Natural Rights
These are the basic liberties that every human being is born with, according to Enlightenment thinkers.
What are Natural Rights?
Enslaved people in this French colony used Enlightenment ideas to demand their own liberty.
What is Saint-Domingue (or Haiti)?
During the Age of Reason, women were often unfairly characterized as being guided by this rather than logic.
What is emotion?
This Latin American leader was deeply influenced by the Enlightenment but feared that total equality might lead to chaos.
Who is Simón Bolívar?
She wrote A Vindication of the Rights of Woman in 1792.
Who is Mary Wollstonecraft?
This philosopher argued that political authority must come from the "consent of the governed."
Who is John Locke?
This movement to end slavery gained traction when thinkers applied rational analysis to show that human bondage was "irrational."
What is Abolitionism?
This is the specific term for the right to vote, which was denied to women during the Enlightenment.
What is suffrage?
Written by Bolívar in 1815, this document reflects his vision for a unified, republican Latin America.
What is the Jamaica Letter?
This French activist famously declared, "Woman is born free and remains equal to man in rights."
Who is Olympe de Gouges?
The glaring contradiction of the Enlightenment was that many thinkers advocated for freedom while profiting from this brutal system.
What is the trans-Atlantic slave trade (or slavery)?
Enslaved revolutionaries argued that if rights were "universal," they must apply to all people regardless of this factor.
What is race?
Mary Wollstonecraft argued that women appeared "inferior" only because they lacked access to this.
What is education?
In Latin America, independence often brought liberty to the creole elite while marginalizing these two groups.
Who are Indigenous and Mestizo populations?
Although she was a champion of rights, Olympe de Gouges was executed during this violent phase of the French Revolution.
What is the Reign of Terror?
This famous 1776 American document asserted that "all men are created equal" while slavery remained legal.
What is the Declaration of Independence?
This was the only successful slave revolt in history that resulted in the creation of a new nation.
What is the Haitian Revolution?
This French activist wrote the Declaration of the Rights of Woman and of the Female Citizen in 1791.
Who is Olympe de Gouges?
Even after slavery was abolished, these types of laws in the U.S. created new forms of racial oppression.
What are Jim Crow laws?
This American "Founding Father" tweaked Locke’s triad to "Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness."
Who is Thomas Jefferson?
This modern 1948 document from the United Nations is a direct descendant of Enlightenment "natural rights" philosophy.
What is the Universal Declaration of Human Rights?
Marginalized groups used the Enlightenment as a "toolkit" to dismantle these social systems of rank and power.
What are hierarchies?
This philosopher argued that a woman's primary role was to serve the family and support her husband's "republican virtue."
Who is Jean-Jacques Rousseau?
This term describes the exploitative labor system often used to replace enslaved labor in the mid-19th century.
What is "coolie" labor?
These two women organized the Seneca Falls Conference in 1848 to demand women's rights.
Who are Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott?