 Condorcet was not alone in recognizing the manifest contradiction between the principles of natural rights and reason, on the one hand, and the exclusion of women from full political rights, on the other. Nor was he the only one to link the question of female citizenship to the demand for rights by other groups like Jews, Protestants, and mulattos, whose political and civil rights had been curtailed under the old régime, or even to the radical demand for slave emancipation. Some politically active women protested for improvements in women’s condition, and even demanded woman’s right to bear arms. The Confédération des amis de la vérité [Confederation of the Friends of Truth] was the first club to admit women as regular members and the first to establish a separate women’s section. The club campaigned in support of divorce, and engaged in a heated debate over member Etta Palm d’Aelder’s speech calling on men to devote their full attention to the problem of women’s rights, insisting “we are your companions not your slaves” (Etta Palm d’Aelders, Appel aux françoises sur la régénération des moeurs et la nécessité de l’influence des femmes dans un gourvernement libre [Appeal to the French concerning the Regeneration of Morals and the Necessity for Women’s Influence in a Free Government], cited in Kates 1985, 123–4). Among the other issues taken up by Palm and her confederates in the women’s section were elimination of primogeniture, protection against wife beating, a comprehensive divorce bill, and political equality for women. Palm conceived of a Parisian and nationwide system of affiliated clubs to care for and educate children and clinics for indigent women. As early as October 1789, the playwright Olympe de Gouges proposed a reform program to the National Assembly that encompassed legal sexual equality, admission for women to all occupations, and the suppression of the dowry system through a state-provided alternative. In her 1791 Déclaration des droits de la femme et de la citoyenne [Declaration of the Rights of Woman and Female Citizen], Gouges rejoices in the natural equality of all human beings and decries the hypocrisy of denying people on the basis of race and sex the inherent rights to which they are owed. Although always a minority position, still other voices were raised inside and outside France on behalf of full equality, perhaps most famously Mary Wollstonecraft in her equally eloquent 1792 treatise The Vindication of the Rights of Woman.