AMONG THE BOOKS OF MY childhood were many that belonged to a series called La Biblioteca Azul, the Blue Library. In the Blue Library were Spanish translations of the Just William stories and several Jules Verne novels, as well as Hector Malot’s Nobody’s Boy, which caused me inexplicable terror. My cousin had the complete companion series, La Biblioteca Rosa, the Pink Library, and she bought every newly published volume month after month with indiscriminate collector’s pride. It was an unspoken rule that I, as a boy, could only have access to the titles in the Blue Library, and that she, as a girl, was permitted only those of the Pink. I sometimes envied her a title in her collection—Anne of Green Gables or the stories of the comtesse de Ségur — but I knew that if I wanted to read them, I would have to find other editions, not segregated by color.
As so many of the rules that govern our childhood, the distinction between what is appropriate for boys and what is appropriate for girls erects invisible but adamantine barriers between the sexes. Colors, objects, toys, sports were identified according to this unquestioned apartheid that told you who you were according to what you were not. On the other side of the divide lay a gender-defined territory in which the natives did other things, had another language, enjoyed different rights and suffered specific prohibitions. It was an axiom that one side could not understand the other. “She’s a girl” or “He’s a boy” was sufficient explanation for a certain behavior.
Literature, as usual, helped me subvert the regulations. Reading The Coral Island in the Blue Library, I felt repulsed by Ralph Rover’s cloying obsequiousness and his absurd talent for peeling coconuts as if they were apples. But reading Heidi (in the neutral Rainbow Classics edition), I knew that she and I had many adventurous traits in common, and I cheered when she bravely stole soft rolls to give to her toothless grandfather. In my readings I changed gender with the fluidity of a parrotfish.
Imposed identities breed inequality. Instead of seeing our personalities and bodies as positive features of our singular identities, we are taught to see them as traits that oppose us to the identity of the unknowable, mysterious foreigner, living outside our fortified city walls. From that first negative teaching spring all the others, which end up building a vast shadow mirror of everything that we’ve been taught we’re not. In my early childhood, I wasn’t aware of anything being alien, lying outside my world; later, I was aware of little else. Instead of learning that I was a unique part of a universal whole, I became convinced that I was a separate entity and that everyone else was different from the solitary creature that answered to my name.
Men are afraid that women will laugh at them.
Women are afraid that men will kill them.
—MARGARET ATWOOD
Many times in our histories we have proudly declared that each single individual is part of humanity as a whole. And every time this noble proposition has been uttered, we have opposed it, amended it, sought exceptions to it, and in the end defeated it, until such time when it is pronounced again. Then, once more, we allow the notion of an egalitarian society to resurface briefly, and once again let it sink.
For Plato, in the fifth century B.C.E., social equality meant equal rights for male citizens, whose number was limited. Foreigners, women, and slaves were excluded from this privileged circle. In The Republic, Socrates proposes to discover the meaning of true justice (or rather, the definition of a truly just man) through a discussion of what is a just society.
Like all of Plato’s dialogues, The Republic is a rambling conversation with no satisfactory beginning and no obvious conclusion, uncovering on the way new forms to old questions and at times inklings of an answer. In particular, what is remarkable in The Republic is its lack of emphasis. Socrates leads the dialogue from one attempt at definition to the next, but none seems definitive to the reader. The Republic reads as a sequence of suggestions, sketches, preparations for a discovery that is ultimately never made. When the aggressive Sophist Thrasymachus declares that justice is nothing but “a generous innocence” and injustice a matter of “discretion,” we know he isn’t right, but Socrates’ interrogation will not lead to the incontrovertible proof of Thrasymachus’s error: it will lead to a discussion concerning different societies and the merits or demerits of their governments, just and unjust.1
According to Socrates, justice must be included in the class of things “that, if one wishes to be happy, one must love as much for their own sake as for what from them may result.” But how is that happiness to be defined? What does it mean to love something for its own sake? What results from that as yet undefined justice? Socrates (or Plato) does not want us to take the time to consider these singular questions: it is the conversational flow of thought that interests him. And so, before discussing what is a just or unjust man, and consequently what is justice, Socrates proposes to investigate the very concept of a just or unjust society (a city or polis). “Are we not saying that there exists a justice proper to a particular man, and yet another, as I believe, proper to an entire city?”2 Apparently seeking to define justice, Plato’s dialogue leads farther and farther away from that ineffable goal, and instead of a straight path from question to answer, The Republic proposes a voyage constantly delayed, whose very digressions and pauses grant the reader a mysterious intellectual pleasure.
