- In De Gouges’ “Declaration of the Rights of Woman,” item XI is saying that women should be able to freely announce who their child’s father is without having to hide that fact. De Gouges is arguing that women have the right to express their thoughts and opinions, so if they want to proclaim that they are the mother of a child or who the father is, they should be free to do so. I found this interesting because it shows just how little power women had, especially those that may have had children with a man that was married. Being unable to say who the father is puts the responsibility of the child completely in the hands of the woman, who is unable to fight back against this unfairness because of their lack of freedom to voice their opinions. Item XI shows how important it is to a woman to be able to say who their child’s father is.
- What I think Olympe de Gouges and Mary Wollstonecraft seem to be saying about marriage is that marriage is like a trap that forces women to become dependent on their husband and renders them as objects that are meant to please their husband in order to maintain their marriage. While the marriage may have started off as two people in love, the marriage will eventually become one where the woman finds herself having to pretend to fake her emotions and trapped in a marriage where she either must continue to find ways to please her husband or risk having him leave her with nothing in her name. Both De Gouges and Wollstonecraft talk about marriage with a negative connotation, as if it’s the destroyer of a woman’s happiness. They do not describe marriage as one filled with love, but rather of a relationship where the husband takes and the woman gives.
- Reading these two 18th century texts in the 21st century really made me see how little progress we have made in giving women rights and equality. Even though women have gotten the right to vote and there have been some monumental changes to the way women are perceived or treated, those rights were things that women had to fight for and we still have a long way to go. One issue that De Gouges and Wollstonecraft address that still seems relevant to us today relates to my response in question 2, the idea of being “pleasing” or “pleasant” in identifying the worth of a woman. Through what they say about marriage, it shows that women are only worth being in a marriage with if they are pleasing and this concept of having to be pleasing for others objectifies women as an object that exists for the pleasure of others. This view is still apparent in our society today. Women are still being objectified and comments towards women like, “You should smile more” show how even in the modern day, women are still expected to please others with their actions and looks.
Pauline Pan – Olympe de Gouges and Mary Wollstonecraft Response
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