Women Revolutionaries

Women’s participation in the revolutionary events in France between 1789 and 1795 has only recently been given nuanced treatment. Early twentieth-century historians of the French Revolution are typified by Jaures, who, though sympathetic to the women’s movement of his own time, never even mentions its antecedents in revolutionary France. Even today most Badinter, Godineau, and Roudinesco, however, should signal a much-needed reassessment of women’s participation.

Godineau and Roudinesco point to three significant phases in that participation. The first, up to mid-1792, involved those women who wrote political tracts. Typical of their orientation to theoretical issues—in Godineau’s view, without practical effect—is Marie Gouze’s Declaration of the Rights of Women. The emergence of vocal middle-class women’s political clubs marks participation by more than a narrow range of the population—women or men—came only with the Revolution.

What makes the recent studies particularly compelling, however, is not so much their organization of chronology as their unflinching willingness to confront the reasons for the collapse of the women’s movement. For Landes and Badinter, the necessity of women’s having to speak in the established vocabularies of certain intellectual and political traditions vocabulary and a violently extremist viewpoint that unfortunately was even more damaging to their political interests.

Each of these scholars has a different political agenda and takes a different approach—Godineau, for example, works with police archives while Roudinesco uses explanatory schema from modern psychology. Yet, admirably, each gives center stage to a group that previously has been marginalized, or at best undifferentiated, by historians. And in the case cost to the women of the Revolution of speaking in borrowed voices.