0191-6599/x? $3 01) + 0.w * 1987 Pergamon Journals Ltd.

FRENCH AND AMERICAN* WOMEN IN THE AGE OF DEMOCRATIC REVOLUTION, 1770-1815:

A COMPARATIVE PERSPECTIVE

LINDA S. POPOFSKY~ and MARIANNE B. SHELDON~

The appearance during the last decade of new scholarship on women in ‘the age of the democratic revolution’1 has demonstrated signi~cant possibilities for reconceptualising women’s history as well as for reformulating a historical understanding of societies in political crisis. Recent examinations of the female experience in the American War of Independence and the French Revolution have distanced themselves from an older, heavily anecdotal tradition that focused on prominent women. Some new studies have argued for the centrality of female activity in revolutionary events, at times concurrently stressing the formation of a feminist consciousness. Others have used prevailing ideas about women’s nature and the status therein implied to reassess the changes-or the lack thereof-revolution brought about in social processes and political structures. Still other work has revised previous understandings of women’s ‘public’ and ‘private’ spheres in such a way as to permit a new conception of what constitutes political behaviour.

Utilising gender as a category of historical analysis rather than concentrating exclusively on women, historians have begun to use contemporary perceptions of sex differences to explore aspects of revolutionary societies such as the thought and behaviour of power elites as well as of ordinary people and the development of new political institutions2 Examining prevailing and dissenting ideologies of sex differences in an era of revolutionary ferment has also prompted re- examination of the resolution of political conflict and its effect on notions of women’s (and men’s) nature, status and roles. In the literature we propose to examine-a sampling representative of a decade of recent scholarship-these varied approaches have enabled historians of the United States and France in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries to raise new questions about the impact of the revolutiona~ experience on gender relations in different social dimensions.

It has long been recognised that the French and American Revolutions shared a common heritage of Enlightenment thought and gave rise to the articulation of similar political and social ideals. In the past two decades, some historians have been elaborating the history of the revolutionary era via an overarching concept of an ‘Atlantic community’ rather than concentrating on distinctly separate ‘European’ and ‘American’ worlds.3 To date, only a few of the newest studies of

*In this review essay, the word ‘America’ refers to the British North American colonies which became the United States, as well as to the new republic.

_tDepartment of History, Mills College, 5000 MacA~hur Boulevard, Oakland, CA 94613, U.S.A.

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women in the revolutionary era have adopted this comparative perspective4 After examining these works, this essay will review in a comparative context the

largely separate bodies of recent research on American and French women. This procedure offers two advantages. First, comparing the distinct historical literatures on American and European women in the revolutionary age illuminates the kinds of evidence historians are uncovering about female experiences and the ways in which different classes in late eighteenth and early nineteenth century revolutionary society perceived women. Second, examining views of gender roles and the ideals underpinning them clarifies a set of similar ideaIs that emerged in both societies at this time. Of these, the elaboration of an ideology of ‘republican/civic motherhood’ was one of the most significant legacies of the revolutionary period for women in France and the new United States.

Only two books have attempted a truly comparative approach to women’s experiences in revoIutionary Europe and America: Susan Croag Bell and Karen M. Offen, eds., Women, the Family, and Freedom: The Debate in Documents, and Jane Rendall, The Origins of Modern Feminism: Women in Britain, France and the

United States, 1780-1860. Bell and Offen draw on a vast array of primary documents to demonstrate the centrality of the debate on the ‘woman question’ to the evolution of western ideas about individual liberty since the mid- eighteenth century. Their two-volume collection of documents with contextual essays has made a significant contribution to the history of ideas as well as to the study of women’s history. It firmly sets contemporary discussions of women’s nature, their relationship to the institutions of marriage and the family, and their claims to equality in legal status, education, employment and political life, in the historical context that made discourse on these issues a transatlantic phenomenon. Bell and Offen argue that late eighteenth century European and American women who applied Enlightenment canons of reason to the issues of women’s nature and condition were, by challenging authoritative views of the social relationships of the sexes, questioning not only the structure of the family but the very “principle of male authority itself’.5 In the American colonies, revolution provided a major opportunity for open debate on women’s nature and roles, while French (and other European) advocates of women’s rights developed what was by 1789 a highly complex argument about the social and political implications of gender differences. Both Europeans and Americans used concepts of natural law to support contradictory ends: emancipation for women, on the one hand, and maintenance of male dominance in gender roles, on the other,’ Documents and commentary in Wometz, the Family, and Freedom make clear ‘the uneven development of ideology and practice’: the backlash against the revolutionary experience in France, as in the rest of Europe, meant that many proposals for female emancipation would remain confined to the realm of theory, while it would be in the United States-although not until the mid- nineteenth century-that ‘practical experiments in sexual equality, education, and legal reform, and the organized women’s movement itself, developed faster and more effectively than anywhere else’.’

