Q. Analyse the role of women in the French Revolution.

The French Revolution is generally seen as the landmark by which the

modern world is demarcated from the medieval. Marxist scholars
understand the French Revolution as an event that marked the transition
from feudalism to capitalism in France. However, many historians see it not
as a signal of the beginning of a new era, but a temporary, albeit significant,
interlude in the existing one. If the Revolution does not mark a break from
the past, we can then see it as an event that allowed one class of people to
ascend further up in the ruling hierarchy. In some ways, thus, we can view
the Revolution, in rather simplistic terms, as merely the overthrowing of
one class of people by another. And in the replacement of the then ruling
class by those that desired the same power (i.e., the bourgeoisie), the
conservatism of the monarchical tradition is not only maintained, but
enhanced in some ways. This we see particular in the ways in which
women and their roles in society were defined. It was with the French
Revolution that the ideas of equality, fraternity, and liberty were made the
rights of Man, immortalized in a Constitution. ‘Man’, however, continued to
be defined by propertied males, which left more than half the population
out of its ambit. Men without property and more significantly, all women,
continued to be treated as “that part of the population that contributed
nothing to the administrative structures.”

This is essay seeks to outline the roles of women in two broad spheres: in
the abstract, and in reality. These two spheres are intertwined – the role
that women played in the public sphere displayed how women were
understood in the ideology of the time and also how the latter affected the
former, mostly negatively. In looking at women before, during, and post the
Revolution, we can trace the changes in their position in reality and in the
abstract – this we see in the way they were written about in the literature
of the time – which included, most importantly, the writings of Rousseau, as
well as what can be called the publications of the “Rousseaus of the
ruisseau” – and their depictions in art. What needs to be keep in mind while
doing so is that the position of women did not fluctuate radically – that is to
say, the dominant patriarchal ideology remained intact through the entire
period of revolution in France, tumultuous as it was in terms of doing away
with old ideas and instituting new ones that supported increased political
participation and representation of the people. Thus, what this essay tries
to underscore is the manner in which women were, over the course of the
Revolution, completely pushed out of public life even while the female
image came to play a central role in the allegorical embodiment of the
revolution.

Joan Landes, in her book on women in and the public sphere in

Revolutionary France, points out that women had more freedom during the
ancien régime than after its fall. In court, at least, women definitely played a
more active role. In the time of Louis XV, his mistresses, Madame du Barry
and Madame de Pompadour did have a significant amount of political
influence. Women were also an important part of the salon culture, as the
owners of the salons and hosts of the meetings. Through this position they
became arbiters of French art and literature and also had some amount of
control over who entered the Académie française. Salonnieres thus
functioned as “instruments of the absolutist state”, in that they created
spaces in which the bourgeoisie could meet members of the aristocracy and
use those connections to find a way into positions of power.

There is some amount of debate on this: Olwen Hufton, for instance,

questions Landes’ thesis – the number of women who exercised any
authority in court and in the salons was a very small one, and thus could
not represent the state of women as a whole. Jane Abray in her seminal
work also noted that women had very few rights in the last few decades of
the ancien régime: in legal terms they were basically defined with reference
to their husbands, or, if they were unmarried, to their father. Economically
they had very few jobs open to them, and even then, they paid so little that
for all practical purposes, marriage was the only option open to women –
and if not husbands, they were forced instead to depend on male members
of their family to provide for them. Abray does, however, point out that
politically women did have some amount of agency. Thus, when looking at
the role women played in the public sphere before the Revolution relative
to during and after it, Madame du Pompadour and the salonnieres can be
seen as evidence enough to suggest that women had a greater degree of
freedom before 1793 – even if it was only those that were high born or had
powerful connections (i.e., the king). The salons continued to exist even
during the first stages of the Revolution; but during the reign of Louis XVI,
the women of the court did not play a particularly significant role in the
workings of the government, even while Marie Antoinette was accused of
being the mind behind the king’s actions.

During this time the court was, in fact, quite patriarchal – unlike in England,
a queen could not rule without a king in France, and the only time that
women ever played a substantial role in governance was when they ruled
as regents for their minor sons. Madame du Pompadour’s role in Louis XV’s
rule was never looked at with approval, and it contributed negatively to his
image. However, the criticism and hostility against women being involved
in ruling the country reached fever pitch only during Louis XVI’s reign.

