Sources for a History of Women’s Rights: Olympe de Gouges and the Politicization of Literature

Never has historiographic research been so characterized by silence and forgetting as it has in the case of the history of the rights of women. Investigating the history of the rights of women means tackling a double silence: the silence of historiography, and the silence of the laws and of public debate. But the movements for the rights of women in the 19th and 20th centuries have their roots, as Lynn Hunt has shown, precisely in the French Revolution. On the long wave of the politicization of literature in the 18th century, the novels and plays of the revolutionary decade preserve the traces of a culture of emancipation which had to confront a historical practice of exclusion—when the false universal represented by the homme as the bearer of rights was challenged by Olympe de Gouges.