But did the “rights of man” include women? During the French Revolution, the question of women’s rights was sharply debated. Just two years after the famous French Declaration, the French playwright and journalist Olympe de Gouges sought to apply those rights to women when she crafted her Declaration of the Rights of Woman and the Female Citizen. “Woman, wake up,” she wrote, “the tocsin [warning bell] of reason is being heard throughout the whole universe; discover your rights.”29 Most men, however, even ardent revolutionaries, agreed with the French lawyer Jean-Denis Lanjuinais that “the physique of women, their goal in life [marriage and motherhood], and their position distance them from the exercise of a great number of political rights and duties.”30

Throughout the nineteenth century, such debates echoed loudly across Europe, North America, and beyond. Among the most well-known and eloquent appeals for the rights of women came from the American feminist leader Elizabeth Cady Stanton (1815–1902) in an 1892 address to a U.S. congressional committee. She was urging then, as she had for decades, an amendment to the Constitution giving women the right to vote. The success of that effort occurred only in 1920, almost two decades after Stanton died.

Elizabeth Cady Stanton

The Solitude of Self

1892

The point I wish plainly to bring before you on this occasion is the individuality of each human soul. . . . In discussing the rights of woman, we are to consider, first, what belongs to her as an individual, in a world of her own. . . .

The strongest reason for giving woman all the opportunities for higher education, for the full development of her faculties . . . ; for giving her the most enlarged freedom of thought and action; a complete emancipation from all forms of bondage, of custom, dependence, superstition; from all the crippling influences of fear, is the solitude and personal responsibility of her own individual life. The strongest reason why we ask for woman a voice in the government under which she lives; in the religion she is asked to believe; equality in social life, where she is the chief factor; a place in the trades and professions, where she may earn her bread, is because of her birthright to self-sovereignty; because, as an individual, she must rely on herself. No matter how much women prefer to lean, to be protected and supported, nor how much men desire to have them do so, they must make the voyage of life alone. . . . It matters not whether the solitary voyager is man or woman. . . . Alike amid the greatest triumphs and darkest tragedies of life we walk alone. . . .

In [old] age, when the pleasures of youth are passed, children grown up, married and gone, the hurry and hustle of life in a measure over, when the hands are weary of active service, when the old armchair and the fireside are the chosen resorts, then men and women alike must fall back on their own resources. . . .

If from a lifelong participation in public affairs a woman feels responsible for the laws regulating our system of education, the discipline of our jails and prisons, the sanitary conditions of our private homes, public buildings, and thoroughfares, an interest in commerce, finance, our foreign relations, in any or all of these questions, her solitude will at least be respectable. . . .

Seeing then that the responsibilities of life rests equally on man and woman, that their destiny is the same, they need the same preparation for time and eternity. The talk of sheltering woman from the fierce storms of life is the sheerest mockery, for they beat on her from every point of the compass, just as they do on man, and with more fatal results, for he has been trained to protect himself, to resist, to conquer. . . . Whatever the theories may be of woman’s dependence on man, in the supreme moments of her life he cannot bear her burdens. . . .

[T]here is a solitude, which each and every one of us has always carried with him, more inaccessible than the ice-cold mountains, more profound than the midnight sea; the solitude of self. Our inner being, which we call ourself, no eye nor touch of man or angel has ever pierced. . . . Who, I ask you, can take, dare take, on himself the rights, the duties, the responsibilities of another human soul?

Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Solitude of Self (1892). http://www.wfu.edu/~zulick/340/solitude.html.