Jane Rendall integrates a wide group of secondary sources in order to investigate The Origins of Modern Feminism. Her synthesis of Enlightenment views of women’s nature leads her to adopt gender as a category of historical

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analysis in her exposition of the victory of the French, British and American proponents of the ‘sentimental movement’ over radicals who argued for more

egalitarian roles for women. Because Enlightenment thinkers on both sides of the Atlantic viewed women as governed by feeling rather than reason, they focused on re-evaluating women’s domestic role, the sole avenue through which, it was argued, women could contribute to the moral regeneration of society.8 In a related study, Sylvana Tomaselli (1985) challenges the assumption that Enlightenment thinkers uniformly assumed that culture, civilisation and science were male creations to which women were incapable of contributing. Reconceptualising the ‘female is to nature as male is to culture’equation in terms of contemporary analyses of gender differences, Tomaselli contends that French and Scottish ~~iioso~~es such as Diderot, Montesquieu, Rousseau, Millar and Alexander viewed women as active agents rather than as passive recipients of culture.9 Maurice Bloch and Jean M. Bloch (1980) point out that the unwillingness of many Enlightenment thinkers to grant a higher status to women at the same time as they accorded a higher value to ‘nature’ created ambiguities and contradictions in their arguments. lo Rendall demonstrates that, although some of these thinkers called for a reconsideration of the legal, familial and economic subjection of women, they proposed only limited reforms; ‘few before Condorcet were prepared to contemplate the possibility of extending political rights to women’.”

The separate literatures that study the American and French cases point to a more explicit synergistic comparison. Historians’ notions concerning the concrete impact of revolutiona~ events on women’s lives and on the evolution of the debate over women’s status recently have undergone major revision. Joan Hoff Wilson’s conclusion (1976), that for women, ‘the American Revolution was over before it ever began’, was based on a narrow perception of political participation still current among historians a decade ago.r2 Hoff Wilson finds American women unprepared to consider the radical implications of republican ideology for their lives; the Revolution had little meaning for them, she argues, in part because the few women who attempted to debate women’s issues did so within ‘narrow ideological parameters’, neither advocating complete equality for the sexes (except in education) nor questioning the institution of marriage or patriarchal standards. I3 Whereas Hoff Wifson asks what specific political gains for American women resulted from the revolutiona~ experience, Jane Abray (1975) inquires as to the oppo~unities for organised female political activity afforded by the political upheaval in France. Between 1789 and the repression of women’s societies by the Convention government in 1793, numerous proposals for the improvement of women’s legal, political and educational status were made by militant Parisian women’s groups.14 Hoff Wilson’s contention that broad social and economic forces caused a deterioration in American women’s status finds a parallel in Abray’s description of the ideological climate that led to the rejection of French women’s ‘feminist’ demands by the revolutionary government.‘5 In the end, Abray sees as dispositive the weakness of the social and political base of those who advocated women’s emancipation and the inability of the women’s groups to join together or to acquire the backing of any important male revolutionary factions. I6 Both Hoff Wilson’s and Abray’s studies use narrow definitions of political activity as norms-voting and office-holding in

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America. and petitioning and organisational activity in France. A more expansive view of what constituted significant female political activity

in America is presented by Mary Beth Norton, Liberty’s Daughters: The Revolutionary Experience of American Women, I750-1800. Norton argues that the Revolution allowed women to expand their previously limited sphere of activity by, for example, participating in economic boycotts that gave household economies new political significance. Women’s activities in the Revolution not only as consumers, but also as shopkeepers, signers of petitions and participants in fund-raising events, allowed them to claim a public role which seemed justified by revolutionary rhetoric. Norton concludes that, in forcing many American women to assert themselves, the American Revolution enhanced female self- confidence while increasing male respect for female capacities,” In France, however, such ‘public roles’ had long been assumed by women of the lower classes. In a path-breaking article (1971), Olwen Hufton demonstrates that working-class women continued their pre-1789 public activity in protests over food supplies and prices during the revolutionary period. Hufton argues that the economic considerations of a family economy which hovered between poverty and destitution shaped lower-class women’s attitudes toward the Revolution. Their initial enthusiasm for its ideals swiftly disintegrated in the face of the extreme economic dislocation of 1795-6, when the revolutionary government, unable to relieve famine via public relief agencies, lost the loyalty of many women frustrated by their inability to feed their families.‘8

Hufton’s work, and that of Darline Gay Levy and Harriet B. Applewhite (1980), points up the significance of class distinctions for analysing French women’s activities during the Revolution. I9 In revolutionary French society, traditional class distinctions persisted along with vast economic divisions, in contrast to the more modestly economically stratified society of the American colonies. Applewhite and Levy argue for female protest in the French Revolution as originating in distinct classes. The goals articulated by such groups as the Societt des citoyennes rtpublicaines revolutionaires sprang mainly from non- elite women’s traditional concerns for subsistence and family survival. These were the women who made broad demands for recognition of their rights as democratic citizens and, until their repression by the Montagnards, functioned as a ‘fighting front’ for their own class, that of the sans-culottes. Levy and Applewhite (1984) further contend that the familial economic responsibilities of lower-class women traditionally had led them to claim rights on the basis of the economic functions performed by their sex, while aristocratic women inherited a class-based individualist tradition that kept them from identifying with any assertion of women’s rights on grounds of gender.*” In explaining why upper- class French women embraced the post-revolutionary ideal of a subordinate and separate domestic sphere, Barbara Corrado Pope (1980) likewiseemphasises the strong sense of class differences that kept elite women from identifying with the political demands of working-class French women.*l Levy, Applewhite and Mary Durham Johnson (1979) document, alongside the demands of thefkmmes sans-culottes, proposals by such educated elite women for constitutional, legal and educational reform, which are seen as proceeding in good part from specifically middle and upper-class resistance to the encroachment of absolutist centraiisation upon individual rights.2’ Considerations of class, however, have

