Condorcet And Gouges

In France in the early 1790s, the French Revolution, which sought to establish universal individual rights in French society, inspired several arguments for women's rights. Two such arguments, articulated by Marquis de Condorcet and Olympe de Gouges, both active supporters of the Revolution, are especially noteworthy because they constitute radically opposed courses wellspring of all injustice experienced by women and should therefore be battled through direct political action.

Condorcet, a mathematician and member of the Academy of Sciences with an interest in social equality, did not separate the question of women's rights from the more general one of equal rights for all members of society, believing that all discrimination was an oversight, the result of not reasoning consistently or not inequality, he argued, this intellectually untenable situation of women's inequality was historically condemned to disappear soon.

Where Condorcet's arguments were purely theoretical and did not include specific legislative proposals to end the exclusion of women from politics, the tone and content of Gouges's proposals reflected her objective that women should become politically mobilized in a war against the injustices that she saw men stubbornly perpetuating. Gouges, a writer experiencing, but unfortunately, even in the atmosphere of the French Revolution, neither's views were widely accepted.