Meet Our Women of the Revolution
In late 18th century France, the role of women in society was a grim one mirrored by most countries around the civilized world. As advocated by Rousseau's Emile and prescribed by the Bible, women were universally regarded as agents of seduction and temptation who inherently belonged in the domestic sphere. In such a family environment, women adopted the identity of mother, breadwinner (in the literal sense), teacher, and guardian angel all at once. However, in the political and intellectual sphere, women assumed the identity of biblical Eve, a corrupting influence given to "hysterics" and limited in usefulness to the fertility of her womb. Subjugated to her husband and the dictates of popular knowledge, whatever rights a woman wielded under the Old Regime were markedly less than the already minuscule rights awarded to men.
However, women shared struggles besides discrimination that allowed for the adoption of a common motivation for revolution. For many women of the Third Estate, their integral role as providers for their families was being compromised by the erosion of guilds and the growing number of recently unemployed men flooding in to steal jobs traditionally held by women. Customarily, women had always ensured economic security for their families through many means ranging in severity from mere physical labor to prostitution. The survival of the family dynamic was dependent upon the economic contributions of women, and as these contributions swiftly dwindled, women turned to bread riots in a desperate attempt to stave off starvation. Such protests clearly defined the frustrations of the women of the Third Estate during the years leading up to 1789: as articulated in the cahiers, working class women demanded a constitutional monarchy, due process, and some system for poor relief (as seen in England). However, the most uniting and catalyzing frustration--the match that lit the first spark of radical revolution and violence--went unsaid: the Third Estate's disillusionment with the chronically lethargic pace of change in governing bodies. Tailored to each woman's daily life, experiences, values, and desires for change, this frustration would prove to accelerate the radicalization of the Revolution and change the course of European history forever.
However, women shared struggles besides discrimination that allowed for the adoption of a common motivation for revolution. For many women of the Third Estate, their integral role as providers for their families was being compromised by the erosion of guilds and the growing number of recently unemployed men flooding in to steal jobs traditionally held by women. Customarily, women had always ensured economic security for their families through many means ranging in severity from mere physical labor to prostitution. The survival of the family dynamic was dependent upon the economic contributions of women, and as these contributions swiftly dwindled, women turned to bread riots in a desperate attempt to stave off starvation. Such protests clearly defined the frustrations of the women of the Third Estate during the years leading up to 1789: as articulated in the cahiers, working class women demanded a constitutional monarchy, due process, and some system for poor relief (as seen in England). However, the most uniting and catalyzing frustration--the match that lit the first spark of radical revolution and violence--went unsaid: the Third Estate's disillusionment with the chronically lethargic pace of change in governing bodies. Tailored to each woman's daily life, experiences, values, and desires for change, this frustration would prove to accelerate the radicalization of the Revolution and change the course of European history forever.
La DENTELLIÈRE (Corinne Babineaux)
Social Status Like many of my fellow citoyennes, I was married pretty late; environ vingt-huit ans, je pense (around 28, I think). It wasn't really momentous because, like most marriages, it wasn't a match for love, but for a man who could support me and my children. My focus is to pass on a secure set of skills to my kids, Heloise and Ringard. They're all I have now, after five miscarriages and one foundling my husband left along the Seine.
No matter what my heart tells me, though, the foundling isn't my fault--not with such piss-poor wheat harvests begging la Grande Faucheuse (Grim Reaper) to return to France. No one has bread. No one has money. No one has hope--except the tax collectors, whose eyes shine with vice and whose bellies stretch by the day to accommodate their avarice. In Les Halles, my tired ears cling to stirrings of Revolution. To sharp, whispered words that turn le roi into mincemeat and the abyss of my stinking lacemaker's heart into radical hellfire. |
Education Quoi? My peasant skull is too thick for philosophy, my heart too practical to indulge in any lesson besides those doled out by the toils of a merciless life. Alarmiste, anarchiste; there are many words for my brand of intelligence, all worth so much more than lessons in court manners or dead languages.