Faced with The Republic’s open questions, what hints of an answer can we offer? If every form of government is somehow nefarious, if no society can boast of being ethically sound and morally fair, if politics is condemned as an infamous activity, if every collective enterprise threatens to crumble into individual villainies and betrayals what hope do we have of living together more or less peacefully, profiting from mutual collaboration and looking after one another? Thrasymachus’s pronouncements on the virtues of injustice, however absurd they may seem to the reader, have been repeated throughout the centuries by the exploiters of the social system, whatever that system might be. These were the arguments of the feudal landlords, of the slave traders and their clients, of tyrants and dictators, of the financiers responsible for the recurrent economic crises. The “virtues of egotism” proclaimed by the conservatives, the privatization of public goods and services defended by the multinationals, the benefits of unrestrained capitalism promoted by bankers are different ways of translating Thrasymachus’s dictum that “what is just is merely what is convenient for the strongest.”3
Thrasymachus’s ironic conclusions are based on a number of assumptions, principally the idea that what might be perceived as unjust is in fact the consequence of a natural law. Slavery was justified by declaring that the vanquished did not deserve the privileges of the victors or that a different race was inferior; misogyny was justified by extolling the virtues of patriarchy and defining the power and roles assigned to each of the sexes; homophobia was justified by inventing standards of “normal” sexual conduct for men and women. In each of these cases, a vocabulary of symbols and metaphors accompanied the establishment of these hierarchies, so that women, for instance, were assigned the passive role (thereby denigrating or condescendingly praising their domestic activities, a fallacy Virginia Woolf understood when she said that a woman’s first task was “to kill the angel in the house”) and men the active one (exalting the violence of wars and other social competitions). Although this was not a universal idea—Oedipus, for instance, in Sophocles’ Oedipus at Colonus, speaks of the difference of the roles of men and women in Greece and Egypt: “For in that country [Egypt] the men sit within doors / working at the loom, while the wives go out / to get the daily bread”—it is from such ingrained symbolic roles that the association of women with speech and men with action derives. Also their perceived opposition, so that in the Iliad the fighting stops only when the women speak.4
Traditionally however, the speech of women must remain private; public speech is deemed the prerogative of men. In the Odyssey, Telemachus tells his mother, Penelope, when she addresses an impertinent bard in public, that as far as speech is concerned, “men will see to that.” But at times, the private and the public speech of women in ancient Greece overlapped. In Delphi, the Sibyl spoke seated astride a tripod, taking the vapors of Apollo’s prophetic spirit into her vagina, thus making, as the classicist Mary Beard suggests, an explicit connection between the “the mouth that eats and speaks” and the “mouth” of her sexual organs.5
Even the identity of a society or city is claimed by patriarchal authority. The legend of the naming of Athens is a fair example. Saint Augustine, citing the authority of the Roman historian Marcus Terentius Varro, retells the story. An olive tree and a water fountain sprang suddenly on the site of the future city of Athens.
These prodigies moved the king Cecrops to send to the Delphic Apollo to inquire what they meant and what he should do. He answered that the olive signified Minerva [or Athena], the water Neptune [or Poseidon], and that the citizens had it in their power to name their city as they chose, after either of these two gods whose signs these were. On receiving this oracle, Cecrops convoked all the citizens of either sex to give their vote, for it was then the custom in those parts for the women also to take part in public deliberations. When the multitude was consulted, the men gave their votes for Neptune, the women for Minerva; and as the women had a majority of one, Minerva conquered. Then Neptune, being enraged, laid waste the lands of the Athenians, by casting up the waves of the sea; for the demons have no difficulty in scattering any waters more widely. The same authority said, that to appease his wrath the women should be visited by the Athenians with the three-fold punishment— that they should no longer have any vote; that none of their children should be named after their mothers; and that no one should call them Athenians. Thus that city, the mother and nurse of liberal doctrines, and of so many and so great philosophers, than whom Greece had nothing more famous and noble, by the mockery of demons about the strife of their gods, a male and female, and from the victory of the female one through the women, received the name of Athens; and, on being damaged by the vanquished god, was compelled to punish the very victory of the victors, fearing the waters of Neptune more than the arms of Minerva. For in the women who were thus punished, Minerva, who had conquered, was conquered too, and could not even help her voters so far that, although the right of voting was henceforth lost, and the mothers could not give their names to the children, they might at least be allowed to be called Athenians, and to merit the name of that goddess whom they had made victorious over a male god by giving her their votes. What and how much could be said about this, if we had not to hasten to other things in our discourse, is obvious.
