In France in the early 1790s, the French Revolution, which sought to establish universal individual rights in French society, inspired several arguments for women's rights. Two such arguments, articulated by Marquis de Condorcet and Olympe de Gouges, both active supporters of the Revolution, are especially noteworthy because they constitute radically opposed courses of action in confronting the question of women's rights. Where Condorcet believed that women's rights were a specific instance of rights in general and that these rights would therefore be established through the establishment of universal equal rights, Gouges argued that the political inequalities to which women were subject formed the wellspring of all injustice experienced by women and should therefore be battled through direct political action.

Condorcet, a mathematician and member of the Academy of Sciences with an interest in social equality, did not separate the question of women's rights from the more general one of equal rights for all members of society, believing that all discrimination was an oversight, the result of not reasoning consistently or not fully using one's rationality to guide one's actions. He felt that all people, women and men, were entitled to equal rights because they were thinking, feeling beings, capable of developing moral ideas and reasoning from those ideas. Condorcet thus maintained that women's rights need not be addressed through vigorous political action. Since no reasoning could justify the perpetuation of any inequality, he argued, this intellectually untenable situation of women's inequality was historically condemned to disappear soon.

Where Condorcet's arguments were purely theoretical and did not include specific legislative proposals to end the exclusion of women from politics, the tone and content of Gouges's proposals reflected her objective that women should become politically mobilized in a war against the injustices that she saw men stubbornly perpetuating. Gouges, a writer and an activist for women's rights, exposed harmful inconsistencies in the period's revolutionary universalism, noting that after the Revolution women's political rights were still limited. She believed that women's political inequality was not just another form of inequality but rather the source of women's unequal position in society, and maintained that only the political vigilance of women could prevent men from appropriating the benefits of the Revolution. She argued that the prevailing political inequality kept women at a disadvantage in all their dealings with men, including marriage, and that this ubiquitous disadvantage would continue until women were granted full political rights, equal access to property, and public employment. Gouges, unlike Condorcet, developed her arguments from the details of the inequality that women were experiencing, but unfortunately, even in the atmosphere of the French Revolution, neither's views were widely accepted.