With revolution on the horizon, I laugh when thinking of the First and Second Estates. How shamelessly they wallow in their ignorance, a weakness that will cost them ten times more than any number they dream of in their warm goose-down beds! My knowhow is practical stuff--like making bread out of human bones, stealing red dye to make my husband's bonnet rouge, and how to think up some pretty good points for a cahier de doleance faster than you can blink your beady eyes. As a lacemaker, all I need is my (ironically) stocky, strong build and my ruthless attitude. Even though I sometimes wish I could read L'Ami du Peuple, I'm just too busy earning barely enough to feed my family to worry about literacy and "enlightened" principles. |
Rights?!? As a member of the Third Estate, my rights and personal prestige are already trop petits (very small). I have some collective rights that enable me to use my husband's property, but otherwise, I am not much better than a slave. By the law, I am not recognized as an independent individual, but rather as a dependent whose social identity is encapsulated by my husband. I may be living, breathing, thinking--zoot alors, maybe even holding natural rights as some Enlightenment fools may lead you to believe, but I am still, in the most basic sense, property of my husband.
I do not have the precious liberty of choice when my primary duty to my husband--to bear as many children as possible--is reflected by our neighbor's pregnant sow. I do not have the empowering right to free speech when my unwanted, disdained words always fall on deaf, spiteful ears. I am good enough to educate my children, yet not deserving of a basic education myself. In the home, my son, Ringard, exercises more autonomy and independence than I will ever be allowed in my wildest dreams. My rights and identity are truly trop petits. I am nothing but the shell of a loveless marriage and a hated gender. But please don't pity me. Pity the patriarchy, pity society, for withholding such vibrant individuals from the public sphere and expression. |
La FÉMINISTE (Olympe de Gouges)
CLICK ON ME - Declaration (**WITH ANNOTATIONS**).docx | |
File Size: | 167 kb |
File Type: | docx |
Mapping the Current of Revolution
Characterized by the tug and pull of the yin-yang forces of reactionary blowback and revolutionary advance, the French Revolution embodied the mercurial crucible of the women's rights movement. Initially cast as villains, women soon emerged as the heroines of the French Revolution, as decorated by scars borne from livid bread riots as by words arising from the ink of revolutionary pens.
However, the members of the fairer sex serve a dual role in one's historical analysis of the French Revolution. The glaring limitations of France's revolutionary fervor were both highlighted by women's exclusion from political expression and subject to international debate. First explored by Edmund Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), a work endorsing the traditional selection of anti-feminist weaponry, such as conservatism and inherited rights, Burke insisted that women were biologically destined to act as the supporter of their families and that politics was the province of men (as rationalized by traditional misogyny). However, another voice rose to refute Burke's conservatism: Mary Wollstonecraft's A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, writing:
"If women are to be excluded, without having a voice from participation of the natural rights of mankind, prove first, to ward off the charge of injustice and inconsistency, that they lack reason--else this flaw in your NEW CONSTITUTION will ever shew that man must in some shape, act like a tyrant!"
According to Mary Wollstonecraft, the doctrines of liberalism and natural rights couldn't be justified within the French Revolution if they were withheld from women on the basis of gender. Realizing that while the French government was in this state of flux, women's voices might finally fall upon attentive ears, Wollstonecraft advocated a widening of the definition of the female role beyond reproduction. Demanding that the Revolution's call to reconstruct society and create a "new man" be extended to include women as well, Wollstonecraft embodied an adamant outside voice that kickstarted a continental backlash against Rousseau's distrustful, romanticized depiction of the ideal woman that relied too heavily on antiquated currents of traditional thought.
However, the members of the fairer sex serve a dual role in one's historical analysis of the French Revolution. The glaring limitations of France's revolutionary fervor were both highlighted by women's exclusion from political expression and subject to international debate. First explored by Edmund Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), a work endorsing the traditional selection of anti-feminist weaponry, such as conservatism and inherited rights, Burke insisted that women were biologically destined to act as the supporter of their families and that politics was the province of men (as rationalized by traditional misogyny). However, another voice rose to refute Burke's conservatism: Mary Wollstonecraft's A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, writing:
"If women are to be excluded, without having a voice from participation of the natural rights of mankind, prove first, to ward off the charge of injustice and inconsistency, that they lack reason--else this flaw in your NEW CONSTITUTION will ever shew that man must in some shape, act like a tyrant!"
According to Mary Wollstonecraft, the doctrines of liberalism and natural rights couldn't be justified within the French Revolution if they were withheld from women on the basis of gender. Realizing that while the French government was in this state of flux, women's voices might finally fall upon attentive ears, Wollstonecraft advocated a widening of the definition of the female role beyond reproduction. Demanding that the Revolution's call to reconstruct society and create a "new man" be extended to include women as well, Wollstonecraft embodied an adamant outside voice that kickstarted a continental backlash against Rousseau's distrustful, romanticized depiction of the ideal woman that relied too heavily on antiquated currents of traditional thought.