Olympe de Gouges was, in many ways, inspired by Jean Jacques Rousseau, whose contributions to Enlightenment thought were largely made within her lifetime. She felt that they shared a connection to nature, a rejection of social artifice, and a purity of intention that ideally situated them to discover and communicate truth; in this communication, she believed, he was right to place primary value on transparency and authenticity, and she strove to do the same as a writer (Vanpée 1999, p. 52). She was also “sympathetic to Rousseau’s diagnosis of the degeneration of eighteenth-century society,” which lay much of the blame on the corruptive force of luxury (Bergès 2022, p. 14). However, she directly opposed Rousseau’s conception of primitive human society, along with many of his prescriptions for social and political reform.
One significant area of disagreement was on women’s rightful place in society; while both Rousseau and de Gouges saw women’s potential as agents of social change, they had very different visions of the form that agency should take. Rousseau believed that women, in order to contribute to social progress, must be kept safely within the confines of marriage, dutifully educating their families in civic and moral virtue; political decisions, meanwhile, would be left to their husbands. De Gouges, on the other hand, was not only highly critical of marriage as an institution but conceived of women’s capacity for social contribution as wholly independent of their familial attachments. She held that women could, and should, be forces of positive change outside the limitations of their domestic roles, extending their sphere of influence outside the home. In fact, as long as women were prevented from actively participating in politics and excluded from public discourse, they could not reach their full potential as social reformers.
Rousseau begins his Discourse on the Origins of Human Inequality with a “Dedication to the Republic of Geneva,” which includes a useful distillation of his thought on women’s roles (expanded upon in his novels, Emile and La Nouvelle Héloise). First, addressing the “amiable and virtuous daughters of Geneva,” he appears to grant women a sort of dominion over men, claiming that “it will always be the lot of your sex to govern ours” (Rousseau 1754, p. 6). This is not to say, however, that women are destined to be political leaders or even heads of household; far from it. Rather, Rousseau seems to be alluding to “the primeval and specifically sexual control women exert over men,” which he believes holds significant destructive power (Fermon 1994, p. 439). Only within the domestic sphere–that is, “in the context of marriage and the family”–does he think that this sexual power could be harnessed for good, allowing women to “transcend their dangerous anti-social proclivities and instead serve a redemptive role” (Fermon 1994, p. 439). This is precisely why he insists, in the next breath, that women’s “chaste influence” be “solely exercised within the limits of conjugal union,” and always with the goal of social good (Rousseau 1754, p. 6). This influence consists of a special kind of moral education, which Rousseau considers of the utmost importance to society: that which “[perpetuates]…a respect for the laws of State, and harmony among the citizens” (Rousseau 1754, p. 6). He believes that women are ideally situated to foster civic virtue within the family unit, compelling their husbands and children to be good citizens. They may not be citizens themselves, and they are certainly not the ones making macro-level decisions, but the moral development of individuals is foundational to broader social change.
However, Rousseau is careful to define the manner in which women should perform this education. In order to be effective, she must teach her lessons with a “persuasive sweetness”; she must be an “affectionate wife,” exerting an “innocent and amiable rule”; and of course, she must model the virtue she teaches, conducting herself with unfailing modesty and grace (Rousseau 1754, p. 6). In other words, woman’s potential to enact positive change is conditional upon her ability to conform to a certain saint-like mold of femininity. On some level, Rousseau may simply be appealing to the practical truth that men feel less emasculated, and are thus more likely to yield to their wives, when receiving gentle instruction rather than forceful assertions or commands. On a deeper level, he is betraying his own biases–utterly unsurprising, given the time period–concerning the way women should behave. Despite ostensibly empowering them as essential agents of social reform, his domestic ideal does not threaten patriarchal dynamics in the slightest.
Olympe de Gouges, as reflected not only in her writings but in the way she lived her life (daring to pursue a literary career rather than remarrying after the death of her husband), refused to stand for patriarchal dominance. The role she envisioned for women did not revolve around their conjugal or familial relationships, partly because she understood marriage to be a deeply flawed institution that perpetuated this dominance and undermined the moral restoration of society. She even goes so far as to call it “le tombeau de la confiance et de l’amour”–the tomb of love and trust (1791). In this, she sharply opposes Rousseau, who conceives of marriage as “the healthiest and most solemn of engagements,” absolutely essential to moral restoration and to the very existence of society (1964; qtd. in Fermon 1994, p. 440). For de Gouges, conjugal union has the potential to serve a pro-social role within an egalitarian context; in Le Bonheur Primitif, where she envisions such a context, she describes “respect…for the sacred ties that united spouses” as “for man’s happiness, and for natural law, the finest institution” (1789, p. 4). But she recognizes that such respect is sadly lacking in the eighteenth century, where humankind has long lost its primitive happiness by straying from the equality prescribed by Nature. Marriage does not function, in practice, as it might in principle.
In her post-ambule to Les Droits de la Femme, de Gouges highlights the ways in which marriage contributes to the oppression of women. She admits, with Rousseau, that women hold a certain power over men that can be viciously abused, contributing to society’s moral degradation; however, she contends that the injustices of the patriarchy are to blame for such behavior. Once women are recognized as equals, allowed to share in “all the exercises of man,” they will be raised to their full moral potential (1791, my translation). To this end, she proposes a new form of social contract between men and women in which property is shared equally between both partners. This contract is an extension of her demand that women be afforded all the same legal rights as men, including the right to vote.
