The eighteenth century

Across early modern Europe there can be found occasional examples of women who directly exercised political power and slightly more of those who had some indirect influence over those who had political authority. The majority of women, like their menfolk, had no access to power of any sort, yet in extremis some challenged authority, principally through riot. In this world, women’s participation in political activity was determined through birth. Of the two kinds of political regimes in early modern Europe, monarchies offered more scope than oligarchic republics for women to share in the public exercise of power. In republics, such as Venice or the Swiss cantons, the only scope for women’s political influence was informally through husbands, sons and wider kin networks. In monarchies such as Britain, France or Spain, there was the possibility for women to overtly hold power, not least by dynastic succession or by marriage, as queens. Although, as Natalie Zemon Davis points out, women never actually sat in the sovereign’s privy council, they did take part in the conversation - political and personal - that filled the halls, chambers and bedrooms of the royal palace.22

In the eighteenth century, few men, let alone women had the power of the absolute monarch and Empress of Russia, Catherine the Great. Nor was she alone, for eighteenth-century Europe contained other powerful female monarchs such as Maria Theresa, Empress of Austria, and those who through marriage had taken on the publicly powerful role of queen consort. To her cost, contemporaries saw Louis XVI’s queen, Marie Antoinette, as having tremendous influence. She was blamed for diverting the King from governing, for removing effective royal ministers such as Turgot and for draining the French treasury to buy jewellery and clothes. Many came to agree with Jacques Joseph Duguet who blamed the pernicious effect of female influence for his country’s ills: ‘the entire nation, formerly full of courage, grows soft and becomes effeminate, and the love of pleasure and money succeeds that of virtue’.23 Royal mistresses were particularly susceptible to accusations of female influence but could be power brokers rather than merely pawns in court politics. Louis XV’s mistresses, Madames de Pompadour and du Barry, were specifically trained by aristocratic male mentors and presented to the royal patron to win the rewards of favour both for their sponsors and for themselves. Women courtiers could also have considerable influence, whether by controlling access to the monarch as Maria Theresa’s attendants did or as advisers such as Queen Anne’s confidante, Sarah Churchill, Duchess of Marlborough. Even for elite women such as these, their access to this world was not a result of their own endeavours but through their family, and it was defined by their relationship to men. In turn their influence was seen in terms of their kin rather than as individuals.

Although such women were located at the centres of political power, many of their skills and attributes were deployed by other elite women who were not indifferent to the operation of power and their ability to influence it. Indeed, one of the ways in which women were able to exercise political power was to become effective participants within patronage systems. Access to political power, albeit indirectly, was possible for some women through building and sustaining personal networks with the powerful and influential. Although literary and intellectual in focus rather than explicitly political, the hostess could use the salon as a space to develop new ideas, form new networks and act as a patron herself, fostering the developing art of conversation. The salon had ‘transformed a noble leisure form of social gathering into a serious work space’.24 It thus had, in the broadest sense, political potential.

Salons were particularly amenable to women as they were less public spaces than the male world of London’s coffee houses and gentleman’s clubs. They appeared in the leading capitals of Europe, including London and Berlin. However, it was Paris that was renowned for its salons. Here salonnieres such as Marie Therese Geoffrin and Julie Lespinasse guided the conversation of men of letters and, in turn, engineered their own education in the most progressive thought of the day. But these initiatives were an ambiguous development for women’s empowerment as the salonniere’s role was largely limited to ‘the governance of male conversation’.25 Some salonnieres did have political influence. So Suzanne Necker helped to make her husband finance minister of France in 1776, through her influential salon, and a generation later, her daughter, Germaine de Stael, led the intellectual and political opposition to Napoleon Bonaparte from her salon. Fear of such feminine influence grew. To Rousseau, the salonniere represented a disturbing unsettling of gender roles: ‘From the lofty height of her genius, she scorns every womanly duty, and she is always trying to make a man of herself’.26 Influence in a monarchical regime had significant costs, as Davis points out: ‘they are hidden, they are unaccountable, and they are especially freighted with suspicion when in the hands of a woman’.27 Yet there are ways of seeing such feminine influence in a more positive light.

