De Gouges Analysis

Throughout this reading, De Gouges never shows her true identity of herself being a woman. She covers it up so men don’t just assume that the writing is biased and shouldn’t be taken seriously just because a woman wrote it. The goal of the overall piece of work is to influence the society as a whole, which means both men and women must buy into this idea of women being “equal” (De Gouges 176). In her writing, De Gouges seems to question how men have been treating women and if they have the right to do this just because of their gender. For example, De Gouges says, “Man, are you capable of being just” (De Gouges 176). She doesn’t necessarily explicitly say that men have mistreated women in this paragraph, but she questions them and brings up
It appears that De Gouges is trying to show the Queen that they are both in the same position since they are women. De Gouges wants the Queen to see that since all women are missing out on certain rights such as property, liberty, security, and resistance to oppression, they must all come together and start a “revolution” (De Gouges 176). This topic of revolution comes up because men in France recently were in a revolution trying to change the way they were being ruled, so by presenting this idea of women beginning a revolution, De Gouges is trying to show that women can be independent and don’t always depend on men, so they deserve their own rights. On a different note, De Gouges use of the word revolution may be trying to appeal to the men’s audience once again because they had just been in war and know what a hard time it was. The revolution affected millions and millions of lives were lost. So, by using this term, De Gouges wants the men to realize that if they don’t change how women are being treated as a whole in society in terms of their rights, eventually women will all come together and fight against men causing an outbreak of war and men wouldn’t want
This harsh statement is clarified by saying that woman just have to be beautiful and amiable in order to be “bought” by men (De Gouges 179). This statement presents men with an image of slaves being beaten or mistreated just because they were a minority. Men may not have thought that women have felt so abused just because they haven’t had rights, but this image of a mistreated slave gets them to really take a step back and think about the women’s mindset. On the other hand, slaves often rebelled against their slave owners so De Gouges may bring up slavery in order to relate back to the revolution, which means women may rebel against men if things don’t improve soon. This appears to appeal to the emotions of men because never before had they thought about women being similar to a slave and now that someone directly stated this, the men would question the previous ways of treatment to women because they have seen how poorly slaves were treated so men would want to think more highly of women than