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been of less concern to historians examining the more homogeneous society of the American colonies in this era. While Norton (1980) recognises the importance of economic, geographic and racial distinctions between American women, she emphasises the ‘constant patterns’ of white women’s lives created by the domestic demands of the household.23

Louis Devance (1977) sees modern ‘feminism’ originating in Paris in the 1790s in a movement that sought women’s equality as well as comprehensive social reform, which he distinguishes from the broad spectrum of women’s political activities: ‘Par l’action de ces femmes [Olympe de Gouges, Tht?roigne de M&ricourt, Etta Palm d’Aelders], le fkminisme moderne est n6 dans Iesdernitres anntes du dix-huititme sittcle.“’ Like that of Abray, Devance’s analysis suffers from the lack of a definition of the term ‘feminism’. In tracing the development of ‘un nlo~lvernent fiministe, doctrinale et agissant’ in revolutionary France, Devance contends that Condorcet’s argument for women’s rights, based on the natural equality of the sexes, was critical to efforts by French proponents of women’s rights to redress the imbalance between the status of men and that of women. In considering the failure of that argument, Devance emphasises the widespread contemporary fear that participation of women in public and civic life would lead to a neglect of their maternal and domestic responsibilities and to a decline in population: in his view, the responsibilities ofcivic motherhood short- circuited the revolutionary women’s movement.”

Republican or civic motherhood, a new ideological ‘separate sphere’ for both American and French women in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, infused women’s domestic role with political significance. In T;lze Bonds qf Womanhood: “Woman’s Sphere” in New England, I780-f83.3. Nancy Cott notes that the domestic sphere became ‘woman’s prerogative’ after the American Revolution.” In Women of the Republic: Intellrct and Ideology in Revolutionary8 America, Linda Kerber argues that it was during the Revolution that traditional feminine virtues were given political purpose. Kerber probes deeply into republican ideology to contend that the Founding Fathers resisted political measures that would have given women greater autonomy and a distinct political voice. After the Revolution, women’s patriotic role was construed as assuring moral stability in the home and guiding the development of a republican citizenry. Kerber sees the male leaders of the Revolution, fearful of social chaos, circumventing the egaljtarian implications of republican ideology by stressing traditional gender roles.“’

In considering French women’s post-revolutionary domestic role, Barbara Corrado Pope finds elite women’s willing acceptance of the similar position of mt+e-t;ducatrice grounded only in part in their adherence to the social hierarchy and in their exclusion from public life by new Napoleonic bureaucracies which used education to institutional& male access to power.2x Pope’s contention that upper-class French women actually exalted the ideal of a separate female domestic sphere because it allowed them to shape their own history and lives and assert female moral superiority is congruent with Kerber’s view (1980) that American women, faced with male refusal to accept female citizenship, functioned as ‘architects of the new female ideology’, participating in the iIl~~ention of a public role for themselves that reconciled civic involvement with the claims of the home.”

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But republican motherhood may be interpreted in a variety of ways. Kerber (1980) contends that this new female ideology left American women with no opportunities to affect formal political processes. However, Kendall argues that the domestic ideal, although it certainly denied American and French women full political rights, did allow them significant indirect political influence. Rendall views republican motherhood as resulting from a broad conservative reaction in both Europe and America against European feminist demands articulated in the revolutionary decade.jO Bell and Offen rightly connect civic motherhood to the ‘bio-social definitions of womanhood’ advocated by many EnIightenment thinkers.” The ambiguous nature-culture dichotomy was expanded into a powerful theoretical position buttressing the doctrine of a separate domestic female sphere in the nineteenth century. Nancy Cott, however, contends that ‘republican motherhood’ did provide some women with a base from which to expand their domestic influence into the larger society: many early nineteenth century reform movements used the ideology of domesticity to provide a rationale for women’s movement into the public sphere.‘2 Paula Baker (1984) elaborates this idea in her analysis of American women’s efforts to combine prevailing ideals of motherhood and domesticity with political activity, and in her description of the consequent growth of the female sphere through the ‘domestication of politics’.” Similarly, Bell and Offen show how the ideology of civic mother~lood could be invoked by nineteenth-centu~ women involved in social reform: in France as well as in the United States, women ‘turned an ostensibly conservative male doctrine on its head and forged it into a revolutionary political tool.‘“J Indeed, Offen (1984) argues that the tradition of republican motherhood could be used as ‘a vehicle not only for improving the status of women but also for subverting the sexual system from within’.”

That republican ideology augmented women’s sense of ~lutonomy and self- respect in less direct ways is argued by Cott (19753, who asserts that personal satisfaction in marriage became an important consideration for some American women at the time of the Revolution. Cott, however, stresses the role played by republican ideology in transforming marriage relations, through its emphasis on male marital fidelity in the context of the family’s responsibility to produce a moral citizenry.‘0 Her finding. that rising expectations regarding marriage appear to have been related to an increased willingness to resort to divorce, contrasts with the largely economic explanation for increased instances of divorce in French cities under the liberalised revolutionary legislation offered by Roderick Phillips (1979). The ability of urban working-class French women to rqject the traditionally sanctioned ~l~is~a~?~~ ~ar;tu~~ of their husbands, the male legal and social authority decried by vocal revolutionary women such as Olympe de Gouges and Etta Palm d’Aelders, depended mostly upon the greater opportunitios for female economic independence in urban areas offered by increasingly available specialized workplaces and widening extrafamilial employment opportunities.”

Norton (1980) insists that the older hierarchical conception of the American family was undergoing some modification in the revolutionary era. due to growing freedom of choice in marriage partners and increasing subjection of the limitation of family size to joint decisions. is It appears that, in fact, between the mid-eighteenth and the mid-nineteenth centuries, a small number of American

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women began to question the notion of marriage as the destiny of all women. Lee Virginia Chambers-Schiller’s study, Liberty, A Better Husband: Sing/e Women in America: The Generations of I780-1840, analyses one hundred and thirteen single women born in the north-east between 1735 and 1848 and offers some evidence that the possibility of remaining single received strong affirmation in these decades.j9 Nevertheless, few changes in women’s actual legal status were effected in either the United States or France. Both Bell and Offen’s selections on the law and Mary Durham Johnson’s study (1980) confirm that, in post-revolutionary France, the Napoleonic Code authoritatively reasserted in law patriarchal views of the primary social retations of the sexes, and that even more efficient bureaucratic machinery could be used for keeping women in their pIace40 In her case study of women and the law in post-revolutionary South Carolina (1980), Marylynn Salmon concludes that American male groups in power similarly remained wary of any legal innovations which might change social, racial or sexual relationships. 41 Kerber (1980) also affirms the case for Iegal conservatism in America, where, for example, the laws ofcoverture, which absorbed a married woman’s legal identity into that of her husband, continued well into the post- revolutionary era.J2

In education, the issue par excellence of Enlightenment debate on the ‘woman question’, changes did occur in the aim and content of women’s education. Both Kerber (1980) and Norton (1980) regard these changes as among the most important developments of the revolutionary era in America.43 Ruth Bloch (1978) argues that the new post-revolutiona~ ideal of ‘moral motherhood’ strengthened the Enlightenment case for a more rigorous education for ‘republican mothers’ on both sides of the Atlantic4’ Charles Akers (1980) underscores Abigail Adams’ special concern for improving women’s educationJ5 Although, as Catherine Clinton (1982) observes, the American content of ‘republican motherhood’ was subject to ‘regional vocabularies’, Enlightenment ideals saw practical implementation in the proliferation of ladies’ academies and the expansion of their curricula throughout the new republic.4h Educational reform was begun much later in France than in the United States. Jean JYI. Bloch (1979) shows how Rousseau’s notion that the nation could be morally regenerated by its wives and mothers could be ‘a two-edged sword’ for French educational theory: the female pamphleteers of the early revolutionary period may have demanded improved education for themselves as wives and mothers, but male authorities proposed female education suitable only to the demands of the mknage4’. After 1815, Joseph de Maistre and other revolutionary thinkers’ arguments against publicly funded education prevented any substantial official attempts to establish schools for girls in France until the mid-nineteenth century.48

This survey has highlighted the similarities in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century French and American ideals of ‘republican motherhood’, which confined women to a subordinate role in the private sphere while barring them from the public domain. It also has raised the question of why ‘feminist’ ideals and demands in the revolutionary decades have been identified by historians of France but not by historians of the United Statesd9 In the United States, there was no comparable ‘feminist’ dissonance necessitating the type of repressive measure taken in France. The distinctively ‘English Whig’ inteilectual

tradition of the new American republic. a tradition ‘rooted in assllrnptioIls that never gave explicit attention to basic questions about women’,‘” may partially account for the relatively moderate character of American women’s proposals, while the severity of the socioeconomic grievances that led many French women to engage in revolutionary activity as a means of protesting their own condition may explain much of the militancy of their demands. The absence of the articulation of anything approaching an organised demand for women’s rights by American women prior to 1800 is also possibly explained by the disjunctive development of the two societies: in the I-Jnited States, the Revolution may have accomplished little more than that which the Enlightenment had earlier begun in France, i.e. an opportunity to re-evaluate and redefine women’s role according to new societal needs.

NOTES

I, R.R. Palmer. The Age of’rhc Dctnocrari~~ Revolurion; a Political Hisroy? o/‘Eutvpe and

Amwim. /760-/KM). 2 \‘oIs. (Princeton, NJ, 1959-64). 2. An extcnsi\,e discussion of’these approaches is found in Joan Wallach Scott, ‘Women

in history II: the modern period’. /-‘o.rr rrnrl Prtwnt 101 (19X3), 141-57. See also Carolyn C. Lougee. ‘Modern European history’ . Si,yn.v 2 ( 1977). 62X-50. Joan Kelly’s view of’ gender as a category olhistorical analysis is discussed in ‘The doubled vision of fktninist theory’. in .Judith L. Newton, Mary P. Ryan and Judith R. Walkowitz, cds.. Sr\- atd C’hs it2 ~~‘otmn’.~ Hi.rtot:r (London. 1983). pp. 259-70; see also ‘Ilitr~~ciu~tlon’. by Blxxhc W. Cook. Alice K. Harris, t’tare Cos5. Rosalind Pcrschesky and Amy Swerdlow, pp. xv-xxvi. and chap. 1, ‘The Social Relattons of’the Sexes: Methodological Implications of’ Women’s History’. pp. I- 18, in .Joan Kelly. II ‘otwctt, Ifi.stot:\. ctttd Thwy: 7%~ E.v.tu.v.r of’.loan KC/!\. (Chicago. 1984). For Amer-ican women’s histor!. see ~liznbcth H. Pleck. ‘U’omen’s history: gender as ;I category’. in J~~mes B. Gardner and George Rollie Adams, eds., 0rdinur.v People cm/ Evc,:r~/a~~

I.</?: l”crqwriLvs otl IIIC Idew Sociul Hi.uor)* (Nashville, TN, 19X3).

5. Bell and Ot.tcn. CZbnzo1, Vol. I. 1750-IXXO, pp. 15-16; quotation on p. 16. See especially theirGcncral Introduction. pp. l-l I. and theessay‘Women anti thc”rights of man” in the age of republican revolutions, 1750-1830’. pp. 13-23.

6. I&c/.. Vol. I. pp. 14-17. and the selections from 7%~ Ftdetkian C’od~. Blackstone’s C‘ot~~menruri~~s and L_‘Encrdopkhc. Vol. 1, pp. 39-41. JamcsTraeranalyses lepiblation governing marriage and the fnmily from the last years of the atzckn r&ittrc to the pronlul~~iti~)n 01‘ the civil code 11~ 1804, with attention to the application oi‘ the revolutionary law-. in ~~ff~~;~/~~~, at2d fhf Fffttft/~~ in Eiglrtefttth-C‘c,ntu~~~ Franct~(It!Xica,

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NY. 1980). Adrienne Rogers traces the fate of women under the ‘Old Law’ ofthe pre- revolutionary era, the ‘Intermediate Law’ of the Revolution, and the Napoleonic Code in ‘Women and the law’, in Samia I. Spencer, ed., French Women and rhe Age of Enlighrenment (Bloomington, IN, 1984). pp. 33-48.

7. Bell and Offen, Women Vol. I, p. 9. 8. Rendall, Origins, chap 1. English models of ‘domestic reformation’ advocated by

Mary Wollstonecraft and Hannah More are discussed by Mitzi Myers in ‘Reform or ruin: “a revolution in female manners” ‘, in Harry C. Payne, ed., Studies in Eighteenth-C’entutyv Culture 11 (1982) 199-216. Myers masterfully analyses the ways in which these female writers exploited the issue of women as vital agents of moral reform so as to transform the predominant domestic ideology into an vehicle for advancing a female critique of mal~dominated society and redefining domesticity in terms of an active and responsible social role for women.

9. Sylvana Tomaselli, ‘The enlightenment debate on women’, Histocr Workshop Journal 20 (1985), 101-24. Tomaselli’s perceptive documentation of the ‘women- culture view’ (p. 105) as held by the Enlightenment thinkers is grounded in a much more profound reading of Diderot, Rousseau and Montesquieu than is found in the following works in well-known collections: Pauline Kra. ‘Montesquieu and women’. in Spencer, ed.. French Women, pp. 272-84; Blandine L. McLaughlin, ‘Diderot and women’, in ibid., pp. 296-308; Elizabeth J. Gardner, ‘The philosophes and women: sensationalism and sentiment’, in Eva Jacobs et al., eds., Women in SocierJ, in Eighteenth-Century France: Essays in Honour of John Stephenson Spit& (London. 1979). pp. 19-27; Robert Niklaus, ‘Diderot and women,’ in ibid., pp. 69-82; Eva Jacobs, ‘Diderot and the education of girls’, in ibid., pp. 83-95. However, Tomaselli is more explicitly concerned with anthropological, sociological and psycfl~)l(~~ical analyses of gender definition, such as that of Sherry B. Ortner HIS female to male as nature is to culture?‘, in Michelle Zimbalist Rosaldo and Louise Lamphere, eds., Women, C’uitureandSociet~(Stanford.CA, 1974),pp.67-X7], which(erroneously, by Tomaselli’s argument) assume that historically western culture has accepted the women-nature equation.

10. Maurice Bloch and Jean H. Bloch,‘Women and the dialectics of nature in eighteenth- century French thought’. in Carol P. MacCormack and Marilyn Strathern, eds.. Nature,’ Culture and Gender (New York. 1980) pp. 25-41. An extensive collection of documents concerned with women in revolutionary France has been edited by Albert Soboul: Les Femmesdans la RPvolutionfran~aise. Vols. l-2, text; Vol. 3.12 broadsides (Paris, 1982). For earlier discussions of the Enlightenment debate on the ‘women question’, see also David Williams, ‘The politics of feminism in the French enlightenment’, in Peter Hughes and David ~~illiams. eds.. The Yaried f’attcrn: Srudies in the 18th Cenimy (Toronto. 1971). pp. 333-51. and Paul Hoffmann, La Femme darts Ia pensee des lumieres (Paris, 1977). A more positive view of the Enlightenment thinkers is presented by Katherine B. Clinton in ‘Femme et philosophe: Enlightenment origins of feminism’, Eighteenth Century Studies8 ( 1975),

283-99. Enlightenment views of women’s nature are surveyed by Abby R. Kleinbaum, ‘Women in the age of light’, in Renate Bridenthal and Claudia Koonz, eds., Becoming Visible: Women in Europeun Histotyp (Boston, 1977). pp. 217-35. Rousseau’s ‘sexism’ is re-evaluated in terms of its impact upon educated late eighteenth and early nineteenth century French women by Gita May in ‘Rousseau’s “antifeminism” reconsidered’, in Spencer, ed., French Women, pp. 309-17. Condorcet, Helvetius, Diderot and D’Holbach are briefly analysed by Elizabeth J. Gardner, ‘The philosophes and women: sensationalism and sentiment’, in Jacobs eta/.. eds., W’omrn in Society, pp. 19-27.

