André Léo
“Manifeste - Du droit des femmes”, L’Opinion nationale, 20 July 1868
The following is the manifesto that we have reported regarding women’s rights:
Right, since the Revolution, has changed its basis. Faced with so-called divine right and all its delegations, human right has arisen which abolishes them.
Justice is based on a living, undeniable reality, both complete for the present and progressive for the future: the individual.
Amidst the burdens of the old order, perpetuated by ignorance, despite the resistance of old dogmas, of the old spirit, of false interests and the influence of old morals, the consequences of the new right are produced little by little in minds and in fact.
The American slave, emancipated by the civil war, becomes a citizen.
The workers, united in the demand for their rights, already see the day when they will arrive at the equitable distribution of products, both intellectual and material, to which they contribute so much.
But justice and peace cannot exist in the world until the most serious social inequities have disappeared. This inequity is the servitude of women, deprived by laws and by society of the possession of individual rights. It is time for her to claim her freedom. It is time to take up a question left unanswered since the day Condorcet[1] posed it before the Consistent Assembly, and to take it up again with sufficient righteousness, perseverance and firmness, so that, until the day of remedy, it can no longer be stifled.
Is a woman an individual? A human being?
If she is an individual – and we suppose that her most bizarre adversaries will not deny this – how is it that she is excluded from the conditions recognised as indispensable to the dignity and morality of the human being?
How is the right to own oneself, to act in one’s own name, to develop oneself according to one’s strength and according to one’s faculties, how is this right, which is the very condition of individuality, refused to her?
Why is obedience, abdication of conscience and reason, the first of all immoralities, since it can lead to them all, imposed upon her as a duty?
Why is she deprived of most of the benefits of participating in social responsibilities, in joint activities?
Why is she forced to comply with laws that she neither made nor consented to?
Why is she excluded from the right, recognised for all men, to choose her representatives?
Women, excluded from scientific and training schools, are generally reduced to receiving only elementary education. This exclusion makes her the tool of a baneful education, directed by the enemies of science and progress.
Woman suffers the monstrous inequity of seeing her rights as a mother destroyed before the power of the father.
The wife’s right to property is sacrificed to that of the husband.
Woman’s work, of equal value, is paid half as much as a man’s, and often even [less], this discounted work being refused to her, she has no other recourse than suicide or prostitution.
Held, in short, on all sides in incapacity, in an immoral, unhealthy, unjust, doomed dependence: rich in the corruptions of idleness, poor in those of misery, woman, debased and unhappy, takes revenge for the wrongs of society, by being the most tenacious obstacle to progress and the most active, though the least responsible, agent for the degradation of morals.
The democratic principles we invoke are also invoked by all the oppressed.
We therefore invite all those who demand social equity, those who hate injustice, to support our cause, which is theirs, just as their cause is ours. Right had no divisions; it is one. Any party that claims to limit it to its convenience condemns itself to impotence through illogic. Democracy is not a party; it is a moral law, it is a new faith.
With all and for all, we demand:
Freedom, in the religious, civil, political and moral order; this freedom which is not the dissolution of morals, but their protection; since it alone allows and develops self-respect.
We demand equality. Equality before the law, equality that we say is in vain consecrated for all, since half of humanity is excluded; equality in marriage, as a guarantee of morality, of union and of happiness.
Equality in work, according to the abilities of each person, and for all workingmen, as for all workingwomen, the equitable distribution of goods produced by work.
We demand fraternity, which must, instead of false respect mixed with oppression, become the general law of relationships between men and women, outwith those which constitute marriage.
Moved by the sense of our dignity, we strongly affirm our right to justice and we appeal to all women and men of heart and intelligence to unite with us in our demand and to seek with us the most effective means of enlightening minds on this point, and to place woman in possession of the rights which belong to her as a human person. We marshal for a new declaration of rights, no longer only those of man, but those of humanity and for their social realisation.
The signatories to this declaration are:
Mme Aglaé Bedouch, rue de l’Orme, 25, in Puteaux (Seine); Mme Rosalie Bellard, rue Saint-Denis, 57, in Puteaux; Mme Agathe Colas, rue Godefroy, 19, in Puteaux; Mme Adelaïde Collet, rue Saint-Denis, 15, in Puteaux; Mlle Marguerite Collin, rue Billauli, 29, in Paris; Mme Foucault, rue du Faubourg-du-Temple, 54, in Paris; Mme Marie Gagneur, rue Gaillon, 11, in Paris : Mme Gautier, rue du Faubourg-du-Temple, 54, in Paris; Mme Pauline Grimard, boulevard de Neuilly, 160, in Paris; Mme Aglaé Jarry, rune Saint-Denis, 9, in Puteaux; Mme Kneip, rue du Faubourg-du-Temple, 54, in Paris; Mme Lacombe, rue Guy-la-Brosse, 5, Paris; Mme André Léo, rue Nollet, 90, in Paris-Batignolles; Mme Poirier, rue Saint-Maur, 162, in Paris; Mme Amélie Rabon, rue Saint-Denis, 53, in Puteaux; Mme Clarisse Reclus, rue des Feuillantines, 91, in Paris; Mme Robierre, rue Saint-Maur, 138, in Paris; Mme Maria Vanoverbeke, rue de l’Église, 5, in Puteaux; Mme Gabrielle Weyland, rue de Paris, 89, in Puteaux.
[1] Marie Jean Antoine Nicolas de Caritat, Marquis of Condorcet (1743-1794), known as Nicolas de Condorcet, was a French philosopher who advocated gender equality during the French Revolution. In 1790, he published “Sur l’admission des femmes au droit de cite” (“On the Admission of Women to the Rights of Citizenship”) in which he advocated women's suffrage in the new Republic as well as the enlargement of basic political and social rights to include women. (Translator)