This page is currently a building site…
I’m only partway through my two years of research, and at the moment I don’t have very much to share with you. However, posts about Etta Palm d’Aelders and Louise de Keralio should be up in the next few weeks, so check back soon!
This past week I was lucky enough to attend the ICUR in Leeds, and to present my research there. I met some of Leeds’ Laidlaw scholars and had a really wonderful morning talking about my research.
I will definitely be attending next year, and hopefully giving a full presentation rather than just a poster presentation. In the meantime, I’m really looking forward to attending the 2018 Laidlaw conference in St Andrews at the end of the month!
Dorinda Outram’s short chapter in The Social History of Language is a gold mine of well-articulated and well-supported opinions on women’s involvement in the French Revolution, and the historiography that has tackled it. Quoting Furet, Barny and Higonnet, discussing Michelet and de Gouges with equal weight, and frequently using the words of revolutionary women themselves, Outram manages to give a comprehensive account of the historiography that is easily accessible to a complete layman. She also uses history, sociology and linguistics in conjunction with one another to create a more thorough picture of the study done in this area – something which is often lacking in other historians’ work.
She comes to a few principle conclusions, which are as follows:
This is certainly an argument I would agree with – time and again in the sources I have studied, women who involve themselves in politics are seen as corrupting influences on the state as a whole, and the slurs against Marie Antoinette speak for themselves in this regard.
Again, an argument I would struggle to refute. Even today, in a far more open-minded world, female virtue means something entirely different to male virtue, and women are punished sexual transgressions that are not even transgressions when committed by men. It is clear to see in contemporary sources, where the slander thrown at politically involved women usually questions their virtue – focusing largely on their sexual crimes (real or imagined) as a way of discrediting their politics.
It is, of course, hard to say whether this discourse arose deliberately or merely through an unhappy accident. However, with men like Robespierre and Chabot so often holding power, I think it would be naïve to dismiss the idea that the anti-woman rhetoric of the republic was entirely unintentional.
Michelet’s assertion that women formed the backbone of many counterrevolutionary movements has proven hard to cast aside, and I think Outram’s explanation of the reasons behind this is plausible too. However, it is certainly an argument that most women’s revolutionary history tries to disprove, and thus it is difficult to see the truth of either argument.
Outram also discusses what she views as the limitations of the current study of women in the French revolution: she believes that feminist historians do not focus enough on the private lives of women, whilst sociolinguistics focuses entirely too much on the private sphere, at the expense of the public. She also raises the point that, perhaps, focusing only on a small group of female activists might result in women’s revolutionary history remaining entirely separate from the wider history of the revolution. This is an idea which I considered at length after reading the chapter, specifically in relation to my own project. Was I, by focusing so intently on these six women, doing women in general a disservice? Was I conforming to the decades of historians who had pushed women’s history aside, separating it from “real history”? In many ways, I was forced to admit that I was. However, my aim was not to complete a sociological overview of the entire revolution, or to tell the story of every women through these six. This project is a form of micro-history, in a way: it focuses solely on six women out of the thousands that were part of the French Revolution. It does this not to represent all women in their image, but to explore the lives of a few extraordinary individuals. I did not mean to write a history of women’s involvement in the revolution, merely of these women’s involvement. It is possible that in doing so I have neglected the other thousands of women involved – however, I have attempted to reinstate these six women, who have been neglected or mistreated by history since their own time. For now, that is enough.
“Women are now respected and excluded, under the old regime they were despised and powerful” – Olympe de Gouges
This site is the final product of a two year long research project, undertaken as part of a scholarship. When the idea first occurred to me, I wasn’t sure what form it would take, or even what exactly I would be researching. I knew I wanted to focus on women in the French Revolution, because they are so often overlooked.
The French Revolution was perhaps the first time human rights and equality had been taken seriously, and implemented on any real scale. Most people, when asked, could name Robespierre or Napoleon, even without a background in history – these names are famous (or infamous) the world over. However, this ground-breaking attempt to create equality was not universal: it discounted women, black people, and Jews, amongst others. Partly as a result of this, the women who were so instrumental to overthrowing the French monarchy and establishing the Republic are usually forgotten. It was my intention, with this project, to reinstate the memories of some of the truly incredible women involved in the Revolution. I could have written about hundreds of women, pro- and anti-revolutionary, rich and poor, named and anonymous, but in the end I decided to focus on just six. These six women are intended to be a symbol, a reminder, of the hundreds and thousands of others whose stories are brushed aside in favour of men’s.
The six women I chose vary greatly: some were rich, well-educated, even nobles by birth or marriage; some were poor, ill-educated, ordinary working women. This was a conscious decision to represent a broad spectrum of the women who supported the Revolution. They were all revolutionary, as opposed to counterrevolutionary, although the extent to which they supported the revolution does differ. All six women have been chosen because they themselves were important, not because of their relationships with important men (as is so often the case). These are not so-and-so’s wife, or such-a-person’s sister, they are activists and campaigners with personal ambitions, struggles and triumphs. They were also chosen because of their stance on women’s rights: almost invariably, these women fought for their rights, and the rights of their sex.
My aim is to present the lives and stories of these women, and to put them in the wider context of the time in which they lived, and by doing so to remind the world that revolutions do not happen without women, and the most iconic and well-known revolution was not different.
Thanks for joining me!
Good company in a journey makes the way seem shorter. — Izaak Walton
On the Barricades 