Revolution and Rights

This prejudice greatly influenced any effort to gain political rights for women. The issue of women's right to education had been raised by a number of thinkers before the revolution. The right to vote was enjoyed by very few men and prior to the revolution was not considered an issue for women or men in France. The interest in the rights of slaves, Calvinists, Jews and non-land owners was more prevalent than the interest in women. This lack of interest in women's political rights was the result in part of the view that women were not a persecuted group.

Most of the women in France were either wives and mothers or shopkeepers, laundresses, and other menial laborers. Women's property rights and financial independence were severely restricted under French law and custom. Most men and women agreed with Rousseau and other enlightenment thinkers that women belonged in the private sphere of the home and, therefore, had no role to play in public affairs.

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omen did participate in the revolution. In the beginning, most women were in the streets protesting high bread prices. A few feminist militants seized this opportunity to push for women's rights. Marie Gouze, under the name Olympe de Gouges, published a pamphlet declaring that women were born free and equal to men in their rights. She criticized the deputies for having forgotten women. She addressed the pamphlet to the queen, Marie Antoinette, although she warned the queen that she must work for the revolution or risk destroying the monarchy. Gouze was sent to the guillotine in 1793. She was condemned as a counterrevolutionary and denounced as an unnatural woman. The revolutionary constitutions reserved political rights exclusively for men. Far from favoring the involvement of women in revolutionary politics, male revolutionaries sought to limit their participation. A convention spokesman laid down the official revolutionary line: Nature itself had destined men and women to live in separate spheres. Women were to confine themselves to the home, where they could best serve the nation by rearing their children as patriots. During the revolution, women lost the two areas in which they had enjoyed greater freedom and
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