Perhaps “what and how much could said about this” is not as obvious as all that. Gerda Lerner, in an important essay on the origins of patriarchy, argued that what she calls “the enslavement of women” preceded the formation of classes and class oppression by converting, as early as the second millennium B.C.E. in Mesopotamia, the reproductive and sexual capacities of women into commodities. This represented, in her judgment, “the first accumulation of private property.” A social contract was established between men and women in which economic support and physical protection were provided by the men and the sexual services and domestic care by the women. Throughout history, though notions of sexual identity vary in the flow of social changes, the contract persisted, and in order to assert the assumption of its validity, commencement stories needed to be told that explained the divine origin of the hierarchical difference between the sexes, as in the legend of the origins of Athens, the tale of Pandora, and the fable of Eve.6
Simone de Beauvoir pointed out the danger of reading in patriarchal myths only the sections that can be conveniently reinterpreted from a feminist point of view. And yet reinterpretations and retellings, though they can go in opposite directions, can sometimes be of use in helping us reimagine new identities and new contracts. For example, in Dante’s misogynist thirteenth century, certain gaps and tears in the social fabric allowed new versions of the fundamental stories to be imagined—stories that if they did not succeed in effectively subverting the patriarchal norms at least attempted to displace them into different settings that altered their meaning. For Dante, always holding in tension the dictates of Christian theology and his own private ethical notions, the conundrum of how to achieve equal justice is always present, and, within the framework of Christian dogma it concerns all individuals, male and female. Through the voice of Beatrice and other characters, female and male, Dante expresses the belief that the capacity for reason, logical advancement, and enlightenment exists in all, and the different measures of that capacity are determined by grace, not the sex of the individual. Beatrice explains to him:
In the system of which I speak, by different means,
all kinds of things tend to be drawn
in larger or smaller measure towards their essence;
wherein they move to various harbors
on the great sea of being, and each one
bearing the instinct that was bestowed upon it.7
Though in Dante’s world the different positions assigned to individuals (peasant or queen, pope or warrior, wife or husband) entail particular rights and obligations to be undertaken or refused according to each person’s free will, men and women live under the same moral code and must abide by it or suffer the consequences. The vast questions of human life and the awareness that much of what we want to know is beyond our horizon are shared by women and men alike.
The minor, fleeting, loving soul who calls herself Pia, whom Dante meets in the Purgatory of the late repentant, says, in one of her seven frugal lines, “Siena made me, Maremma unmade me.” Historians have argued, with very little to go on, that Pia was perhaps a certain Sapia, murdered by her husband, who had her thrown out of a window, either from jealousy or because he wanted to marry another woman. She speaks to Dante, begging to be remembered, but only after tenderly noting that Dante will be weary after his journey, and that he will need to rest. In Pia’s story, what matters is not that she is a woman wronged by a man, but that hers is a compassionate soul seeking to restore a certain balance to a past act of injustice.8
This equality of human suffering is made explicit many times in the Commedia. In the second circle of Hell, confronted with the fate of the souls punished for excess of love or misplaced love (Cleopatra and Helen, Achilles and Tristan), Dante feels such pangs of pity that he almost faints. Then, out of the whirlwind of the lustful, Francesca speaks both for herself and for her condemned lover, Paolo, with whom she is imprisoned for all eternity, and tells Dante how they fell in love with one another while reading the tale of Lancelot and Guinevere. Hearing the confession, Dante is overcome by the same pity he has experienced earlier, but this time it is so strong that he feels as if he were dying: “And I fell as a dead body falls.” Dante’s growing pitiful sorrow for the suffering of others turns into compassion (com-passion, or shared passion or feeling), reminding him that he himself has been guilty of the same sin as these lovers. As Dante knew, literature is the most efficient instrument for learning compassion, because it helps the reader take part in the emotions of the characters. The secret love of Lancelot and Guinevere in an old Arthurian romance revealed the love that Francesca and Paolo did not yet know they were feeling; Paolo and Francesca’s love revealed to Dante the memory of his old loves. The reader of the Commedia is the next mirror in this amorous corridor.9
