Question

What was the role of french women in the french revolution???

Answer 1

Traditional roles. Women had no political rights in pre-Revolutionary France; they could not vote or hold any political office. ... The highly influential Encyclopédie in the 1750s set the tone of the Enlightenment, and its ideas exerted influence on the subsequentRevolution in France.

Answer 2

The French Revolution really wasn't very revolutionary when it came to gender roles. In fact, one prominent Montagnards politician characterized the role of the wife as intrinsically that of the homemaker, taking care of the children while her radical husband was off protesting.

Probably the best chance women had for any real advancement in the Revolution was the Revolutionary Women’s association, led by Olympe de Gouges, one of the first outspoken feminists in history. De Gouge in 1791 published the “Declaration of the Rights of Women and the Female Citizen”, a clear riffing on the Declaration of the Rights of Man, where she demanded full gender equality for women.
Unfortunately for the cause of gender equality in France, de Gouges was in the wrong faction. She was a Girondin, a moderate Republican, and opposed the more radical elements of the Revolution. She supported that Louis XVI be exiled, not executed. The last straw came in 1793 when she published a demand that a referendum be called as to whether France would be a monarchy or a Republic(to be fair, this demand was totally unworkable). She and her associates were arrested and purged as part of the Reign of Terror. With them died any chance that the French Revolution would see advancement for women- and, indeed, it eventually saw a rollback of the rights of women, when Napoleon in his Napoleonic Code declared a woman fundamentally subordinate to her husband, and abolished divorce.