Modern feminism grew out of the age of revolutions. When Americans and French declared the rights of “man,” some women, and some men, asked why those rights stopped at half of humanity.

Olympe de Gouges

In 1791 the French playwright Olympe de Gouges published the Declaration of the Rights of Woman and of the Female Citizen, rewriting the revolution's 1789 declaration article by article. Its first article declares that woman is born free and remains equal to man in rights. She was executed in 1793 during the Terror, for her political writings against the radical faction then in power.

Mary Wollstonecraft

The English writer Mary Wollstonecraft (1759 to 1797) published A Vindication of the Rights of Woman in 1792, dedicated to the French statesman Talleyrand, who had proposed only limited schooling for girls. Her central argument was that women appeared less rational than men because they were denied a real education, not because of their nature. Raised to please and to value appearance, they were then blamed for being frivolous. Educate girls as reasoning beings, she argued, and they would become better citizens, wiser mothers and true companions to their husbands. Of women she wrote: “I do not wish them to have power over men; but over themselves.”

Seneca Falls, 1848

Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott met in London in 1840 at the World Anti-Slavery Convention, where women delegates were not allowed to take part on the floor. In July 1848 they helped organize a women's rights convention in Seneca Falls, New York. Its Declaration of Sentiments, modeled on the Declaration of Independence, announced: “We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men and women are created equal.” It listed grievances about property, wages, divorce, education and the church. About a hundred people signed it, 68 women and 32 men. The most controversial resolution was the demand for the vote; it passed narrowly after the abolitionist Frederick Douglass spoke for it.

Sojourner Truth

Sojourner Truth (around 1797 to 1883) was born into slavery in New York State, where her first language was Dutch, and gained her freedom in the 1820s. In 1851 she spoke at a women's rights convention in Akron, Ohio. An account published that year reports her saying, “I have as much muscle as any man, and can do as much work as any man.” She used her own life to show that ideals of delicate womanhood ignored enslaved and working women. The famous version with the refrain “Ain't I a Woman?” was published twelve years later, in 1863, and differs from the earliest report, including by giving her a Southern dialect she did not speak.

Mill and Harriet Taylor

In English law, a married woman's legal identity was largely absorbed into her husband's, a doctrine called coverture. The jurist William Blackstone summed it up in 1765: “the husband and wife are one person in law.” Harriet Taylor Mill challenged this order in “The Enfranchisement of Women” (1851). After her death in 1858, her husband John Stuart Mill published The Subjection of Women (1869), crediting her and her daughter Helen Taylor with many of its ideas.

Mill argued that the legal subordination of one sex to the other was wrong in itself and a major obstacle to human progress. He also argued that no one could know women's true nature, because it had always been formed under constraint: “What is now called the nature of women is an eminently artificial thing.” As a member of Parliament, Mill proposed in 1867 to replace the word “man” with “person” in the Reform Act, which would have let women vote. The amendment was defeated, 196 to 73.

Worked example: reading the Declaration of Sentiments

The organizers at Seneca Falls made a shrewd choice: instead of writing a new kind of document, they rewrote the most famous text in American politics. Compare the opening lines.

The Declaration of Independence (1776) says that “all men are created equal.” The Declaration of Sentiments (1848) says that “all men and women are created equal.” Where Jefferson listed the wrongs of King George, the women listed the wrongs of “man” toward woman. Among them:

• He has never permitted her to exercise her right to the vote.
• He has made her, if married, “in the eye of the law, civilly dead”: she could not own property or keep her wages.
• He has framed divorce and custody laws without regard to her happiness.
• He has closed most profitable jobs to her and denied her a thorough education, with colleges closed against her.
• He has kept her out of the ministry and from public participation in most churches.

Why did this strategy work? First, it put opponents in an awkward position: to reject the women's claims, they had to explain why the nation's founding principles did not apply to half its people. Second, it linked the women's cause to a story Americans already told about themselves, so the demand sounded patriotic rather than foreign. Third, the list format made grievances concrete and checkable.

The strategy also had limits. The document spoke mainly for white women of property and education, and it said nothing about enslaved women, whose wrongs were of a different order. Sojourner Truth's appearance three years later in Akron began to press that gap.