One of the most complex ethical dilemmas presented in the Commedia is the question of free will in the case of a person forced to suffer or commit an infamous act. At what point does a victim become the accomplice of the victimizer? When does resistance cease and acquiescence start? What are the limits of our own choices and decisions? In Paradise, Dante meets the souls of two women who have been forced by men to break their religious vows. Piccarda, the sister of Dante’s friend Forese Donati, is the first soul he encounters in the Heaven of the Moon, and the only one he recognizes unaided (in Heaven, souls acquire an extraterrestrial beauty that changes the appearance they had when alive). Piccarda was forcibly removed from her convent by another of her siblings, Corso Donati, to be married into a powerful Florentine family that could assist Corso in his political career. Piccarda died shortly afterwards, and is now in the lowest of heavens. The second soul is that of Constanza, the grandmother of Manfred, a rebel leader whom Dante met in Purgatory, who will be discussed in Chapter 12, below. She was forced to marry the Holy Roman Emperor Henry VI, after being removed, like Piccarda, from her convent, according to a legend that Dante takes for fact. Piccarda, however, claims that though Constanza was forced to abandon her nun’s veil, “she was never freed from the veil of her heart,” a willed act that has assured her a place in Paradise. The canto ends with the singing of the Ave Maria, the hymn in praise of Mary, the fundamental Christian symbol of constancy in the heart. With the spiritual weight of her words, Piccarda vanishes, “as something heavy into deep waters.”10
As these encounters in the Commedia suggest, the conviction that the human will can be stronger than the circumstances to which it is subjected enhances the belief in human freedom and equality. Oppression is always an oppression through symbols as well as through material actions, and every revolution is a struggle to gain control over those symbols. “The oppressed group,” says Lerner, “while it shares in and partakes of the leading symbols controlled by the dominant, also develops its own symbols. These become, in time of revolutionary change, important forces in the creation of alternatives.”11
Symbolically, Constanza’s and Piccarda’s ordeals are conflicts between the female will and the will of the dominant men, and in the dogmatic frame within which the Commedia inscribes itself they reflect the larger symbol of the male Trinity. In this symbolic context, however, Dante sets up a personal female trinity that lends power to Piccarda’s and Constanza’s configurations. The singing of the Ave Maria, the words with which the angel Gabriel greets Mary to announce that she is the bearer of the Messiah in the Gospel of Luke (1:28), places the female divine presence at the cusp of the discussion on free will, the power that makes all human beings equal. Dante, the male protagonist, is saved through the intercession of three female figures: the Virgin Mary “who takes pity / on this [Dante’s] impediment”; Saint Lucy, instructed by Mary to help “your faithful one” (faithful because Dante is devoted to Saint Lucy); and Beatrice, whom Lucy seeks out, and asks, “Why don’t you rescue one who loved you so?”12 The saving vision will be granted to Dante by God the Father, by Christ, and by the Holy Spirit, but his salvation itself is devised by the three holy women.
In our time, the symbolic separation of genders is effected not through theological dogma but through the daily instruments of social interaction. Before audiovisual games and activated screens that respond aloud to a child’s questions, there were music boxes and talking dolls, dogs that barked, and clowns that giggled. Pull a cord, turn a key, and the toy came to life with sounds that carry meaning. The first talking dolls said things like “Hello,” “Play with me,” and “I love you.” Later, toy soldiers too were given their voice: “Fight!” “You’re brave!” “Attack!” Unsurprisingly, toys were made to speak with conventional tags that corresponded implicitly to what was deemed proper for either a boy or a girl. (Sometime in the 1980s, a group of feminist activists purchased a number of talking Barbie dolls and G.I. Joes, exchanged their sound boxes, and returned them to the store. Customers who bought the doctored toys found that when their children activated the doll’s voices, G.I. Joe would whine in girlish tones, “I want to go shopping!” while Barbie growled ferociously, “Kill! Kill! Kill!”)13
These symbolic representations of gender don’t grant equality to the sexes. In most of our societies, as is apparent in the defining symbolic language, only the dominant, male sex has existential reality. Grammar confirms this. In French and Spanish, for example, in a sentence where the plural subject is composed of masculine and feminine elements, the masculine is always privileged. “If you speak of a hundred women and one pig,” the poet Nicole Brossard has remarked, “the pig has the upper hand.”14
Female identity, outside the roles assigned by society to women, lacks a vocabulary, even in momentous historical events which supposedly redefine “humanity as a whole.” A notorious example of this can be found in some of the fundamental texts of the French Revolution.
