Question

What was the position of women in French society?

Answer 1

women were considered inferior than man

Answer 2

There were no women of note on the revolutionary side, but that says more about the mindset of Europe at the time, rather than the politics of the revolution. Women were primarily responsible for one of the pivotal events in the revolution which was storming the royal palace at Versailles and forcing the monarch back to Paris, from which point things deteriorated for the Royals:

Women played a MAJOR role in the French Revolution. The People who Stormed the Bastille included men and women. The original popular movement of 1789–1791 included many women standing alongside men. The most important moment of the Revolution was the Women’s March to Versailles. This was the decisive incident, more important than Bastille and Napoleon’s seizure of power. Thanks to the initiative of Parisian market women, the Capital of France shifted from Versailles to Paris for the first time in more than a hundred years, and Paris became the center of France, and remains so to this very day. It wouldn’t have happened without those women.As for whether women were treated equally to men. .The attitude towards women in the French Revolution divided on the basis of class. The ones who were proto-feminist leaning like the Girondins, such as Marquis de Condorcet, admired aristocratic and bourgeois women who were salon hostesses and educated, but they all hated lower-class Parisian women, and the latter hated the former. The Parisian women tended to back the Jacobins and Robespierre was, believe it or not, a sex-symbol among these ladies. (Women of the French Revolution, Between the Queen and the Cabby) Robespierre never backed the women’s vote (as opposed to votes for Jews, Black people, and abolishing slavery), and he was a bit macho.Parisian women were often driven by the same interests as the street radicals. They wanted bread for their children, they wanted changes and they wanted an end to famine. Their mentality was similar to earlier medieval era peasants revolt (which also featured poor women participating). They certainly did not have any sentiments of sisterhood, except in brief moments (such as when they sympathized with Marie Antoinette in her highly gendered trial). They also often attacked and fought each other. Like Theroigne de Mericourt, who tried to start an all-woman’s batallion was publicly beaten by Revolutionary women for her Girondin leanings and ultimately Jean-Paul Marat had to come and save her.The Jacobins in the French Revolution put forth ideas like the no-fault divorce, they allowed women to inherit property and were firm in their commitment to women’s right to primary education. But all of this was reversed under Napoleon…the Famous Civil Code strengthened male rights, and especially male rights over women. Napoleon once said about a school-for-girls, “Raise for us believers but no thinkers”, and he was a macho catholic pig in that regard. They also insisted that women work in various fields of France while the men were fighting in battlefield during the first total war of 1793–1794.Women’s suffrage and vote did not advance during the Revolution itself. The most pro-woman major Revolutionary Condorcet wrote a draft of the Constitution and even he didn’t put women’s vote in the paper because he knew nobody would agree to it then. The main reason why the Revolutionaries opposed giving women the vote was that there was a perception among them that women were more religious and more supportive of the Church and Royalty. So they felt giving them suffrage was against their interests.But at the same time, the French Revolution did advance women’s rights. It energized and inspired Mary Wollstonecraft to write A Vindication of the Rights of Women and public movements and participation of women, as well as calls for equality, made many of them start imagining a future of equal rights.