Olympe de Gouges’ Declaration heavily influenced Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Women, and can perhaps be seen as the cornerstone of Western feminism. It was written out of a deep sense of disappointment and betrayal at the failure of the French revolutionaries to address the rights of women in their Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen (1789). De Gouges argued that women may not be the same as men but they are equal. Urging women to wake up to their continuing