Original scientific paper

Women's Rights and the Democratic Revolution

Tomaž Mastnak ; Ljubljana

Abstract

Among the theoreticians dealing with the development of democracy a woman can seldom be found. However, that the influence of the women’s rights issue on the democratic revolution is by no means a minor one, but quite the contrary, demonstrates Mary Wollstonecraft’s essay »Vindication of the Rights of Woman«. In his considerations regarding the relation between the women’s rights issue and the democratic revolution, Mastnak relies upon this very book and its interpretations. In contrast to some other interpreters of Wollstonecraft, Mastnak claims that the articulation of the women’s rights issue introduces qualitative changes into the democratic revolution. Why is that? The principal document of the democratic revolution »Declaration des droits de l’homme et du citoyen«, can be considered as universal only up to the point when the woman's rights issue was established and when it became apparent that the declaration spoke only of the rights of men. Thus, the generation of the women's rights issue revealed that women weren't imprisoned within their families by the old regime, but that it was accomplished by none other than the original democratic revolution which, to be sure, overthrew the monarchistic rule and the hierarchical social pyramid not upsetting the family. Men voted for men’s human rights, and took away the vote from women, thus leaving them out of the public sphere. Consequently, after the articulation of the women's rights issue, the democratic revolution ceased to exist as a simple negation of the ancien regime and through self-cognition had to face its own internal problems and blocades. Even today this impulse for reflection hasn't yet lost its freshness.

Keywords

Hrčak ID:

155426

URI

https://hrcak.srce.hr/155426

Publication date:

31.12.1989.

Article data in other languages: croatian slovenian

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