How did Olympe de Gouges challenge the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen?

Olympe de Gouges challenged the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen by exposing its failure to grant women equal political citizenship despite its stated commitment to liberty and equality.1

In her 1791 pamphlet, the Declaration of the Rights of Woman and of the Female Citizen, she explicitly modeled her work on the 1789 document to assert that women are equal to men in society and therefore entitled to the same fundamental rights. By doing so, she fundamentally critiqued the exclusionary nature of the French Revolution’s political framework, which had effectively relegated women to a secondary status. Beyond political rights, she also advocated for social justice, including equal inheritance rights for children born outside of marriage.1