Patronage, as in most of Europe, was central to eighteenth-century British politics. Few men had the right to vote, so women, like all the millions of unenfranchised men, had to find other strategies to affect political decision-making. Patronage was peculiarly suited to women as it linked together social and electoral politics, providing elite women with an important way of participating in political life.28 Their gender did not debar them from being brokers of patronage, but their proximity to powerful men enabled them to play such a political role. Traditionally, patronage has been seen as part of ‘Old Corruption’, of pre-Reform, pre-modern politics, and as such has been disparaged. Yet within a system where women had no formal power and where the contemporary ideal was one of an apolitical, domestic femininity, it was possible for some women to use their influence, their family and their friendship networks to engage in political negotiations. In this context, rank and relations seem to have mattered more than gender in shaping patronage requests and expectations and in determining responses and outcomes. Moreover, because patronage operated where the public and private domains overlapped and could be shaped to fit women’s lives, the strategies deployed by these elite women could transfer to the new era heralded by the Great Reform Act of 1832. The political effectiveness of mobilising kin and friendship networks, of lobbying directly and through intermediaries, was not lost on new generations of women campaigners who continued to remain outside the world of formal politics.

If the business of patronage took place largely in the private domain, there were other ways in which eighteenth-century women might be apparent in public spaces: through protest and riot. Plebeian women had long been accustomed to take part in and even initiate riots in towns and villages when it was felt that rightful claims had been violated and the authorities were failing in their duty. This could be for social and political reasons: when grain or bread prices were too high, when taxes were unjust, when open fields were enclosed or when religious outrages were committed. Some see the food riot as a space if not dominated by women at least as highly permeable to women’s active participation, while others insist that food riots were not a distinctly feminine province at all.29 The significant presence of women in many of these riots seems to be linked to a perception that this was ‘a reactionary form of collective action - spontaneous and impulsive in nature, purely local in focus, apolitical and communally based’.30

Across eighteenth-century Europe there were outbreaks of popular violence in which women participated in different ways: they did not ‘think only with their stomachs’.31 Women’s roles in riot may have varied, but local law, which defined riotous offences and community traditions about the limits of acceptable behaviour, often influenced them. Such protests were not frequent but when riot broke out women were primarily involved in economic and religious disturbances that could have a political context. This varied from country to country. For example, in Britain, in addition to bread riots in the 1760s and 1790s, women participated in riots in the 1720s prompted by rumours of the extension of indirect taxation, though not to the same extent as men. Purely political unrest such as the Gordon Riots appears to have been male terrain. But then recording women’s participation in such informal actions was never systematic. In popular protests, women could act with other women, with men or provide the incitement to revolt and then leave more violent action to the men.

But what of women’s relationship to electoral politics? The possibilities for this seem slight. Yet in recent revisionist accounts of eighteenth-century English women and politics, a new reading of women’s relationship to, and participation within, political life is being made. It was generally assumed that this was a time when women were barred by custom from parliamentary politics and that widespread cultural misogyny excluded all but a few exceptional elite women from political life. New scholarship traces women’s involvement in all elements of the electoral process from what Elaine Chalus terms ‘social politics’ (the management of people and social activities for political ends) to managing and directing campaigns and controlling family interests. These electoral activities were a logical extension of traditional female roles and were ‘generally accepted, often expected, and sometimes demanded’.32 In some cases this was because the women concerned were not particularly interested in politics as such but became involved in local contests to protect or promote a family interest, but for others their involvement stemmed from a sense of ideological or factional loyalty. These were ‘political women’ whose open political involvement was accepted out of respect for their political capabilities and in deference to their positions within families or factions.

Yet the most notorious example of women’s electioneering in England, the 1794 election in Westminster, has traditionally been seen as evidence of a general antipathy to women’s public political activity. The Duchess of Devonshire attracted considerable adverse publicity for her energetic canvassing for Charles James Fox. Indeed this election has been seen as hardening the boundary between acceptable private and familial activity and the proscribed public male world of politics for women. The much-circulated image of the Duchess kissing butchers for their votes was considered to be offensive not only because her femininity had been transgressed but also so had her class position. The opprobrium poured on her was thought to have put an end to all patrician women’s public political activity for many generations, yet this judgement has recently been challenged.33 The Duchess was by no means the only woman involved in canvassing in this particularly high-profile election, nor was her political career ended by it, although the experience did affect how she practised her politics thereafter.

