Marquis de Condorcet “on Giving Women the Right if Citizenship”

Out of all of the small readings we had for this blog
post the one I took a lot of interest in was the article On Giving Women the Right of Citizenship. The main reason for this
interest was firstly as opposed to all the other choices it is the only one
that plainly states a need for the rights of women as opposed to the other readings
which in the case they are even about positive development only looks at this
angle from a satirical perspective. Another reason is that the article is rather
bold for literature from the 1790s, and surprisingly despite my original
assumptions about the author of this piece which I assumed was done by a woman
it was very surprising to discover the work was in fact done by a man. I think
this is important to note because while gender equality is a more balanced but
still prevailing issue today back in the time this piece originated despite the
assumptions and feeling of many women in society change like this would likely
only be driven with male backing since they were the dominate people in
society. Thinking about it after looking into the authors identity it does make
sense this piece was done by a man because at the time I am hard pressed to believe
a women would have been able to publish an article such as this easily, although
I have no knowledge as to if the author Marquis de Condorcet had an easy time
himself getting this article publicly published. It is so interesting to just
think about how such an easily addressed issue today could have caused so much
turmoil back in 1700s. I wonder if Condorcet was hesitant or proud to publish
this work?

Regardless of how he felt about the work itself, I would
like to touch on the fact that the work itself is both very insightful and the
argument is well established. Condorcet argues that if we give some people
rights and not others then in reality it is no one who truly has rights. I also
enjoy how he touches on the issue of superiority of gender as unproven bigotry
which is an illogical argument for social oppression.  He discusses the idea that if we are focusing
on superiority should only men of genius intellect be given rights? Of course
not because there are many a fool in the male gender and as the author sates “both
sexes have an equal share of inferior and superior minds”. I enjoy looking at
this type of discussion from an earlier time period because for me a male who
has many female personal heroes and who is in a field which seems t generally
have more women than men involved it baffles me to think about a time where
this inspirations and sources of knowledge would of been few and far between. I
would love to see a man like Condorcet pulled into the modern world to see his
thoughts on current social structure.

For my picture i decided to add the famous rosie the riveter picture because this is a good symbol for women equality and is something i felt would not of been present during the time of this article

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosie_the_Riveter#/media/File:We_Can_Do_It!.jpg