1791: when it was no longer enough to say “women are born free and have equal rights to men”. A critical reading of the idea of equality

Abstract

The article attempts to focus on the idea of “equality” and how it was seen by women in the 17th century through an analysis of the works and the lives of two female figures emblematic of that period: the French Olympe de Gouges, author of the “Declaration des droits de la femme et de la citoyenne” on the model of the “Declaration des Droits de l’Homme”, and the English thinker Mary Wollstonecraft. What comes out clearly is that women, along with all “weaker” individuals, have never gone beyond a formal or material equality, in absence of a concept of equality as a universal element that, from birth, confers humanity to all individuals without denying diversity, evolution and transformation of a personal nature. Their biographies and the relationships pertaining to their private sphere, rather than their works, reveal us best the struggles they had undertaken.