If the themes of eighteenth-century European women’s practical relationship to politics are delineated by class - the influence of elite women and the rioting plebeian women - then these two elements came together and were transformed by the French Revolution. Ideas about political participation and the nature of citizenship were matters of contention amongst European intellectuals in the century before the French Revolution. What had largely been an intellectual matter until 1789 became a major political issue from the start of the French Revolution.

The French Revolution affected women’s relationship to politics in a number of ways, both at the time and in the following centuries. One of the most significant was the way in which at the birth of modern democracy the definition and political practice of citizenship was so thoroughly gendered. Thus the whole understanding of what constituted politics and who could or could not expect to participate in the exercise of power was reconfigured in an upheaval that had implications beyond the specific events of the Revolution itself. The Revolution may have produced feminist ideas, but these emerged in tandem with a much more powerful ‘highly gendered bourgeois male discourse that depended on women’s domesticity and the silencing of “public” women, of the aristocratic and popular classes’. As a result the bourgeois public sphere created through Revolutionary politics was ‘essentially, not just contingently, masculinist’.34 This has had crucial consequences for women’s relationship with politics throughout the modern era. It seemed that the effect of the French Revolution was to legitimate gender hierarchy while at the same time other social hierarchies were being challenged by new concepts of individual rights and social equality. But this need not be an entirely pessimistic scenario, for it can also be argued that the French Revolution ‘both excluded women from citizenship and raised the possibility of it’.35 It was this possibility that was explored in different ways across Europe during the nineteenth century and beyond.

The Declaration des Droits de I’homme et du citoyen (Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen) in 1789 created a new political space. Individual rights were now firmly on the agenda, yet how much room to manoeuvre did this actually give women? The new constitution defined the active citizen as a man who could meet a particular tax qualification while all other adults were deemed passive citizens. The group excluded from active citizenship included women, foreigners, domestic servants and men who did not meet the tax qualification. The latter could become active citizens once they paid sufficient tax: women never could make such a transformation. Yet being defined out of citizenship did not stop a significant number of women engaging in informal political acts, thus exploring a de-facto citizenship. Nor did it stop some women making claims for more formal citizenship rights. The most famous example is Olympe de Gouges who argued for equality in political participation and citizenry in the Declaration des Droits de la femme et de la citoyenne (Declaration of the Rights of the Woman and of the Citizen) (1791). Her case was that women represented the nation not although they were mothers, daughters and sisters but because they were. A rather different conception of female citizenship emerged in 1792, in which women’s right to self-defence was combined with a civic obligation to protect and defend the nation. In this understanding of citizenship, which was not gendered, the previously passive citizenry were to be armed in defence of the revolution and the nation. Thus the armed processions that took place in Paris in June 1792 included women wearing liberty caps carrying sabres and blades. Gisela Bock argues that the historical significance of de Gouges and the other voices that were raised for female citizenship ‘resides not in the fact that they failed but that they existed at all. The revolution gave them space, and the revolution silenced them’.36

The Revolution saw new forms of women’s political activism and brought new responses and legends about the nature of women’s political action and its effect on the body politic. Crucial moments during the Revolution seemed to be shaped by women’s participation. Women were present at the storming of the Bastille and subsequent actions in Paris in the later summer of 1789, but the women’s march to Versailles in October 1789 came to symbolise the collective effect of militant women. Women were now making political and economic demands - demands that translated into political action. This included women who entered the National Assembly, disrupting the procedure and even occupying the speaker’s chair. Their actions have been seen as ‘direct interventions in the legislative process and symbolic replacements of representatives who did not represent’.37 For contemporaries and even subsequently, one of the unsettling aspects of the early stages of the Revolution was the public participation of women, particularly of plebeian women such as the Paris market women who provided the core of the women’s march. Women had been involved in food riots and protests over rising prices, but 1789 saw a new context for such economically driven actions. Essentially, the march connected demands for food with a sense of the political obligation of the ruler, and of justice and moral order. The women called for ‘Bread, but not at the price of liberty’.38 In this way the October days prefigured subsequent mobilisations of unorganised women over the cost and distribution of food, linking the economic with the political through consumption. Such activities had the potential to lead to significant revisions in the long-term political agenda and linked directly and particularly to the everyday experience of working women.

As attempts at reform quickly progressed into social revolution, female faces were to be found in the crowd, on the streets and in the spaces where informal politics took place, such as the new political clubs. Women’s political activities took a range of forms, in some of which women sought to engage directly within the political upheaval, either as members of their class or explicitly as women, while others were drawn in and out of less formal political activity by struggles around subsistence. And, of course, women were to be found on all sides of the debate, both spurring the revolution forward and also resisting and even falling victim to it, while many more endeavoured to ride out the often chaotic situation prioritising family survival. We can never know the individual motivation of many of the women in the crowd or plot their participation over time and its effect on the rest of their lives. There is no evidence to suggest that the sans-culotte’s wife had political aspirations of her own, particularly in terms of full citizenship rights. Like later political movements, such as Chartism in Britain, these women appear to have endorsed the idea that not only their own but crucially their household’s interests were represented through their husband’s citizenship rights. Yet this did not induce passivity: sans-culotte women took seriously their right to petition, denounce and fill the tribunes of the Assembly, to criticise politicians and to address them as ‘tu’ to remind them of whose interests they were supposed to represent.39

The women who took part in the political clubs were more unequivocally politically active. The more radical ones, such as the Jacobins and the Cordeliers, did not admit women as members, but they could witness the debates from the galleries. Some women’s clubs were formed: the most famous was the Society of Revolutionary Republican Women which lasted from May to October 1793, led by Pauline Leon, a chocolate-maker, and Claire Lacombe, an actress. For some historians, the existence of such clubs and the articulation within them, and within the club culture more generally, of demands for women’s citizenship rights shows that some women saw the feminist possibilities of the Revolution. For others, silencing of such demands by male revolutionaries is more critical; for others still the concern is the extent to which such debates touched the experiences and shaped the perception of politics of the broader mass of the female population. Certainly, the society led by Leon and Lacombe was never large (about 170 members at its foundation), but it was militant and had an effect far beyond its membership. The Society of Revolutionary Republican Women came into conflict with another group of politicised women, the market women of Paris, over the enforcement of price controls and their successful campaign for a law obliging all women to wear the revolutionary tricoloured cockade in public. A series of brawls between the two groups of women gave the Jacobin Government the excuse it needed to act against the society and, indeed, all political women. Having been useful allies, women became a nuisance, particularly when they highlighted the shortcomings of government policy. On 30 October 1793, women’s clubs and associations were outlawed and women were reminded that their life lay within the home: as was said in the Convention, ‘a woman’s honour confines her to the private sphere and precludes her from a struggle with man’.40

Once women’s political clubs had been prohibited, militant women continued to speak out in markets and in the streets. Although this was a particularly diffuse form of political engagement, it became much more important after 1793 and had the virtue of being much harder to control. Dominique Godineau has mapped the different ways in which the food question shaped women’s public interventions as individuals or as part of the crowd from 1793 to 1795.41 She argues that although insurrections might be prompted by economic crisis, the key for the women as citoyennes without citizenship, was that these were moments when women were able to claim rights in the name of ‘the people’ that, as women, they did not actually have. One of the ways in which they did this was to incite men to action. The fact that after the failure of the Prairial insurrection of May 1795, the Convention prohibited women from gathering in the street in groups of more than five, showed just how important this form of action had become. Indeed, Lynn Hunt sees one of the distinguishing features of the Revolution as being not only women’s organised activism but also ‘the surprisingly open political space created by the radicalization of the revolution’. As she says, ‘What was new was the self-conscious organization by women to demand their political rights’.42 She stresses how important it is to change our focus from understanding why the revolutionaries opposed female activism and full citizenship for women, to unpicking how it is that women were able to organise in the first place, given widely shared attitudes to women’s proper place in society, in effect, to put agency and the workings of patriarchy into the total story of the Revolution. The narrative of radical democrats excluding women from active citizenship is only the beginning of a story that focuses on how women have negotiated passive citizenship or, in the French case, being citoyennes without citizenship. Thus, whether women had, or even demanded, the vote is only part of how European women’s relationship to political power can be reconstructed. Indeed, how women found and exploited political spaces is an important part of the story to be told here.