Lynn Hunt sees the crisis in French monarchy as a crisis in paternal

authority in France. According to her, French political consciousness was
defined by narratives of family relations. In the overthrowing of the
monarchy, thus, she sees the overthrowing of fathers by sons. The ideas of
‘fraternity’ and ‘citizenship’, then, automatically takes on exclusively
masculine connotations, and just as the monarchy is relegated to the
sidelines of governance, so women are too. The ideology and writings of
Rousseau display the insistence on the relegation of women to the private
sphere. Both Louis XV and XVI were seen as ineffectual and weak kings, and
this was attributed to them being influenced by the women in their lives.
Rousseau was in favour of the clear division of roles of the sexes. To him,
the ‘natural’ place of the woman was in the domestic sphere, taking care of
the children and the home, while for men it was in the public sphere, where
they were to be involved in the governance of the people. He talked about
the danger that women posed to the virile masculinity of government: “no
longer wishing to tolerate separation, unable to make themselves into men,
the women make us into women.”

Since prostitution was one of the most visible ‘public’ roles that women
played, Rousseau characterised all women who ventured into the public
sphere as prostitutes, and painted salons as places where all manner of
sexual perversion was celebrated. Salonnieres and other women in the
public sphere were viciously attacked as women of loose morals who
contributed to the degeneration of society, and the only way in which
virtue could be restored is if they were pushed back where they belong.
Keeping this in mind, the extreme hatred that the people had for Marie
Antoinette can be better understood; not only was she unpopular for being
a foreigner and for her alleged involvement in the Diamond Necklace Affair,
she was the epitome of a public woman. Thus, she became “a rallying point
for male bonding against all outbreaks of women's exertion of power”, the
face that the people associated with the effeminizing force in court. She
corrupted the “body politic either through ‘liaisons’ or ‘intimacies’ with
criminal politicians or through her ability to act sexually upon the king, his
ministers, or his soldiers.” The idea that the Queen used her ‘feminine
wiles’ to acquire power and work against the people of France was
reinforced over and over again in the pornographic libelles that were
published about her, connecting her to just about every other influential
male at that time in France, which included the King’s brother and his
grandfather. She was also accused of failing her ‘natural’ duty as a mother –
for the ultimate crime that was attributed to her was that of committing
incest with her son. While none of these stories about her were true, Marie
Antoinette came to symbolize the corruption and moral degeneration of the
ruling class.

While aspersions are cast on the Queen’s character and virtue, what is
interesting to note is that the King was never written about in the same
light. The libelles that were written about the King were quite tame
compared to the consistent and vicious slandering of the Queen: he was
only ever depicted as a cuckold, or at most, a pig. Thus, even while
overthrowing the monarchy, the revolutionaries continued to uphold the
king as a symbol of power – by doing this, they aimed to maintain the
virility of his position, the seat of the ruling power, while doing away with
the institution of monarchy itself.

Even while, in the prevailing ideology of the time, women were consistently
told stay within the confines of the domestic sphere, there were those who
fought against this clear delineation of male/female roles, public/private
duties, right from the beginning of the Revolution. Writers, both male and
female, took up the cause of feminism. Jane Abray’s article on Feminism in
the French Revolution looks at the various demands that they made in
pamphlets they wrote, which included the right to vote, higher pay,
equality in marriage and the right to education. If Rousseau argued that
men and women were born with different duties, the feminists argued that
since all people were born equal, sexual discrimination was a man-made
construct. They argued that women deserved to be treated as citizens
because they performed all the duties that were expected of a citizen – they
contributed to the struggle against the monarchy, and displayed the same
patriotism that their male counterparts had, and, as child bearers, all
mothers made a special contribution to the state in guaranteeing its
survival. Women also saw their continued fight for liberty as an extension
of the fight that the Third Estate waged against the aristocracy. Abray also
describes how, between the years 1789 and 1793 women formed
delegations and approached the National Assembly to argue for the
equality of the sexes in terms of legal, political, economic and social rights.

The main issues that these women rallied around were that of education
and citizenship. Education was the one aspect generally agreed upon by
both feminists and anti-feminists – the real contention lay in the nature of
education that was to be given to girls. While the feminists wanted both
sexes to receive the same knowledge, a large majority of people supported
the idea that girls should be taught things that would help them better run
their homes and care for their families. On the issue of citizenship for
women, while those who supported it pointed out the ways in which
women fulfilled the necessary criteria, other such as Abbé Sieyès argued
that women (also children and foreigners) contributed nothing to public
institutions and therefore did not deserve to have the right to vote or the
right to utter the civil oath of citizenship. In arguing that mothers deserved
to be citizens, however, citizenship continued to be treated as a privilege
granted to a select group of women and not as a right.