The revolutionaries by and large believed that in spite of the particular cultural and political characteristics of every society, all human beings have the same fundamental needs. Taking as their premise the notion of universal “natural rights” described by Jean-Jacques Rousseau in his Discourse on Inequality, they sought to define these rights in the context of the new society. The duties of man, Rousseau had argued, are not dictated by reason alone, but by self-preservation and compassion for his fellow men. Consequently, a society, composed by men with equal duties and rights, had the right to choose its own form of government and its own system of laws. In this context, individual freedom is not based on tradition or historical hierarchies but on the law of nature: man was free because he was human. The French Revolution, declared Robespierre, “defends the cause of humanity.” The particulars of this defense were set down in the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen.15
The Declaration was a document long in the making. The original version, consisting of seventeen articles that were adopted by the National Assembly in August 1789, became a preamble to the Constitution of 1791. Later, with some alterations and abbreviated as the Declaration of the Rights of Man, it was used as the preamble to the Constitution of 1793, and later still, expanded as the Declaration of the Rights and Duties of Man and the Citizen, to that of 1795. The Declaration (like the Revolution itself) had “only one principle: that of reforming abuses. But as everything in this dominion was an abuse, it resulted from it that everything was changed.”16
The discussions leading up to its formulation were long and complex. Two sides confronted each other in the debate: the counterrevolutionaries who feared the destabilization of the political, social, and moral order and the ideologues, led by the philosophers who defended a utilitarian theory of society. Some thirty “declarations” were discussed preceding the adoption in 1789, most of them keyed to the prevention of more urban and rural violence, and a new “plague of despotism.” The majority of the group agreed with the leader of the French Protestants, Jean-Paul Rabaut Saint-Etienne, that the language of the Declaration should be of “such lucidity, veracity and directness in its principles . . . that everyone should be able to grasp and understand them, that they might become a children’s alphabet taught in schools.”17
The most eloquent of the debaters was the abbé Sieyès. All men, argued Sieyès, are subject to needs and therefore constantly desire comfort and well-being. When in nature, men succeed through their intelligence in dominating the natural world for their benefit. But when they are in a social setting, their happiness depends on whether their fellow citizens are seen as means or obstacles. Relations between individuals, therefore, can take the form of war or of reciprocal utility. The former Sieyès deemed illegitimate because it depended on the power of the strong over the weak. The latter, instead, led to cooperation between all citizens and transformed social obligations from a sacrifice to an advantage. Consequently, the first right of an individual must be “ownership of his person.” According to Sieyès, “every citizen has the right to remain, to go, to think, to write, to print, to publish, to work, to produce, to protect, to transport, to exchange, and to consume.” The only limitation to these rights was infringement on the rights of others.18
But the universality of these rights was undoubtedly not universal. The first distinction established in the Declaration, between French citizens deserving civil rights and others who did not, was between the “active” and “passive” male members of society. The Constitution of 1791 defined “active citizens” as all men over the age of twenty-five who possessed independent means (they could not be in domestic service). Property, represented by land, money, and social condition, was deemed the defining feature of citizenship. After 1792 a citizen was defined as a man over twenty-one who earned his living, and owning property was no longer a requisite. But though the distinctions between rich and poor, aristocrats and plebeians were seemingly abandoned, the difference between the sexes was deemed natural and persisted. The chief procurator of the Commune of Paris, Pierre-Gaspard Chaumette, arguing against the right of women to take on a political role, put the question as follows: “Since when is it permitted to give up one’s sex? Since when is it decent to see women abandon the pious cares of their households, the cribs of their children, to come to public places and take part in harangues in the galleries or at the bar of the Senate? Is it to men that Nature entrusted domestic cares? Has she given us breasts to feed our children?” To which the marquis de Condorcet, mathematician and philosopher, responded: “Why would beings exposed to pregnancies and temporary indispositions be unable to enjoy the rights that no one has ever imagined to deprive others that suffer from gout every winter and fall easily prey to colds?”19
The Revolution granted women certain rights, allowing them to divorce and to administer some of the conjugal property, but these rights were later restricted under Napoleon and revoked by the Bourbons. The Convention of 1893 declared that “children, insane individuals, women, and those condemned to degrading penalties” would not be considered citizens of France.20 According to the revolutionaries, natural rights did not imply political rights. But there were those who disagreed. Two years after the original Declaration, in 1791, a forty-three-year-old playwright, Olympe de Gouges, published Declaration of the Rights of Woman and of the Female Citizen to complete what she saw as a faulty and unfair founding document.
