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10 - The Rights of Women (or Women’s Rights)

from Part I - A Revolution in Rights?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 January 2025

By
Karen Offen
Edited by
Dan Edelstein  and
Jennifer Pitts
Dan Edelstein
Affiliation:
Stanford University, California
Jennifer Pitts
Affiliation:
University of Chicago
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Summary

This chapter traces the emergence of published women’s rights demands in Western Europe and America. While this history begins with seventeenth-century French debates and broadened through the eighteenth century, it was in the immediate run-up to, and then during the course of, the French Revolution that arguments for women’s civil and political rights flared up and arrived at their modern expression. From Condorcet to Olympe de Gouges, many more writers of both sexes advocated les droits des femmes, demanding legal, educational, economic, and social equality with men. Early expressions of these claims sometimes met with scorn and disbelief, particularly from influential German philosophers, but the claims would nevertheless resurface periodically and gain momentum throughout the nineteenth century, especially during the revolutionary upheavals of 1848 and 1870–1 (and eventually in 1917 Russia), and the women’s suffrage campaigns in the West. Many advocates of women’s rights in France and in the English-speaking world, including Sarah Grimké, made common cause with abolitionists (of Black slavery) and with early social reformers and socialists. As democratic ideas slowly made headway, claims for women’s inclusion and equal rights grew louder and more insistent, ultimately fostering attitudinal changes and proposals for legislative action in many nation-states.

Keywords

womenwomen’s rightsgendermarriagePoullain de la BarreOlympe de GougesMary WollstonecraftSarah GrimkéAngelina GrimkéJeanne Deroin
Type
Chapter
Information
The Cambridge History of Rights , pp. 228 - 259
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2024

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References

Further Reading

Bell, S. G., and Offen, K. (eds.), Women, the Family, and Freedom: The Debate in Documents, 1750–1880, vol. i (Stanford, CA, Stanford University Press, 1983).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Eger, E., Grant, C., Gallchoir, C. Ó, and Warburton, P. (eds.), Women, Writing, and the Public Sphere, 1700–1830 (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2001).Google Scholar
Fauré, C., Democracy without Women: Feminism and the Rise of Liberal Individualism in France (Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 1991).Google Scholar
Fauré, C., (ed.), Political & Historical Encyclopedia of Women (New York, Routledge, 2003).Google Scholar
Green, K., A History of Women’s Political Thought in Europe, 1700–1800 (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2014).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Green, K., “The Rights of Women and the Equal Rights of Men,” Political Theory 48/5 (2020), 1–28.Google Scholar
Hanley, S., “The Family, the State, and the Law in Seventeenth and Eighteenth-Century France: The Political Ideology of Male Right versus an Early Theory of Natural Rights,” Journal of Modern History, 78/2 (2006), 289–332.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hauch, G., “Women’s Spaces in the Men’s Revolution of 1848,” in Dowe, D., Haupt, H.-G., Langewiesche, D., and Sperber, J. (eds.), Europe in 1848: Revolution and Reform (New York, Berghahn Books, 2001), pp. 639–82.Google Scholar
Hunt, L., The French Revolution and Human Rights: A Brief Documentary History (New York, Bedford Books of St. Martin’s Press, 1996).Google Scholar
Knott, S., and Taylor, B. (eds.), Women, Gender, and Enlightenment (Basingstoke, UK, Palgrave Macmillan, 2005).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Norton, M. B., Founding Mothers & Fathers: Gendered Power and the Forming of American Society (New York, Knopf, 1996).Google Scholar
Norton, M. B., Separated by Their Sex: Women in Public and Private in the Colonial Atlantic World (Ithaca, NY, Cornell University Press, 2011).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Offen, K., “Defining Feminism: A Comparative Historical Approach,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 14/1 (1988), 119–57.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Offen, K., European Feminisms, 1700–1950: A Political History (Stanford, CA, Stanford University Press, 2000).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sapiro, V., A Vindication of Political Virtue: The Political Theory of Mary Wollstonecraft (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1992).Google Scholar
Sklar, K. K., and Stewart, J. B. (eds.), Women’s Rights and Transatlantic Antislavery in the Era of Emancipation (New Haven, CT, Yale University Press, 2007).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Smith, H. L., Reason’s Disciples: Seventeenth-Century English Feminists (Urbana, University of Illinois Press, 1982).Google Scholar
Tomaselli, S., Wollstonecraft: Philosophy, Passion, and Politics (Princeton, NJ, Princeton University Press, 2021).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Wells, C. C., Law and Citizenship in Early Modern France (Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994).Google Scholar
Zagarri, R., “The Rights of Man and Woman in Post-Revolutionary America,” William and Mary Quarterly 55/2 (1998), 203–30.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

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