In addition to believing that women’s voices must be heard in the political arena, de Gouges sought to bring them into other areas of public discourse. Specifically, in Le Bonheur Primitif, she advocates for a new National Theatre whose repertoire would include the work of women writers. This proposal is part of her larger argument that the arts, once properly reformed, have a central role to play in society’s moral restoration. In this, she directly challenges Rousseau’s contention in the Discourse on the Arts and Sciences that the arts, which “owe their birth to our vices,” necessarily contribute to “the dissolution of morals”–that they are founded upon harmful competition and cannot be separated from the associated vanity, idleness, and luxury (1750, p. 13-16). But in addition to advancing a positive view of artistic competition, reframing it as “emulation” and arguing that it can “bring us back to a state where we work together towards human progress,” de Gouges insists that its reform depends on women’s contributions (Bergès 2022, p. 25). She points out that she is not the only “estimable Author” of her sex to write plays with “a moral purpose,” plays with real reformative power; if society gave these women the right encouragement and resources, recognizing the value of their work and presenting it alongside men’s, “this different competition would uplift women’s souls and make men more polite, more genuine, and more considerate” (de Gouges 1789, p. 18).
Rousseau, on the other hand, is not interested in women as playwrights, competing with men in the arts. Even if he saw theatre as a viable path to moral reform, it seems unlikely that he would advocate for women’s involvement in it, given his belief that “women were naturally unable to control their sexual urges” and needed men to keep them in line; in the theatre, freed from such constraint, they were apt to behave without virtue, as illustrated by the example of actresses (Bergès 2022, p. 24). Relatedly, if more women pursued literary careers like de Gouges, they would become less and less dependent on men to provide for them, and perhaps more would refuse to marry in the first place. This would not only remove the safeguards of their chastity but could topple the whole foundation of Rousseau’s family-based structure of social reform; in order for women to take on the role of domestic moral educator, they must have husbands and families to educate.
Rousseau’s and de Gouges’s philosophical differences concerning women’s role in social progress can be traced back to their different conceptions of human origins. As de Gouges charitably puts it at the beginning of Le Bonheur Primitif, “Jean Jacques was too enlightened, his genius carried him too far, and that may be what prevented him from grasping the fundamental character of mankind in primitive times” (1789, p. 2). This fundamental character, according to her, was social and egalitarian; human beings lived in communities from the beginning, taking care of and emulating one another in the pursuit of collective flourishing. Men and women, joined together in partnerships founded on “reciprocal feelings,” had equal roles to play in this pursuit (de Gouges 1789, p. 4). In Rousseau’s Discourse on the Origins of Human Equality, however, he depicts the first human beings as leading solitary lives, occasionally coming together to procreate and then quickly going their separate ways; everyone existed independently, without any concept of morality or need of others’ assistance (1754, p. 22). Eventually, men and women developed the habit of living together and voluntarily adopted gendered divisions of labor: “the women became more sedentary, and accustomed themselves to mind the hut and their children, while the men went abroad in search of their common subsistence” (1754, p. 31).
In other words, Rousseau contends that although men and women are equal in their most primitive state (that of free-roaming isolation), there is something natural, or at least rational, about sex inequality once society emerges: women choose to submit to patriarchal arrangements, embracing their “functions as mothers,” once they cohabitate with men (Fermon 1994, p. 441). They’re the ones who carry the babies, so it just makes sense that they stay home and raise them while a man provides for the family; like the citizen giving up certain freedoms for the protection of the state, the primitive woman willingly sacrifices her autonomy when offered male protection. De Gouges believes nothing of the sort, demanding women to listen to the “tocsin of reason” and recognize their natural rights, including freedom from men’s oppression (1791, my translation). On her view, patriarchy has no rational basis and no justification in Nature–a judgment no doubt informed by her lived experience as a woman, which Rousseau, however enlightened he may have been, did not have the viewpoint to fully understand.
SOURCES:
Bergès, Sandrine. Olympe de Gouges. Cambridge Elements: Women in the History of Philosophy. Cambridge University Press, 2022. https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/content/view/2A06D8D821079834D475E8676AAD9383/9781009010528AR.pdf/olympe-de-gouges.pdf.
Fermon, Nicole. “Domesticating Women, Civilizing Men: Rousseau’s Political Program.” The Sociological Quarterly 35, no. 3 (1994): 431–42. http://www.jstor.org/stable/4121219.
Gouges, Olympe de. “Le Bonheur Primitif de l’Homme, ou les Rêveries Patriotiques” [1789]. Translated by Clarissa Palmer. https://olympedegouges.eu/docs/le-bohneur-primitif.pdf
Gouges, Olympe de. “Les Droits de la Femme” [1791]. Project Gutenberg, 2016. https://www.google.com/books/edition/Les_droits_de_la_femme/Y6Z-EAAAQBAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1.
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. Discourse on the Arts and Sciences [The First Discourse],1750. Translated. https://www.stmarys-ca.edu/sites/default/files/2023-03/arts.pdf.
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. Discourse on the Origins of Inequality, 1754. Translated by G.D.H. Cole. https://www.files.ethz.ch/isn/125494/5019_Rousseau_Discourse_on_the_Origin_of_Inequality.pdf.
Vanpée, Janie. “Performing Justice: The Trials of Olympe de Gouges.” Theatre Journal 51, no. 1 (1999): 47–65. http://www.jstor.org/stable/25068623.