Revolutions, citizenship and sexual difference

Revolutions, citizenship and sexual difference

Much of the inspiration for the women’s rights movements of the nineteenth century lay in the political ideologies that influenced the American and French Revolutions. In British North America, colonists employed Lockean notions about consent of the governed and Rousseauian concepts of natural rights and republicanism to justify resistance to reinvigorated imperial rule between 1763 and 1783. These ideas and the disruptive effects of resistance and revolution shaped the actions of large portions of the general population. People of colour found inspiration in the rhetoric of liberty, and those who were enslaved took advantage of numerous opportunities created by wartime disorder, including aiding both the British and American forces, to free themselves. Some middling and elite white women remained loyal to British rule; others took up the cause of resistance and revolution. In neither case did women necessarily follow the lead of the men of their families. Many white women formed sewing circles to aid the war effort; others took action based on their roles as consumers. Poor and working women, concerned about the effects of wartime hoarding, set off food riots. A group of elite women in Edenton, North Carolina, issued a statement of support for the non-importation agreements in 1775. A similar group of elite women in Philadelphia collected the money they saved by limiting their consumption of luxury goods and used it to benefit George Washington’s army in 1780.

Abigail Adams echoed women’s public activism in her now well-known private letter to her husband John Adams. Writing to him while he was serving in the Continental Congress in 1776, she urged him and his colleagues to ‘remember the ladies’ as they made laws for their new nation. Abigail Adams considered the guarantees of life, liberty and pursuit of happiness mentioned in the Declaration of Independence to be as much her rights as her husband’s, but John Adams did not take her admonition seriously. Nor did subsequent legislators; neither the 1783 Articles of Confederation nor the 1787 Constitution addressed the question of women’s rights in the new nation.

Like their sisters in the USA, women who participated in the French Revolution considered liberty, equality and fraternity to be as much their rights as those of men. Working-class women marched on Versailles to bring the king to Paris in 1789, and they instigated bread riots in the city. The Society of Revolutionary Republican Women (1793), the first group to organize for women’s rights, saw themselves both as consumers responsible for feeding their families and as citizens equal to men in their capacity to bear arms. They demanded price controls and argued for women’s right to carry arms in defence of their country.

Encyclopedia of nineteenth-century thought 206 Other advocates of women’s rights in France saw the Revolution as an opportunity to

remake entirely notions of equity, justice and citizenship. They sought to equalize the status of women and men, both by instituting political equality and by changing policies regarding education, marriage and sexuality. The Marquis de Condorcet, one of the only men to speak in favour of women’s rights, called for full suffrage; he also advocated women’s education and sought to legalize birth control and homosexuality. Etta Palm d’Aelders, a Dutch woman who participated in the French Revolution, called first on the Estates General and later on the Assembly to include women in the political life of the nation. She also campaigned especially for divorce laws. Both Condorcet and d’Aelders saw contemporary ideas about marriage and sexuality as detrimental to women and in need of change.

This opinion of marriage and sexuality was shared by one of the best known of the women’s rights activists of the French Revolution, Olympe de Gouges. A self-made woman of letters, de Gouges explicitly opposed the identification of the rights of citizenship with masculinity. Seeking equal citizenship rights for women, she adapted revolutionary rhetoric to make the argument for women’s rights. De Gouges rewrote the seventeen articles of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen (1789) in her Dedaration of the Rights of Woman and the Female Citizen (1791), replacing the word ‘man’ with the words ‘woman and man’ and pointing out the significance of certain rights for women. Freedom of speech, for example, would aid women’s sexual autonomy and enable them to demand support from the fathers of their children, eliminating the shame of illegitimacy and giving women leverage in non-marital sexual relationships. De Gouges also proposed replacing marriage with a simple and easily dissolvable civil contract, a model for which she appended to her declaration.

When the Jacobins took control of the French government, women’s participation in politics came under attack, and de Gouges found herself in direct conflict with revolutionary gender ideology. The Jacobins saw women’s value to the Republic in their nurturing abilities as mothers, and Jacobin emphasis on femininity as motherhood precluded any public role for women. For the crime of trying to assume a masculine political role, Olympe de Gouges was guillotined in 1793.

Most women avoided such fatal rejection of their political activism in the revolutionary era, and, in fact, some saw significant changes. In Massachusetts, a woman and man known as ‘Bett’ and ‘Brom’ used the concept of natural rights to sue for their freedom. Their suit brought an end to slavery in that state; in 1781. Some women had limited voting rights by the beginning of the nineteenth century. In New Jersey, for example, tax-paying determined voting rights, and legislation affirmed inclusion of women voters in 1790. In France, marriage became a civil contract in 1791, and divorce became legal in 1792.

