France's support for independence from the United States, constant clashes with the English, and several years of poor harvests left the royal coffers almost empty. The French monarch, Louis XVI, took the quickest and easiest way:more taxes. This new measure had to be approved by the States General . So, on June 17, 1789, he convened the Estates General with the sole objective of creating new taxes and getting out of bankruptcy. But the estates represented in the States (nobility, clergy and people) had other issues to deal with:they claimed economic and social reforms, and the change from an absolutist monarchy to a constitutional monarchy. Things were getting ugly for the king. On July 9, the three estates came together, to have more strength, and the Constituent Assembly was constituted. . The fuse that lit the French Revolution It was the taking of the Bastille fortress on July 14.
On August 26, 1789, the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen was promulgated. that came to collect and develop the motto of the French Revolution (Liberté, égalité, fraternité) and that, later, would inspire other texts such as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (December 10, 1948).
From my humble point of view, this Declaration refers to human rights in general (men and women) since as many as others participated in said Revolution. I think there was no need to specify men and women, but…
Olympe de Gouges he must not have understood it as I did, because in 1791 he drafted the Declaration of the Rights of Woman and of the Female Citizen . It is one of the first historical documents that proposes female emancipation in the sense of equal rights or the juridical and legal equality of women in relation to men. Although his approaches are totally defensible, praiseworthy and, for the time, very brave, he believed that he had a certain feminist whiff close to hembrismo (the same as machismo but in reverse). It is a text in which he never speaks of rights in general, without specifying the sexes, but in hammering away at women. The simple fact of speaking of "man-woman" already establishes a differentiation between the two.
Before they call me a sexist, I want to make it clear that, for me, men and women are equal (not physically, thank God). Defendable feminism, as I understand it, is the one that fights for equality between men and women, and not the one that claims the superiority of women over men (hembrism) nor the one that differentiates them. In this we should learn from Mandela (I recommend the film Invictus), a man who after years of injustice regains freedom and understands that South African society can only be built on the basis of forgiveness and equality. I'm sorry that women have had to go through all these injustices, but they should be able to forgive, look forward and fight together for equality.
I leave you the text of the preamble of the Declaration of the Rights of Women and Citizens:
The mothers, daughters, sisters, representatives of the nation, ask that they be constituted into a national assembly. Considering that ignorance, forgetfulness or contempt for women's rights are the only causes of public ills and government corruption, they have resolved to expose in a solemn declaration, the natural, inalienable and sacred rights of the woman so that this declaration, constantly present to all members of the social body, constantly reminds them of their rights and duties, so that the acts of women's power and those of men's power can be, in all moment, compared to the objective of any political institution and are more respected by it, so that the claims of the citizens, based from now on on simple and indisputable principles, are always directed to the maintenance of the constitution, of the good customs and happiness of all (up to here, embroiders it)
Consequently, the superior sex in both beauty and courage, in maternal suffering, recognizes and declares, in the presence and under the auspices of the Supreme Being, the following Rights of Women and Citizens ( shit in this paragraph)