Olympe de Gouges was born in Montauban in 1748. To satisfy convention, on her birth certificate her father appears as Pierre Gouze, butcher of Montauban, but she was assumed to be the illegitimate daughter of a mediocre man of letters, the marquis Le Franc de Pompignan, and Anne-Olympe Mouisset. All her life she would idealize the absent marquis, to whom she attributed an “immortal talent.” Her contemporaries did not share her high opinion of Pompignan: the aristocratic disdain he showed towards his social inferiors and his indifferent literary style earned him the mockery of Voltaire, who said of Pompignan’s Sacred Poems that they merited the epithet because “no one would dare touch them.”21
She was married at sixteen to a much older man (“whom I didn’t love, and who was neither rich nor nobly born”), who died when she was twenty. Refusing to be called the Widow Aubry after her husband’s death, as custom dictated, she invented for herself a name made up of one of her mother’s Christian names and a variation on her surname. She aspired to be a playwright, but since she was illiterate, like most women of her time who were not brought up in privileged circles, she first had to teach herself to read and write. In 1870, she left Montauban for Paris. She was thirty-two years old.22
Almost everyone tried to discourage her from pursuing a writing career. Her father, the old marquis, while refusing to acknowledge her as his daughter, also tried to dissuade her from becoming a playwright. In a letter addressed to her shortly before his death, Pompignan had this to say: “If persons of your sex become logical and profound in your writings, what will we become, we men, who are today so shallow and insubstantial? Farewell the superiority of which we were so proud! Women will dictate to us. . . . Women may be allowed to write, but they are forbidden, for the sake of a happy world, to undertake the task with any pretensions.” Nonetheless, she persisted, and wrote over thirty plays, many now lost, but several of which were performed by the Comédie française. So convinced was she of her dramatic talents, boasting that she could write a full-length play in five days, that she challenged the most successful playwright of the day, Pierre Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais, author of The Marriage of Figaro, to a writing duel, because he had said that the Comédie française should not perform plays written by women. If Gouges won, she promised to use the money as a dowry to enable six young women to marry. Beaumarchais did not bother to reply.23
In her plays, but also in her political tracts, Olympe de Gouges fought for that elusive universal equality vaunted by the revolutionaries. She pleaded for the rights of women as well as men, and also against slavery, arguing that the prejudices that allowed blacks to be bought and sold were only the justifications of greedy white merchants. Slavery was finally abolished by a decree of the Revolutionary Assembly on 4 February 1794; almost fifteen years later, an honor roll was compiled of the “Courageous Men Who Argued or Labored for the Abolition of the Slave Trade.” Olympe de Gouges was the only woman listed.24
Unlike other revolutionary women such as the ardent Girondin Madame Roland, Gouges maintained that women should have a political voice and be given a place in the Assembly. Whereas Madame Roland had meekly declared, “We don’t want another empire than that governed by our hearts, and another throne than that within your hearts,” Gouges had argued, “Women have the right to mount the scaffold; they should also have the right to mount the tribune.” The nineteenth-century historian Jules Michelet, who recorded these words, at the same time dismissed Gouges as a “hysterical” woman who changed her political position according to her mood: “She was a revolutionary in July 1789, she became a royalist on 6 October after seeing the king made prisoner in Paris. Having then turned republican in June ’91, under the impression that Louis XVI had fled and was guilty of treason, she bestowed him again to her favor when he was taken to court.”25
The Declaration of the Rights of Woman and the Female Citizen counters Michelet’s misogynistic judgment. It is a document that not only amends and supplements its male counterpart; it adds to the civic liberties listed in the Declaration of the Rights of Man the rights of all individuals, proposing, among other things, the recognition of illegitimate children, legal aid for unwed mothers, the right to demand recognition from the biological father, the payment of alimony in case of divorce, and the replacement of marriage vows with a “social contract” that legally recognizes the status of both married and unmarried couples, a forerunner of today’s contracts of civil union. Gouges’s proposal that all children, whether legitimate or not, be given the right to inherit, had to wait until 1975 to be made a law in France. Perhaps for reasons of diplomacy, Gouges dedicated her Declaration of the Rights of Woman and the Female Citizen to Queen Marie Antoinette. It was not a wise decision.
