The liberal paradigm

Abstract

In September 1791 in Paris, ‘The Declaration of the Rights of Women Citizens’ was issued by Olympe de Gouges. Caught up in the fervour of the French Revolution, she spoke of the ‘natural, unchangeable and sacred rights of women’ which it was the duty of government to protect and affirm. Conversely, the corruption of government, she argued, was due to ‘ignorance, neglect or contempt of the rights of women’. De Gouges believed that the same kinds of natural rights which men were proposing for themselves also applied to women. There was in her view no cause for distinction. She believed these natural rights to be established and expressed in the form of principles, and so her moral argument was that our reasoning in making decisions must be based on ‘clear and unarguable principles’. It was by reference to these that the logic of the feminist case was to be presented. These principles were founded in nature itself. De Gouges claimed that limits had been put upon the lives of women through men depriving women of what is naturally theirs, and these limits ‘must be reformed by the laws of nature and of reason’. It was the task of rationality to discover the principles that lie at the heart of nature, and no longer to base political or moral judgements upon superficial distinctions or social tradition.