Women were also to be found amongst the counter-revolutionaries. For example, in provincial France, peasant women saw few advantages in a new order that wanted to pay for their produce in a worthless, debased currency, and they had little to gain from the regime’s attempts at price-fixing. For many in rural France, the Revolution seemed alien, urban and a Parisian imposition. When these concerns combined with strong local Catholic allegiances, rural women defended their faith against Jacobin attempts to impose dechristianisation through occupying churches, reclaiming confiscated religious objects and freeing dissident priests from prison.43 These women became as important to the myths of the Revolution as any of the Parisian citoyennes: republican revolutionaries and historians would blame the failure of the revolution on counter-revolutionary women in collusion with priests. As Olwen Hufton remarks,

The most persistent ghost of the French Revolution was not the woman of the revolutionary crowds but the counter-revolutionary woman of 1795-6. A citizen at one remove with her rationality called into doubt she succeeded in becoming the basis of a troubling legend.44

The Revolution also has to be seen as crucial to the birth of feminism. Were the apparently universal rights announced as the Rights of Man to include women’s rights? As Condorcet wrote in 1790, ‘Either no individual of the human race has genuine rights, or else all have the same; and he who votes against the right of another, whatever the religion, colour, or sex of that other, has henceforth abjured his own’.45 The Dutchwoman Etta Palm D’Aelders, the Englishwoman Mary Wollstonecraft and the Prussian Theodor Gottlieb von Hippel produced the most well-known texts claiming women’s emancipation and their admission to full citizenship, though none prompted an organised women’s movement at this stage. Indeed, Wollstonecraft did not call on women to mobilise for their rights; rather she looked to men to forgo female subservience in order to acquire better wives and mothers, ‘in a word, better citizens’.46

A number of Wollstonecraft’s arguments had a resonance beyond her times. She argued that women, like men, were rational creatures and that they therefore had rights like men. But she did not challenge sexual difference and effectively argued for a kind of sexed citizenship based on women’s domestic and maternal duties. Like de Gouges, Wollstonecraft has been read as emphasising women’s maternal duty as the basis of women’s claim for political rights, legal independence and full citizenship, that is, republican motherhood.47 For the republican mother, her major political task was to instil her children with patriotic duty. These were ideas that were to shape women’s political participation in the forthcoming centuries.

The politicisation of women during the Revolution shocked both conservatives and revolutionaries in and beyond France. In England, with its traditional antipathy to France, many had already condemned ancien regime France for the unnatural political influence it was thought to give women. With Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790) came the unequivocal condemnation of the revolution through its female participants: the women who marched to Versailles were the ‘furies of hell, in the abused shape of the vilest of women’.48 The disruption to gender norms helped to condemn the Revolution. This was not just the spectacle of working women daring to seize the initiative in public events but, moreover, a queen who was also a wife and mother being driven by force from her home. His views reflected common concerns. Indeed the escalation of the Revolution, reinforced by the war between Britain and France after 1793, prompted a deluge of conduct books, sermons, novels and magazine articles largely directed at women and underlining the centrality of separate sexual spheres to the maintenance of political stability. In other countries, the effect of the Revolution was more indirect. For example, in Denmark there was no response among women to the conceptions of female emancipation embraced by the Revolution, despite the translation of Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman into Danish in 1801.49 Although the Revolution prompted isolated claims for women’s emancipation during the 1790s in Belgium, the Dutch republic, in the various states and principalities of Italy and Germany and in Britain, they were overwhelmed by the conservative backlash that swept across Europe. This was the moment that the eighteenth slipped into the nineteenth century.