The Revolutionary Double Standard

Throughout modern history, women have been indispensable yet disposable participants in political revolutions. From the English Civil War to the Russian Revolution, a consistent pattern emerges: women mobilize en masse to support revolutionary causes, only to be sidelined when new power structures consolidate. This phenomenon finds its clearest expression in the French Revolution (1789-1799), where women’s dramatic marches shaped history while their rights remained negotiable. The revolution that promised “Liberté, égalité, fraternité” ultimately reinforced patriarchal norms, demonstrating how gender equality often becomes the first casualty of revolutionary pragmatism.

Precursors to Rebellion: The Ancien Régime’s Gender Order

Pre-revolutionary France operated under a rigid system of legal and cultural patriarchy. The Napoleonic Code later codified what tradition already dictated: women passed from their father’s authority to their husband’s control upon marriage. Education for girls focused on domestic skills, while property laws treated women as perpetual minors.

Remarkably, some Enlightenment thinkers challenged these norms. The Marquis de Condorcet argued in 1790 that “either no individual of the human race has genuine rights, or all have the same ones.” His radical proposal for gender equality in voting, education, and property rights stood in stark contrast to Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s popular vision of domestic femininity. Rousseau’s contradictory legacy—revolutionary political theorist and traditionalist gender essentialist—would haunt revolutionary France.

Bread and Petitions: Women’s Early Revolutionary Roles

As the Estates-General convened in 1789, women from different classes articulated distinct demands:

– Bourgeois women submitted formal petitions (cahiers de doléances) seeking protections against marital abuse, economic safeguards for dowries, and educational reforms
– Working-class women faced immediate starvation from bread shortages, transforming them into direct actors rather than petitioners

The October 1789 Women’s March on Versailles became history’s most consequential grocery protest. Nearly 7,000 armed market women and revolutionary allies marched 12 miles through rain to confront Louis XVI. Their successful forced relocation of the royal family to Paris demonstrated women’s political power—but this energy wasn’t channeled into lasting structural change. The subsequent Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen conspicuously omitted women’s rights.

Radical Peak: The Republic of Petticoats and Pistols

By 1791, activist Olympe de Gouges published her Declaration of the Rights of Woman and the Female Citizen, demanding:
– Equal participation in political assemblies
– Access to public offices and professions
– Shared parental authority

Two years later, as foreign armies threatened revolutionary France, women’s contributions became indispensable. The Society of Revolutionary Republican Women (founded 1793) embodied radical feminism—members wore trousers and pistols while organizing military supplies. Their activism bore legislative fruit:
– Divorce legalization (1792)
– Equal inheritance rights (1793)
– Girls’ public education provisions

This period marked revolutionary feminism’s zenith before the Thermidorian Reaction.

The Thermidorian Backlash: Domesticity as Counter-Revolution

The pattern repeated predictably: once military crises eased in 1794, revolutionary governments reversed women’s gains. The pretext came when working-class women protested rising bread prices. The National Convention:
– Banned all women’s political clubs (October 1793)
– Executed prominent feminists including de Gouges
– Restricted public gatherings of more than five women

Napoleon’s 1804 Civil Code institutionalized the backlash, declaring: “The husband owes protection to his wife, the wife obedience to her husband.” Married women regained the legal status of minors, requiring male permission to work or travel.

The Long Aftermath: From Salons to Suffrage

Post-revolutionary Europe saw feminist ideas migrate from streets to salons. Nineteenth-century activists like Flora Tristan and John Stuart Mill adapted French revolutionary rhetoric into new campaigns:
– 1848 Seneca Falls Convention echoed de Gouges’ Declaration
– International Council of Women (1888) established transnational networks
– Suffrage movements employed French revolutionary symbolism

The voting rights timeline reveals both progress and paradox:
1900: 1 nation (New Zealand)
1920: 15 nations
1950: 69 nations

Yet as Simone de Beauvoir later observed, the ballot box proved insufficient. Few revolutionary feminists anticipated how formal equality could coexist with persistent cultural and economic disparities—a lesson echoing through contemporary gender wage gap discussions and #MeToo reckonings with patriarchal power structures.

The Unfinished Revolution

The French Revolution’s gender dynamics established a template repeated in subsequent upheavals. Women’s labor and bodies serve as revolutionary resources, while their personhood remains negotiable. Modern feminist movements still grapple with this legacy—whether fighting for representation in Egypt’s Arab Spring or challenging post-apartheid South Africa’s persistent inequalities.

The market women of Versailles would recognize today’s persistent paradox: societies that celebrate women’s revolutionary courage often resist restructuring the domestic spheres that constrain them. As historian Joan Wallach Scott notes, “Gender is a primary way of signifying relationships of power”—a truth as visible in the Jacobin clubs as in modern parliaments. Until revolutions confront this foundational inequality, their promises of universal liberation will remain half-fulfilled.