Essay Series 6.1: Women didn’t benefit from the European Enlightenment or the American and French revolutions during the 1700s.

The history I learned about the Enlightenment and the American and French Revolutions taught me that the Enlightenment was a time of intellectual freedom. I also learned that the impetus for the American and French Revolutions was to bring freedom from tyranny to everyone.

These events did result in more individual rights for White men. However, women and people of color didn’t gain rights. They largely remained under White men’s control through legal means, including couverture and enslavement.

Couverture was a legal doctrine that applied when women married. Legally, they became one with their husbands and lost their legal rights to own property and control their financial resources. In addition, they had few, if any, rights to their children. Essentially, women were their husbands’ property. Some groups are proposing similar restrictions now. For example, certain Christian nationalist pastors, including Doug Wilson and his colleagues, advocate replacing women's individual voting rights with a household vote that their husbands control.⁴¹¹

Enslavement involved White people in the United States treating people of color as property, most of whom were Black. White people could buy, sell, or abuse enslaved people with few, if any, legal consequences.

Enlightenment

The Enlightenment was a European-based upsurge in intellectual, philosophical, and scientific knowledge and research. As in Ancient Greece and Rome, the European Enlightenment philosophers during the 1700s generally said that women were inferior to men. The Enlightenment philosophers asserted that women were more irrational and connected to nature than men. Men were rational and in control. Women had to remain in their domestic roles because they were capable of little else. For example, Jean-Jacques Rousseau wrote that everyone should have equal rights, with the exception of women. He argued that women needed to be suppressed from childhood; otherwise, who would do the work underlying society?⁴¹² Also, he asserted that men risked tyranny at the hands of women.⁴¹³

The effect of this thinking was to support men’s continued control over women. At the time of the Enlightenment in England, women were legally “covered” by their marital bonds with their husbands (couverture). This common law English doctrine was exported to British colonies in the Americas.⁴¹⁴

A French exception to the Enlightenment’s misogyny was the Marquis de Condorcet. He argued that women were the equal of men, and any deficits they had were due to poor educational opportunities and the resulting lack of knowledge. Condorcet said that women should have equal rights of citizenship as men. His arguments didn’t sway the anti-woman views of France’s revolutionary and post-revolutionary leaders.⁴¹⁵

I bring up the Enlightenment because its philosophers’ work underlies some of the thinking leading to the American (1776) and French (1789) revolutions. Both revolutions used women’s labor and later denied them equal rights. Some women who were progressive thinkers and writers were guillotined in France for not conforming to the restrictions that French society imposed on women.

American Revolution

During the American Revolution, Abigail Adams, wife of future President John Adams, was prescient when she wrote him a letter in 1776 about the new code of laws that would be necessary after the Revolution was successful.⁴¹⁶ She said,“…Remember the ladies and be more generous and favorable to them than your ancestors. Do not put such unlimited power into the hands of the husbands. Remember, all men would be tyrants if they could.”⁴¹⁷

Her husband and other revolutionary leaders ignored her and other women’s concerns. This happened despite the fact that during the Revolutionary period, women actively supported the war. Women formed ladies associations in Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Maryland, and Virginia. One in Pennsylvania wrote and distributed articles about independence. A number of these associations raised thousands of dollars for the revolutionary army. Women also organized protests and boycotts of British goods and had to manage their homes without access to essentials. They did so by making clothing and refusing to buy certain goods.^418,419,420

Women got involved in fighting. They fought alongside or replaced their husbands in battle. For example, Deborah Sampson, whose alias was Robert Shurtliff, was a leader of dangerous reconnaissance missions under George Washington. During an illness, Sampson’s identity as a woman became known. She was honorably discharged in 1783 and was the first woman soldier to receive a full military pension. Her husband was awarded a widow’s⁴²¹ pension after Sampson died. Women also followed the army in person to work as nurses, cooks, laundresses, and water carriers.^422,423,424

Finally, women managed farms and businesses when their husbands went to war. Martha Washington is just one example of this. She ran her and George Washington’s substantial properties while he was leading the Colonists’ revolution against England.^425,426,427

French Revolution

Women led the first uprising against the monarchy in 1789, which sparked the French Revolution. Poor, hungry women led a 17-mile march on Versailles, where the king of France and his family lived at the time. The women wanted food because they and their families were starving. The leaders of the march forced the king and his family to go to Paris.⁴²⁸

Women received no reward for instigating the rebellion. In revolutionary France’s 1791 Constitution, women were “passive citizens” along with domestic servants, criminals, and people who were financially bankrupt.⁴²⁹

Some women who spoke out politically or for women’s rights died as a result. Olympe de Gouges claimed that women should be citizens with the same rights as men. De Gouges was welcomed into major salons in Paris and was a prolific writer advocating for women’s rights. Her most well-known work, The Rights of Woman and of the Female Citizen, asserted that women were not inferior to men. Rather, men made themselves superior by suppressing women. De Gouges was arrested for her political views and continued her writings from jail. She had initially supported the French Revolution but had more moderate political views than Robespierre, who was instrumental in the Reign of Terror. De Gouges died by guillotine at age 45 in 1793.⁴³⁰

In October 1793, the National Convention in France banned women from all political activities. Madame Roland opposed the radical revolutionaries who conducted the Reign of Terror. The government executed women, such as Madame Roland, for being politically active.⁴³¹

After Napoleon became dictator of France in 1799, following the chaos of the post-French revolutionary period, he created the Napoleonic Code of Laws in 1804. This code took away what little freedom women had in France at the time. The Code said that women had to obey their husbands and needed their permission to act. Women faced severe consequences if they committed adultery while men didn’t. The Napoleonic Code affected the French colonies and many other countries.⁴³² The Code had a long reach. Women didn’t get the right to vote in France until 1944, and women couldn’t enter a profession without their husband’s permission until 1965.⁴³³

Reflections

The 1700s was an era of increased freedom for White men, while women’s rights lagged behind by at least 150 years. The men in the United States and France controlled the women, enslaved or not. This happened despite women supporting, fighting in, or helping to lead the two revolutions.

Growing up, I didn’t learn much about women’s roles in revolutions. I have a vague recollection of learning about women disguising themselves as men to fight in the American Revolution. However, I didn’t learn that women were critical to the success of the American and French revolutions.

What did you learn in school about women’s roles in revolutions against tyranny?