this took the form of demanding participation in government. The new reformers, however, like the puritans, tended to set limits to the scope of participation. Many of them still felt that there must be certain criteria for democratic rule, and retained qualifications of property, class and sex. (Rowbotham, 1974, p. 19)
As men in France began to ally themselves with radical movements, women as well tried to include themselves within the scope of radical argument:
Male radicals, influenced by the idea of men controlling nature and society by science and reason, did not necessarily see that this had implications for women. They tended to assume that a man would reason for his woman and children, just as the puritans had assumed that democracy would only involve heads of households who owned property. (Rowbotham, 1974, p. 20)
It was in the context of the French Revolution that Mary Wollstonecraft produced her work Vindication of the Rights of Women and extended ideas about the need for all human beings to decide their fate to women. She called for women to be able to decide their own fate based on what was in their interests rather than depending on men. She saw some relationship between the oppression of women and existing property relations. She saw that in society, men had more scope for freedom than women (Rowbotham, 1974, pp. 20-21).
The place of women in the eighteenth century was thus secondary to males and was dependent on the male, whether it was the father, a brother, or a husband. This sense of dependence continued into the nineteenth century and was indeed seen as the rightful place of women in society. These attitudes were reflected in opera as in other arts. Ross (1988) notes
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