ABSTRACT
In popular histories of the French Revolution, the representations of women range from docile ‘sisters’ nursing the wounded revolutionaries to ‘amazons’ storming the Paris Council dressed in red caps and pantaloons (Kadish 1991). The images and sympathies differ significantly, but the one point upon which all are in agreement is that women were not invisible during that conflagration. Revolutionary feminism was a significant political force, and it attracted both supporters and detractors and influenced the women’s movement in France throughout the nineteenth century (Moses 1984; Rendall 1984; Bridenthal and Koonz 1977). The 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man became the preamble to the
Constitution of 1791. Olympe de Gouges, eager to ensure that the Revolution brought women political rights in addition to the political voice they had already obtained, wrote and published a Declaration of the Rights of Women.3 Drawing its inspiration and style from the earlier document, her Declaration demanded equal rights for women before the law and in all aspects of public and private life. This decidedly political document was a contribution to an ongoing debate, throughout the revolutionary decade, about the natural roles of women and men in society. Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), among other works, emerged during the period and, although it may have been part of an English conversation,4 it was certainly steeped in the drama of French circumstance. No intellectual actively involved, as was Jean-Baptiste Say, in the construction and legitimation of the social sciences could be unaware of the tumult, even if, as is much more likely, he was not aware of the many strains and details of women’s activism during the decade. The controversy wells up in distinct places: in May of 1793, Claire Lecombe
(a former actress) and Pauline Léon (a former chocolate maker) founded the Société Républicaines-Révolutionnaires, the most notorious women’s revolutionary club of the time. With Léon as president, the Club established itself in the library of the Jacobin Club and took up the battle against ‘enemies of the republic’. As strong supporters of the Jacobins, these Club members took their battle to the streets where, in revolutionary bonnets and pantaloons, they harassed the Girondins and silenced them in the galleries of the National Convention. In June, the Jacobins took over the National Convention and expelled the
Girondins with the support of the Société. In July and August, women were accepted on the councils of the Parisian sections. But later that year, the deputies to the Convention outlawed women’s political clubs with only one
dissenting vote. A delegation of women was led by Claire Lecombe to protest the betrayal before the Paris Council. Pierre Chaumette, president of the Council, responded:
It is horrible—unnatural—for a woman to want to become a man…since when has it been decent for women to abandon their pious household tasks and their children’s cradles, to meet in public places yelling from the galleries? Impudent women who want to turn themselves into men, don’t you have enough already? What more do you want? Your despotism is the only force we cannot resist, for it is the despotism of love, thus the work of nature. In the name of nature itself, stay as you are. Instead of envying our perilous, busy lives, you should be content to help us forget all this at home in our families, where we can rest our eyes with the enchanting sight of our children made happy through your cares.