Most gains, however, were soon lost. Though several states followed Massachusetts in abolishing slavery, federal laws in the USA continued to sanction the institution until the Civil War in the 1860s. In France, the Napoleonic Code rolled back revolutionary reforms regarding marriage and divorce in 1804. And New Jersey legislators revoked women’s suffrage in 1807.

In fact, by the beginning of the nineteenth century, married white women in both the USA and France held only an indirect relationship to the state. The roots of their condition lay partly in republican political theory and partly in their legal status, both of

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which defined women as dependants in republics that valued the autonomy of the individual citizen. As described in such works as Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Émile (1762), the abstract individualism of the republican citizen required reason, virtue and independence, all of which were based on sexual difference. Reason was a masculine trait. Since Rousseau’s Sophie could not use reason to control her passions, she lacked the capacity for republican virtue, and therefore for full citizenship. Even Emile’s virtue could be ensured only through a stable home life grounded in marriage and family. And, finally, republican virtue also required economic independence so that the citizen could set aside his own self-interest and use his vote in the interest of the common good. Rousseau thus defined the individual (male) citizen in relationship to others—the women, children and other dependants of his family and household. Those others failed to meet the criteria for citizenship at least in part because the (male) citizen’s virtue was predicated on both his difference from them and their dependence on him.

Mary Wollstonecraft famously took issue with Rousseau’s attitude towards women in her influential Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792). Addressing Rousseau’s notion that women were not equipped to function as republican citizens, Wollstonecraft maintained that any deficiencies women exhibited were the result of poor education and lack of opportunity rather than innate capacity. If women were vain and self-serving as Rousseau claimed, Wollstonecraft argued, it was because a society controlled by men had limited them to subordinate roles. This male-dominated society had taught women that feminine behaviour was their only route to power or influence. To rectify this situation, Wollstonecraft urged, women should be recognized as ‘reasonable creatures’ and taught to think for themselves. Provided with educations equal to that of men, women could become as good citizens as men.

Wollstonecraft’s critique of Rousseau addressed only part of the problem that political ideology posed for women at the end of the revolutionary period; seeing women as reasonable creatures did not necessarily change their dependence on men, an element of both republican ideology and French and US legal systems. These legal systems limited married women’s economic and personal autonomy by defining them as dependants. The Napoleonic Code established women’s legal status in France and its colonies, and English Common Law remained part of the legal system in the USA long after the American Revolution. English jurist William Blackstone described women’s legal status under the Common Law when he explained coverture in his Commentaries (1765). Women gave up certain rights when they married, losing their legal identity because husband and wife were seen as one person—the husband—at law. That is, a woman’s legal identity was covered by that of her husband during the term of the marriage. Since most women were married at some point in their lives, at any one time the great majority of women in the USA and Great Britain had no independent identity at law, leaving them unable to make contracts, to sue or be sued, or to own property in their own name. They were, in a manner of speaking, legally dead. Similarly, the Napoleonic Code denied married women’s property rights. It also eliminated divorce and modified adultery laws. Coupled with republican ideology, these legal systems ensured that only certain self- supporting, property-owning, white men could meet the criteria for full citizenship— including the franchise—in France and the USA.

Thus defined out of the category of republican citizenship, women were to adopt the position of republican womanhood in its stead. This indirect relationship to the state

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made them responsible for its continuation by maintaining its moral integrity. The ideal republican woman was modest and well educated. She was to remind her husband to focus on the common good rather than on self-interest, and she was to train her sons to be virtuous republican citizens. She was not to take any active political role.

One positive result of the ideal of republican womanhood lay in new opportunities for education. Condorcet in France, Wollstonecraft in Britain and Judith Sargent Murray in the USA: all advocated improving women’s education. And in the USA, for example, numerous academies were established for the education of girls and young women at the turn of the century. The curricula at these academies went well beyond the music, art and languages of earlier finishing schools, teaching girls of the middling classes such academic subjects as mathematics and history, which had previously been reserved for boys. Girls, however, still lacked the opportunity to prepare for the professions by learning Latin and Greek. The goal of education for women lay primarily in enhancing their domestic role, making them good spouses and mothers for men and boys, who were the true citizens of the republic.