1 1. Rendall. Origins, p. 3 1.

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12. Joan Hoff’ Wilson, ‘The illusion of’ change: women and the American revolution’, in Alfred F. Young, The American R~~~oJl(riotl: ~.~p~o~.fft~ons in the Histor_v o,f’Americ*an

Rudidism, (DeKalb, IL. 1976) p, 43 I. 13. Ibid. p. 387; quotation on p. 426. Much of the recent scholarship on the history ot

w>omen in the British North American colonies and in the new United States focuses on a reappraisal of the concept of a ‘golden age’ for women. Scholars ofthe history 01 American women such as Hoff Wilson postulated that economic. social and legal conditions in the seventeenth and early eighteenth century contributed to the creation of an improvement in women’s status; however, as American society matured and became increasingly Angliciscd in the second half of the eighteenth century. women’s position supposedly deteriorated. That thesis is increasingly under attack, For a comprehensive discussion of that thesis and its critique, see Mary Beth Norton, ‘The evolution of white wonler~‘s experience in early Allierica’..~~~~ieffn ~~~t~ri~~/R~if~~,~i, 89 (1984). 593-619. For a revisionist view of’the legal status of colonial women. see Maryiynn Salmon, ‘The legal status of women in early America: a reappraisal’, I,alr trttdIfis/oty Review 1 ( 1983), 129-j 1. Salmon’s observationsareelaborated in a recent book-length study, Women and the Llnr qf‘I’roperty in Ear-/J* America (C’hapel Hill, North Carolina, 1986). Claudia Goldin introduces statistical evidence to argue against the contention that women’s economic status markedly deteriorated between the colonial era and the early nineteenth century [‘The economic status of women in the early republic: quantitative evidence’ . .Journal qf’ Jntc~rdi~cipiinut~~~ Ifistosj, XVI (1986). 375-404].

14. Jane Abray, ‘Feminism in the French Revolution’, American Historicul Revt’e~s 80

(1975). 43-62. 15. Bell and Offen argue that one way to avoid the confusion inherent in the use of the

term ‘feminism’ is to employ the term ‘the woman question’. which avoids ‘current lnisunderstandings about the evolution of historical demands made on women’s behalf during the last three centuries” ( Women, p. 2n). For the purposes oftiris review essay, we accept Rendall’s broad detinition of‘l’eminism’, drawn from the distinctions made by Gerda Lerner between ‘movements for “woman’s rights” and “woman’s emancipation” ‘: to Rendall. the word ‘feminist rel’ers to ‘women who claimed for themselves the right to define their own place in society, and a few men who sympathised with that claim’ [Origins, pi I].

16. Abray. ‘Feminism’, pp. 59-62. 17. Mary Beth Norton, Liber!,,‘.s Duughtetx: The Revoiutionury Experirnce c~‘Ame~riran

U‘omcn. I750-IKfNI (Boston, 1980), chap. 7. See also Mary Beth Norton, ‘Qhteenth- century American women in peace and war: the case of the loyalists’. ~i/~j~~~z nnd Mary ~~u~rrer~},. 3rd series, XXX111 (1976), 3X6-409. in ‘The domestication of politics: women and American political society, f78O-1920’, Am~rie~n Hixroricui Reviebz 89 (1984). 620-47, Paula Baker discusses the desirability of ‘a more inclusive definition of politics than is usually offered’, one including ‘any action, formal or informal. taken to affect the course or behaviour 01’ government or the community’ (p. 622).

18. Olwen Hution. ‘Women in revolution. 1789-1796’. Pat and Present 53 (1971). 90-108. See also Natalie Zemon Davis’ essays on the activities of city women in sixteenth-century France in Society und Culture in Ear1.r Modern Fratrcr (Stanford, CA, 1975).

19. LIarline Gay Levy and Harriet Branson Applewhite, ‘Women ofthe popular classes in revolutionary Paris, 1789%1795’, in Carol R. Berkin and Clara M. Lovctt. cds., ll’onxx, E’ul, arrd Revolution (New York, 1980). pp. 9-35.

20. Ibid., p. 23. See also Harriet B. Applcwhitc and Darline Gay Levy. ‘Women, democracy, and revolution in Paris. 1789-1794’. in Spencer, Frcndz @‘omett, pp. 64-79, and the documents in Soboul, cd., i.t>s F~mmr.~. and in Darline Gay Levy,

Reviews 607

Harriet Branson Applewhite and Mary Durham Johnson, eds., Women in

Revoiutionary Paris, 1789-1795 (Urbana, IL, 1979), passim. An account of women’s activities and attitudes towards them during the French Revolution, which utilises many original documents, is found in Paule Marie Duhet, Les Femmes et la Revolution, 1789-1794 (Paris, 1971). For the Society of Revolutionary Republican Women, see also Margaret George, ‘The “world historical defeat” of the republicaines revolutionaires’ , Scicn~e and Societ\’ 40 (1976-7), 41-437. The issue ot class is addressed by Ruth Graham, ‘Loaves and liberty in the French Revolution’, in Bridenthal and Koonz, Becoming Visible, pp. 236-54. Aristocratic women are briefly discussed by Susan P. Conner, ‘Sexual politics and citizenship: women in eighteenth- century France’, in Proceedings ofthe Tenth Annuai~eeting ofthe Western Societyfor French History 10 (1984), 264-73.