Among the most visible of the feminists was the Marquis de Condorcet,
who was the first to point out the need for the emancipation of women. He
was one of the first, and among the few, men who supported the equality of
rights for women – according to him, since women paid taxes they
deserved to be represented in the government. Olympe de Gouges was
another important figure among the feminists; in 1791, she declared the
‘rights of women’, which read the way the declaration of the ‘rights of man’
did. It included the right to equality, the right to representation, and a call
to put “an end to male tyranny generally”. Although Olympe de Gouges was
sent to the guillotine because she opposed Robespierre, her execution was
also significant as a government reaction to the feminists. Other important
figures included Théroigne de Méricourt and Etta Palm, also known as
Baronne d’Aelders.

The persistent pamphleteering and meetings with the National Assembly

pushing for the rights of women can be seen as largely pacifist, intellectual
activity; its physical, violent counterpart can be seen in what Darline Levy
and Harriet Applewhite call the “militant citizenship” of women who took
part in riots and other armed demonstrations. The October March of 1789
is one of the earliest examples of women taking up arms during the
Revolution. The March to Versailles was the first event that signified the
end of the independent authority of the king and the women who
participated in them came to embody the Rousseauian concepts of popular
sovereignty and the general will of the people without formally stating as
much. Between the years 1791 and 1793 women did claim their right to
militant citizenship, and this was used by the Jacobins as and when
required – which was often during public demonstrations and rallies – to
project an image of popular power. Women stood with men during these
demonstrations, carrying weapons and leading the processions – and in
doing so, blurred the boundaries between the sexes. This kind of
citizenship, which was adopted by a small section of women between 1789
and 1792, quickly came to be seen for the threat that it was to the Jacobin
understanding of the roles of men and women. For the founder of the the
Citoyennes Républicaines Révolutionnaires, Pauline Léon, boldly
demanded the right to bear arms for women, since, she claimed, women
had fulfilled all the criteria of revolutionary citizenship. In order to prevent
women from seeing themselves as “autonomous political actors” instead of
auxiliaries to their male counterparts, their militancy, particularly that of
leaders like Pauline Léon needed to be reined in before it went completely
out of hand. It was with this in mind that all of the women’s clubs were
banned in 1793, completely quashing the political identity of women,
diminished though it anyway was.

Amidst the feminist meetings, creation of feminist literature, and

development of the militant citizenship of one section of the female
population, another section focussed on a different cause – that of religion.
With the nationalization of the Church in France, the Catholic Church was
almost completely ruined. These women worked towards reclaiming their
church from the revolutionaries. While most revolutionary women came
from the urban area, the counter revolutionaries came mostly from the
peasantry, and were deeply religious. They defied the officials of the
government, refusing to attend the services led by priests who took the
oath of loyalty to the Republic in 1790. Instead, they hid nonjuring priests
in their homes and attended Catholic mass in secret. They prevented
officials from desecrating their chapels and led anti-oath processions.
Women became defenders of the faith, thus feminizing it. Despite efforts
made by the Republic to convert women to their Cult of Reason, they
remained steadfastly Catholic and through non-cooperation and sexist
ridiculing of the Republic they won the small battles they fought against
officials in their locality. Because of the consistent opposition of the
women, by 1795, the Thermidorean government was willing to
compromise on their religious policies, allowing people the freedom of
worship within certain boundaries.

