"Formed principally of the portraits of women, drawn by Michelet in his History of the revolution."--Author's pref. Includes chapters devoted to such general topics as the influence of women on the 18th century, the worship of women for Robespierre, the execution of women, and the reaction of women following the Revolution. The author also concentrates on individuals such as Mme de Stäel, Mme de Condorcet, Olympe de Gouges, Rosa Lacombe, Théroigne de Mericourt, Mme Roland, Charlotte Corday, Mlle Kiralio [sic], Lucille Desmoulins, and Danton's two wives.

Excerpt from Women of the French Revolution The Women of the French Revolution is so vast a theme that hitherto, even in France, it has not yet met with anything like exhaustive treatment. Michelet himself admits that the title of his book, Les F emmes de la Revolution,1 is misleading, and that he has written of a few heroines rather than of the mass of revolutionary women. A much later writer, M. Adrien Lasserre, in his work on Women's Participa tion in the Revolution2 says that he has found it impossible to cover completely a field so extensive. The attempt which M. Lasserre has renounced cannot be made here. All I hope to do is to give some idea of the rank and file of revolutionary women and of their famous leaders, during little more than a brief period of five memorable years. That period extends from May, 1789, until July, 1794, with some glances now and then, before and after. One aspect of this subject of revolutionary women - their connection with the secret societies of the day I have purposely ignored. It is obscure and highly controversial. Unfortunately, though these societies have been much written about, and especially of late, it has often been in a partisan spirit. This book will constantly deal with parties, but I trust not in the spirit of a partisan. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.

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In this provocative interdisciplinary essay, Joan B. Landes examines the impact on women of the emergence of a new, bourgeois organization of public life in the eighteenth century. She focuses on France, contrasting the role and representation of women under the Old Regime with their status during and after the Revolution. Basing her work on a wide reading of current historical scholarship, Landes draws on the work of Habermas and his followers, as well as on recent theories of representation, to re-create public-sphere theory from a feminist point of view.Within the extremely personal and patriarchal political culture of Old Regime France, elite women wielded surprising influence and power, both in the court and in salons. Urban women of the artisanal class often worked side by side with men and participated in many public functions. But the Revolution, Landes asserts, relegated women to the home, and created a rigidly gendered, essentially male, bourgeois public sphere. The formal adoption of "universal" rights actually silenced public women by emphasizing bourgeois conceptions of domestic virtue.In the first part of this book, Landes links the change in women's roles to a shift in systems of cultural representation. Under the absolute monarchy of the Old Regime, political culture was represented by the personalized iconic imagery of the father/king. This imagery gave way in bourgeois thought to a more symbolic system of representation based on speech, writing, and the law. Landes traces this change through the art and writing of the period. Using the works of Rousseau and Montesquieu as examples of the passage to the bourgeois theory of the public sphere, she shows how such concepts as universal reason, law, and nature were rooted in an ideologically sanctioned order of gender difference and separate public and private spheres. In the second part of the book, Landes discusses the discourses on women's rights and on women in society authored by Condorcet, Wollstonecraft, Gouges, Tristan, and Comte within the context of these new definitions of the public sphere. Focusing on the period after the execution of the king, she asks who got to be included as "the People" when men and women demanded that liberal and republican principles be carried to their logical conclusion. She examines women's roles in the revolutionary process and relates the birth of modern feminism to the silencing of the politically influential women of the Old Regime court and salon and to women's expulsion from public participation during and after the Revolution.