21. Barbara Corrado Pope, ‘Revolution and retreat: upper-class French women after 1789’, in Berkin and Lovett, Wamen, War, pp. 215-36.

22. Levy, Applewhite and Johnson, eds., Revolutionary Paris. passim; ibid., p. 7. Levy, Applewhite and Johnson (p. 31 I) also make a fascinating case for the association of protesting French women with revolutionary rhetoric and symbols which would remain significant in French political culture, a subject treated by Maurice Agulhon in Marianne into Battle: Republican Imagery and Symbolism in France, 17,?9-1880 (Cambridge, U.K., 1981). Tracing the use of female symbols in French republican iconography, Agulhon argues that the female allegorical image of triumphant republican virtue became established in the visual memory of the French people during the republican era. The changing iconography of the image of Liberty in America is examined by Michael Kammen in ‘From liberty to prosperity: reflections upon the role of revolutionary iconography in national tradition’, American Antiquarian Society, Proceedings LXXXVI (1976), 237-72; the paired female images of Minerva and Columbia are mentioned by Kerber, Women ofthe Repubi~~: InteRect and ideot’ogy in Re~Io/ut~onary America (Chapel Hill, North Carolina, 1980). p. xii.

23. Norton, Liberty’s Daughters. passim. 24. Louis Devance, ‘Le fiminisme pendant la revolution francaise’, Annales Historiques

de la Revolution Francaise 227 (1977) 350. 25. Ibid., passim. Quotation on p. 341. 26. Nancy Cott, The Bonds of Womanhood: “Woman’s Sphere” in Neua England,

178OLlR35 (New Haven, CT, 1977) p. 199. 27. Kerber, Women of theRepublic, p. 269. Catherine Clinton presents a similar argument

in The Other Civil War: Ameriran Womenin theNineteenth Century(New York, 1984). See also Linda K. Kerber, ‘The republican mother: women and the Enlightenment- an American perspective’, American Quarterly XXYIII (1976) 187-205; Linda K. Kerber, ‘Daughters of Columbia: educating women for the Republic, 1787-1805’, in Stanley Elkins and Eric McKitrick, eds., The Hofstadter Aegis: A ~ernor~af (New York, 1974) pp. 36-59.

28. Pope, ‘Revolution’, passim. Margaret II. Darrow describes the processes by which aristocratic French women ‘appropriated domesticity as a class ideal’ during and after the Revolution as part of an attempt to stave off bourgeois dominance at the Restoration in ‘French noblewomen and the new domesticity, l750-1850’, Feminist Studies 5 (1979), 41-65; quotation on p.42.

29. Ibid., pp. 223-32; Kerber, Women of the Republic, p. Il. 30. Kerber, Women of the Republic, p. 12; Rendall, Origins, pp. 66-72. 31. Bell and Offen, Women, p. 19. In ‘American feminine ideals in transition: the rise of

the moral mother, i 785-18 15’, Feminist Studies 4 ( 1978) 101-126, Ruth Bloch traces the evolution of the new feminine ideal back to the mid-eighteenth century and the appearance of the first American edition of Samuel Richardson’s novel, Pamela,

which oftcred an early version of the ideal which bccamc widespread later in the

century.

32. C‘ott, Bn& pus.Gnt. Hoi?‘ Wilson, ‘The illusion of change’. pp. 389-90, questions the

contention that women’s domestic role acquired political significance as ;I result 01‘

the Rcvotuiion. She notes that many American women, including Abigail Adams, were aware of the gap between the reality of‘ their daily existence and the extravagant

claims of “republican motherhood’.

33. Baker. ‘The domestication of politics’. passim

34. Belt and Oiftn. iZbmt~. p. 242.

35. Karen Orfen, ‘Dep~~p~~i~~ti~~l, n~~l~)n~lisrn and feminism in t’in-de-sicctc France’.

Anwt-km Histcwical Rwie~t. 89 ( tYti4). 675.

36. Nancy t:. C.‘ott. ‘Divorce and the changing status of women in eighteenth-ccnturb

Massachrrsctts’. M’iNiorn ant/ MU,:), Q~urtc,r/,\.. 3rd series, XXX111 (1976). 5X6-614.

37. Roderick Phillips. ‘Women’s emancipation. the family and social change in

eightccntli-~entu~ France’. ./OWF?Ui C,f’ .~OC,U/ ~~;.\tW’~‘, 12 (1979). 553-67; SW ;itSO

Phillips t’utlcr study, F@irni/~~ ~~~~~~~~~~~1.~2 irt f.oti~Ei~~~~/i~~~ntfi-C‘rttt2~~~~~ Fwnco Divotw,v

ift Roum. /7YZ-/h’il_< (New York. IYXI f.