In the year 1792, Marianne as the allegorical embodiment of France was

introduced. She represented all the ideals of the French Republic – Liberty,
Reason, and the Homeland. Initially, Marianne was depicted as a young,
beautiful girl, standing tall and straight. Joan Landes explains that she was a
way for “men to project their sexual desire onto the face of the nation.” This
was to lay the foundation for feelings of patriotism. However, by 1793, the
image of Marianne that was adopted by the French Republic was that
which was immortalized in Eugène Delacroix’s “Liberty Leading the
People” – she is shown as a fearless, fierce warrior, bare breasted and
leading men into battle. There were various reasons for Marianne
becoming the embodiment of France, one of them being that she marked a
break from the ancien régime that was generally depicted as a male figure.
But Marianne can also be seen as a neutralizing force that was employed by
the Republic against women and their various strands of political activity.
Unlike Marie Antoinette, the militant revolutionary women, and the
feminists, Marianne was a positive effeminizing force in the public sphere.
She did not pose a threat to the masculine virility of it, since she did not
have any real feminine qualities beyond her female form. She was,
according to Lynn Hunt, “in effect, a masculine mother, or a father capable
of giving birth.” With Marianne, woman once again entered the realm of the
public sphere, albeit stripped of her sexual connotations.
The insistent and forceful removal of women from the political arena was
also reflected in the economy. One of the many odd jobs that women could
take up before the Revolution was that of the wet-nurse; women who
managed to find jobs could not afford to breast feed their own babies.
While wet nurses also cost money – often 40 - 50% of a woman’s salary,
this was still half of what it would cost to take time off to feed one’s own
child. During the Revolution and after, the image of the wet nurse came to
be associated with the ancien régime and all that was wrong with it, and the
image of a mother breast feeding her own child was upheld as the image of
the ideal woman. With the immense pressure put on them to be the perfect
mothers and wives, it becomes clear that they were not expected to
contribute to the wages of her household. The general belief was that
women were too weak, too delicate, to hold down jobs that required them
to work for hours every day in a factory or on a farm. Their role was at
home with their children, and their contribution to society lay in their
capacity as mothers – at the most they were the educators of children,
teaching them how to be good citizens of the French Republic.

In conclusion, what we see is the complete and total removal of women

from the public sphere, economically, politically, socially, in the course of
the Revolution. Those in power felt that they were doing women a favour
by keeping them in the private sphere – to them women were, as already
mentioned, creatures of a weak constitution, incapable of proper reasoning
since they lacked, according to Kant, the “mental capacity necessary to
achieve full maturity as autonomous self-determining moral agents”. In
associating the public sphere with masculinity, public spaces like salons
that were dominated by women did not fit in; men who frequented them
were characterised as effeminate creatures, prone to vanity and having an
inordinate amount of interest in their clothes, things that were otherwise
associated with women. Salons, thus, were no longer taken seriously and
they quickly lost their relevance. All public women also came to be
associated with women of questionable moral character – which is one of
the reasons why the feminists’ message failed to get through to a large
percentage of women. The most famous women of the time were extremely
careful to distance themselves from those who were notorious – who were,
most often, the more visible feminists; they were mostly accused of being
sexual deviants of loose morals. Generally, women who were well known
did not want to associate themselves with feminists, because they did not
agree with them. Mary Wollstonecraft, for example, argued for women’s
upliftment within the patriarchal paradigm. Thus, she was one of the
people who encouraged the education of women, but only so that it would
help them better perform their feminine duties. Also, every time women
tried to enter the public sphere as men’s equals, they were equated with
women like Marie Antoinette and Corday, the sins of these women
becoming theirs – by virtue of being of the same gender this was their cross
to bear as well.

Although many revolutionary women used the political clubs as a way to

approach the Republic, political clubs were generally constituted by
women who came together to argue for “economic claims…rather than
strictly feminist demands.” In fact, most women’s clubs were not
particularly inclined towards tackling the issue of social status, since most
women not only accepted, but embraced the role that had been clearly
defined for them, as good mothers, daughters, and wives, and accepted that
they were not meant to participate in the governance of a people. This
notion was so deeply entrenched in them that women turned on those who
did not conform to it – thus, it was a group of women who first demanded
that the Citoyennes Républicaines Révolutionnaires be shut down, and
consequently set the ball rolling for the complete banning of all women’s
clubs. Thus, the efforts made by feminists to acquire equal status for men
and women ultimately failed.

Also, as we have seen, there were many different movements led by women
during the course of the Revolution. The lack of homogeneity in, and more
importantly the lack of solidarity between, women’s movements meant
that their position could not, and did not, change drastically. Many women
fought for change, while others fought against it, holding on to that which
had been part of their way of life for centuries. And while there were
women who participated in protests and in acts of patriotism (as seen in
the role women played in public demonstrations between 1790 and 1793),
they only heightened the anxiety of the government and thus served to
further repress their own gender, even though that was not their aim.
Despite the rigidly conservative views on women that the French Republic
had, however, women never stopped their political activity – in whatever
limited capacity it existed; they continued to publish newspapers in the
1830s, and they also were important in the revolutions of 1848.
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