent her adult life advocating for victims of unjust systems, helping to create a public conversation on women’s rights and the economically disadvantaged, and attempting to bring taboo social issues to the theatrical stage and to the larger social discourse. On the death of her husband after a brief unhappy marriage, she moved to Paris, where, with the support of a wealthy admirer, she began a life’s work focused wholly on mounting the rostrum denied to women.
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While contradictions abound in her writings, she never wavered in her belief in the right to free speech and in its role in social and political critique. The only woman executed for her political writings during the French Revolution, she refused to toe the revolutionary party line in France that was calling for Louis XVI’s death (particularly evident in her pamphlet Les Trois Urnes, ou le Salut de la Patrie (1949 ), as one of the few women in history who “protested against their harsh destiny.” Favorably described by commentators alternately as a stateswoman, a femme philosophe, an artist, a political analyst, and an activist, she can be considered all of these but not without some qualification. “Woman has the right to mount the scaffold she must equally have the right to mount the rostrum” wrote Olympe de Gouges in 1791 in the best known of her writings The Rights of Woman (often referenced as The Declaration of the Rights of Woman and the Female Citizen), two years before she would be the third woman beheaded during France’s Reign of Terror.
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