3X. Norton. I.ftwrrr’.r Dnu,~htcr~t. pp. 232-4. I-or a brid overview offamity relationships

before and during the French Revolution, see C’issie Fairchitds, ‘Women and filmily’.

in Spencer. cd., rFc,/~~h I,t’onlc>N. pp. 97-t IO.

39. Lee Virginia Chambers-Schitter, Libcrt~~. A Bcttr~f/u.shu~~tl: Sing/c Ubm~n it? .Atnrrir~u:

777~ ~;~,~I~,~.~~~~~~~~.~ of ~~X~~-i#~~) (New Haven, CT, 1984). Otwen Huftctn discusses the

~tetlto~r~ptii~ evidence on the &mate single state in ei~liteenth-eentllry Brltnin ;InJ

Fr-ancc. stressing the economic difficulties 01‘ never-married women and widows in

‘U’omcn without men: widows and spinsters in Britain and France in the cightcenth

century’, .loumul of I:utui/j, Hi.\tor:~~ 9 (19x4). 355-76. See also the study of late

nineteenth and early twcnrizth century British women by Martha Vicinus.

/~l~~l~~~‘tlii(~F7/ tf ‘OF?7U7: l4 ~0f.k ill7d < ‘otimutiit~~ jbr Sifl<c$~ J,i ‘O?FlfW. lK_50- IY’O.

Intro~u~tioil ;rnd chap. 1. ‘7‘1~~ Revolt agamst Re~tun~j~ln~y’. pp. I-45 ((‘hiago.

19XS).

30. Belt and Ol’l’cn. II ‘017707. pp. 37-3 I; Mary Durham Johnson. ‘Old wins in new bottles:

the inslltutionat changes for women of the peopte during the French Revolution’, in

Bcrkin and Lovetr. ~t’umor, IZ’ar, pp. 107-43.

4 I. Mary tynn Salmon. ’ “Life. liberty. and dower”: the legal status of women atter the

American Revolurion’, in Berkin and Love& ft’omc~, !Pilr, pp. X5- 106.

42. Kcrber, if ‘OWCW ~$rfrr f~i~~u~)~i~,. pp. I 113-21

43. Kerber, ibid.. chap. 7; Norton, Lihertja’s Dotqhtcw, chap. 9. See also Jacqueline S.

Relnicr. ‘Rcarlng the republican child: attitudes and practices in post-re\“tutionar\;

Philadelphia’, I~‘i//iom atrd Mor:~~ L)uut7c~(~~, 3rd series. XXXIX ( tYX3). 150-63.

44. Bloch. .il/~~~i~ar~ fiwinifw ItI~ds. pp. I I 7- IX.

35. t‘h;~rte~ M’. Akers. Ahi,~aii A~/~!NI.c AF? .~??7c~~~ic~c~~7 ~~‘ormn (kston. 1980). pp~ 17-8,

65-h. 100, 1x9.

46. Catherine C‘tinton. ‘E~qualty their due: the education of the planter dat~ghtcr III the early republic’. .lou,nu/ of’ thra Eartj, Kqtddir~ 2 ( IY X2). 59.

47. Jean H. Btoch. ‘b’omen and the rct’orm oi’the altim’, in Jacobs ~/a/.. ds.. 1t’on1c,rz it1

.\‘oc,rc,~.r. p. 17. Ruth Graham examines Ihe USC of Rousseau’s ideas by French wumcn

themsctve\ during the Revolution in ‘Rousseati’sscxism revotutionl~ed’. in Paul Fritz

and R icha rci M orton. ccis.. if onrnn i~7 Iire !h’rh (. ‘trt77tcg~ arrd ~>i/?rr k;;.tf~_t-.r (pI’r3ro tlto. 1976). pp. 127-34. Traditional interprctarions 01’ Rouxse:tu are critiqued by Victor-Ci.

\L’cxte~, in ‘RoLlhseau as antif>minist’ . AtwtYt~utt H~.~~otkd Kr\~ww 81 ( 1976). 266-9 I .

4X. SCC the discussion m Claire Goldberg Moses. /.‘1.~~7~~/7 ~~mini.o?r in r/7(’ :L’iuc~reo/rt/z

C’cwtq (Alhan~. N\r , IYXdt, /w.\.\m

49. The ‘frankly feminist demands’ of Ofympe de Gouges, Etta Palm d’AeIders and Condorcet are discussed by Appiewhite and Levy ~Wo~en, democracy’, p. 66) who, however, insist that the activities of women of the popular classes cannot be characterised as motivated by ‘feminism’ (p.67). Abray details the demands of ‘feminist’ leaders’ and identifies ‘male feminists’ as well without adequately defining the term (‘Feminism’, p. 50). Rendall assumes that the radical proposals made by Olympe dc Gouges, Etta Palm ‘d’Aelders, Theroigne de Mkricourt, Claire Lacombe and Pauline L&on were ‘feminist’ in nature (Origins, pp. 50-l), as does Devance, ‘Le Feminisme”,passim. Joan Hoff Wilson notes the ‘absence of feminism in the behavior of women during the Revolution and in their attitudes afterward’ (Hoff Wilson, ‘The

illusion of change*, p. 430). 50. Kerber, IVomen qfihe Republic. p. 28.