Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

The French Revolution is often cited as a defining moment of modernity. Apart from a number of specialized studies, much of the general work on the revolution has ignored the questions raised by feminist scholarship, but it is necessary to look at the complex ways in which women took part in this revolution, and the ideological positions that developed. Landes (1988) describes the period as one in which women actually lost status. Referring to the salons like those of Madame Du Deffand and Madame Geoffrin, the patroness of the Encyclopedia, she suggests that women had a greater degree of freedom in the last decades of the ancien régime. Noblewomen and nuns even had some political space, as shown by the elections to the Estates General, where some of them could be represented, even though by men. The revolution and its consciously masculinist discourse, however, excluded them from the public sphere and, as Landes shows, the republic was not just constructed without women, but against them. This reading of the revolution suggests that women, as a category, did not have a revolution.This painting, entitled French Revolution, 1789, depicts Parisian women marching to Versailles on October 5, 1789. Parisian women took an active part in the French Revolution by forming clubs, such as Etta d'Palme's Friends of Truth, which provided meeting places where women could discuss revolutionary ... log in or subscribe to read full text