Women in the Revolution

Women were central participants in the French Revolution — as rioters, activists, writers, and organizers. Yet the Revolution that proclaimed universal human rights systematically excluded women from political citizenship. This contradiction between revolutionary universalism and gendered exclusion is one of the period’s most important and revealing tensions.

Women and the Old Regime

Women’s lives under the old regime were defined by legal subordination. Married women had no independent legal identity — they could not own property, sign contracts, or initiate legal proceedings without their husband’s consent. Divorce was prohibited. Educational opportunities for women were limited, largely confined to convents for the elite and entirely absent for the poor.

Yet women were economically essential. Working-class women labored in markets, workshops, textile manufacturing, and domestic service. They managed household economies, haggled with merchants, and bore primary responsibility for feeding their families — a role that made them acutely sensitive to bread prices and food supply.

Aristocratic and bourgeois women wielded informal influence through the salon culture of the Enlightenment. Women like Madame Geoffrin, Madame du Deffand, and Madame Necker hosted gatherings where philosophes debated ideas that would fuel the Revolution. This tradition of women as intellectual facilitators, while real, was also limited — women shaped the conversation but were expected not to claim authority within it.

The October March on Versailles

The most dramatic instance of women’s collective action during the Revolution was the October March on Versailles (October 5–6, 1789). Several thousand market women — fishwives, laundresses, flower sellers, and other working women — gathered at the Hôtel de Ville to demand bread. Frustrated by the municipal government’s inaction, they marched the twelve miles to Versailles.

The marchers’ demands were immediate and material: bread for their families. But the march also had profound political consequences: it forced Louis XVI to accept the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the August decrees, and it brought the royal family back to Paris, permanently shifting the balance of power.

The October March demonstrated women’s political capacity in a way that could not be dismissed. These were not women following male leaders — they organized themselves, armed themselves (with pikes, knives, and a few cannons), and confronted the king directly. Lafayette and the National Guard followed them to Versailles, not the other way around.

Women’s Political Activism

Throughout the Revolution, women participated actively in political life — despite being formally excluded from it:

The Clubs

Women formed their own political organizations. The most prominent was the Society of Revolutionary Republican Women (Société des citoyennes républicaines révolutionnaires), founded in May 1793 by Claire Lacombe, an actress, and Pauline Léon, a chocolate maker. The Society advocated for price controls, militant sans-culotte politics, and women’s right to bear arms.

The Society was active and confrontational — its members attended Convention sessions, challenged deputies, and clashed physically with market women who opposed price controls. But its radicalism made it enemies on all sides. In October 1793, the Convention banned all women’s political clubs, with the deputy Pierre-Gaspard Chaumette declaring: “Since when is it permitted to give up one’s sex? Since when is it decent to see women abandoning the pious cares of their households to come to public places, to harangues in the galleries, at the bar of the senate?”

The Galleries

Women packed the public galleries of the National Assembly and the Convention, cheering, jeering, and putting direct pressure on deputies. The gallery women — known as the tricoteuses (knitters) for their habit of knitting while watching debates — became a fixture of revolutionary politics. Their presence was both democratic (public oversight of government) and intimidating (physical threats against unpopular deputies).

Petitions and Journalism

Women submitted petitions to the Assembly on issues including divorce rights, inheritance equality, public education, and political representation. Olympe de Gouges, Théroigne de Méricourt, Etta Palm d’Aelders, and others wrote extensively on women’s rights, producing pamphlets, newspapers, and formal declarations.

What Women Won

The Revolution did produce genuine advances for women, even without granting political rights:

• Divorce was legalized in September 1792, on relatively equal terms for both spouses. Women could initiate divorce for reasons including incompatibility, abuse, abandonment, and mutual consent. Thousands of women took advantage of this new right.
• Inheritance equality was established: daughters received equal shares with sons, ending the system of male primogeniture for commoner families.
• Civil marriage replaced religious marriage, and the state took over the registration of births, marriages, and deaths — reducing the church’s control over women’s lives.
• Property rights for married women were modestly expanded, though full legal equality would not come for another century and a half.
• Education: Plans for universal public education (the Condorcet Plan and others) included girls, though implementation was minimal during the revolutionary period.

What Women Were Denied

Despite these advances, the Revolution explicitly and deliberately excluded women from political citizenship:

• The 1791 Constitution restricted voting to “active citizens” — propertied males. Women were “passive citizens” by definition, regardless of wealth or education.
• The 1793 Constitution, though it proclaimed universal male suffrage, said nothing about women’s political rights.
• The ban on women’s political clubs in October 1793 was accompanied by explicit ideological justification: women’s “natural” role was domestic, and their participation in politics was a violation of nature and a threat to public order.
• The Committee of Public Safety and the Convention repeatedly stated that women’s patriotic duty was to raise virtuous republican children, not to participate in governance.

The execution of prominent women — Marie Antoinette (October 1793), Olympe de Gouges (November 1793), Madame Roland (November 1793) — carried explicit gender messages. The charges against them frequently included “unnatural” behavior: de Gouges for “wanting to be a statesman,” Roland for having been “a monster in every sense.”

Théroigne de Méricourt

Anne-Josèphe Théroigne de Méricourt (1762–1817) exemplifies the Revolution’s treatment of women activists. A Belgian-born singer and courtesan, she became a passionate revolutionary, attending the National Assembly daily, founding a political club, and reportedly participating in the storming of the Bastille and the October March.

In May 1793, a group of Jacobin women publicly stripped and flogged Théroigne on the terrace of the Tuileries for her Girondin sympathies. The humiliation triggered a mental breakdown from which she never recovered. She spent the last twenty-three years of her life in the Salpêtrière asylum in Paris, a vivid symbol of how the Revolution — and its aftermath — treated women who transgressed gender boundaries.

Napoleonic Regression

Whatever modest gains women made during the Revolution were largely reversed under Napoleon. The Civil Code of 1804 (Code Napoléon) re-established the legal subordination of married women:

• A wife owed obedience to her husband
• She could not sign contracts, buy or sell property, or take legal action without her husband’s consent
• Adultery laws were heavily gendered — a wife’s adultery was always criminal; a husband’s only if he brought his mistress into the family home
• Divorce was made more difficult and was eventually abolished entirely under the Restoration (1816)

Napoleon explicitly stated his views on women’s role: “Nature intended women to be our slaves… they are our property.”

Legacy

The Revolution’s treatment of women established a pattern that would repeat in subsequent revolutions: women participate actively, contribute decisively, and are then excluded from the political order they helped create. This pattern — visible in the revolutions of 1848, the Paris Commune of 1871, and numerous 20th-century revolutions — was first clearly articulated during the French Revolution.

The writings of Olympe de Gouges, Condorcet (who was the only prominent male revolutionary to advocate for women’s political rights), and others planted seeds that would not fully germinate for over a century. French women did not receive the right to vote until 1944.

The Revolution’s legacy for women is therefore deeply paradoxical: it articulated universal principles that logically demanded women’s inclusion while simultaneously constructing elaborate justifications for their exclusion. This tension — between the universalism of rights language and the particularism of its application — remains central to feminist theory and practice.