Middle-Class Feminism. While the origins of feminism can be found in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, not until the nineteenth century were coherent alternatives to familial and social relations proposed. Some middle-class women were at the forefront of these challenges to the bourgeois ideal. The opening of a dialogue over the natural rights of men as citizens during the French Revolution created a forum in which men and women could criticize the traditional place of women as domestic creatures not suited for public life. The French writer Olympe de Gouges (1745-1793) critiqued women's place in society in Declaration of the Rights of Woman and the Citizen (1791), focusing on their status in the family. Feminists began to argue that women needed to be emancipated from their husbands' authority before they could be considered citizens. Despite their...