Olympe de Gouges was neither a brilliant playwright nor a profound political theorist; she was a woman who was concerned about a declaration of social equality that was visibly disproved by the facts. To the rules and regulations devised by the lawmakers of the Revolution, Gouges brought her emotional criticism, pointing out their deficiencies and arguing not from a judicial point of view but from a political one, as a conscientious, feeling individual.
In her pamphlets and her speeches, she unwisely expressed sympathy towards the Girondins, a party made up of different factions that had sought the end of the monarchy but resisted the ever-growing violence of the Revolution and whose only common stand was their opposition to the Jacobins in power, who supported a centralized government. To punish her, the Jacobins ordered that she be stripped and flogged in public. (This was a common procedure against rebellious women: at about the same time, Théroigne de Méricourt, another revolutionary, was publically whipped and then locked in the insane asylum of La Salpêtrière, where she died ten years later, having lost her mind because of the brutal treatment she received.) One afternoon, Gouges was attacked in the street as she was coming out of a shop, and her assailant, tearing her dress and grabbing her by the hair, cried out to the mob: “Twenty-four sols for the head of Madame de Gouges. Who’ll bid?” To which she calmly replied, “My friend, I bid thirty and I claim preference.” She was released amid the laughter of the crowd.26
Eventually her Girondin sympathies led to her arrest, under the pretext of having printed a subversive poster that appeared in her name. In the fierce summer of 1793, she was detained on the third floor of the infamous Mairie, close to the Palais de Justice. She had a wound in her leg, was running a fever, and had to lie in a lice-infested room for a fortnight, during which time she managed to write a number of letters arguing her case and pleading for mercy, constantly watched over by a gendarme. After her trial, where she was given no real chance to defend herself, she was transferred to other prisons, and finally to the Conciergerie, to the cell reserved for women condemned to death. As a last resort, she claimed to be pregnant because pregnant women were excepted from the guillotine. Her claim was rejected, and the execution was announced for the morning of 3 November; because it was raining, it was postponed until the afternoon. One of the many anonymous witnesses of her death said later that she had died “calm and serene,” a victim of Jacobin ambition and of her intention “to denounce the villains.”27
Olympe de Gouges’s determination to seek equality for all was not mere self-serving. Injustice is, or should be, a universal concern, and the gender of those who fight for it should not be a consideration in the argument. “We are ministers of God on earth,” says Don Quixote, “and arms through which His justice is executed.”28 Olympe de Gouges would have agreed. Inequality may be principally caused by the efforts of one sex to defend its social or political power, but equality is not a question of gender.
Almost all of us, even those of us who commit unforgiveable atrocities, know, like Socrates and Don Quixote and Gouges and Dante, what justice and equality are, and what they are not. What obviously we don’t know is how to act justly on every occasion, individually or collectively, so that we are all treated with justice and equality as citizens and as persons in the society we call ours. Something in each of us draws us toward seeking material and self-satisfying benefits without consideration for our neighbors; an opposite force draws us to the subtler benefits of what we can offer, share, render useful to our community. Something tells us that though ambition for riches, power, and fame can be a strong drive, experience of ourselves and of the world will end up proving that in itself such an ambition is worthless.
In The Republic’s final pages, Socrates says that when the soul of Odysseus was asked to choose a new life after his death, “leaving aside his ambition with the memory of his previous labors,” from all the possible heroic and magnificent lives at his disposal, the legendary adventurer chose the life of “a common and unencumbered man,” and “he chose it joyfully.”29 It is possible that this was Odysseus’s first true act of justice.
