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Berghahn Books

WOMEN AND THE PUBLIC SPHERE: A Modern Perspective


Author(s): Joan B. Landes
Source: Social Analysis: The International Journal of Social and Cultural Practice, No. 15,
GENDER AND SOCIAL LIFE (August 1984), pp. 20-31
Published by: Berghahn Books
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/23169275
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Analysis: The International Journal of Social and Cultural Practice

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SOCIAL ANALYSIS
No. 15, A ugust 1984

WOMEN AND THE PUBLIC SPHERE:


A Modern Perspective

Joan B. Landes

One of the most exciting by-products of the resurgence of feminist scholarship


in recent years has been the discovery that in writing about our subject, women, we
are simultaneously discovering ourselves to be strands of a complex history of
women and modernity. The growing politicization of women in the nineteenth
century led to the creation of feminist movements in the countries of North
America and Western Europe. Today, a similar impulse animates women to shape
an autonomous feminist politics. However, everywhere that women have claimed
political rights and powers, they have had to overcome seemingly intractable
barriers. For the very definitions of politics and political subjectivity were shaped in
the pre-modern era in a manner which denied women's status as a political subject.
Thus, feminism as it emerged necessitated a discourse which authorized women's
involvement in the public realm. Once this is understood, it is no longer surprising
to discover how often feminism has been described in anti- or a-political
metaphors, such as "republican motherhood", "domestic feminism" or "social
housekeeping".
These labels suggest the paradoxes which result when the category of woman is
inserted into a masculinist discourse on politics and public life. They also
underscore the fact that the discursive field of modern political theorizing, at its
core a critique of the older suppositions of patriarchal politics, nevertheless was
constituted by a binary structure of oppositions: between public and private, state
and family, temporal and unchanging, discourse and silence, universal and
particular, culture and nature, rational and irrational, order and chaos, power and
morality, justice and love, knowledge and superstition, city and countryside. These
terms constantly interpenetrate and transform one another; but indicated in this
series of oppositions is an uneasy relationship of women to politics.1 The ideology
of republican motherhood, an eighteenth-century invention, highlights this
ambiguity within the discourse of modern politics.
I propose to examine these antinomies at the outset of the modern period from
the standpoint of a political language fraught with sexual metaphors and gendered
constructions. The Enlightenment, the intellectual and cultural movement of
eighteenth-century Europe and America, offers an excellent point of departure for
an investigation of the relationship between feminist politics and discourses on
women. Here, a lively debate over the "woman question" transpired within an
already highly politicized intellectual climate. A concern with the topics of women,
childbearing and family life flavoured the writings of male and female authors. In
fact, the desire to emancipate women — within the family and within society — was
just one strand of a larger shift in discourse through which new definitions of the
categories of "public" and "domestic" were beginning to emerge.
Liberal and republican schemes for limiting the power of absolute monarchs
and expanding the liberties of subjects were of special importance in shaping the
new definitions of public and private. In particular, the republican impulse to create
a self-governed political community of virtuous citizens, bound together not by

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selfish interest as in the strictly liberal model but by a genuinely shared set of
common interests in public affairs, was joined to a new set of commitments to
female nature and natural domesticity. It provided the metaphor, republican
motherhood, for a domestication of woman on the eve of her possible
emancipation into society. Initially, the institutional setting for the modern
understanding of public and domestic existence was provided by, respectively, the
bourgeois public sphere, the new form of urban public life which accompanied the
social rise of the bourgeoisie, and the restricted or private bourgeois family form.2
Against the backdrop of these institutional developments, I will discuss the
eighteenth-century debate on women and its impact as a theory of republican
motherhood on women's role in the French Revolution and its aftermath. Finally, I
will conclude with some observations on the relationship between the institutional
and discursive changes which accompanied the opening of the modern age.
The Enlightenment's defense of reason and scientific method against ancient
prejudices and traditionaliste notions of truth affected all fields of human
endeavour. The domination of woman was construed by many to be a powerful
example and a residue of the political and religious abuses of the ancien regime.
Reason and the force of critique appeared as potentially efficacious weapons in the
struggle for women's emancipation. For the most part, however, no such battle
occurred openly and explicitly within pre-revolutionary society. Enlightened
thinkers usually maintained an ambivalent posture towards the justice of the
women's cause. This is aptly reflected in the manner in which gender differences
were mapped on to a language of cultural and natural distinctions. Broadly
speaking, gender roles within society were defended on the basis of perceived
hierarchies within the natural world. The new reason and science, that is, could be
made to serve the old cause of tradition, in this case that of the ascription of
immutable inequalities between the sexes. The fact that reason itself was grounded
in nature or held to be natural generated a raised level of respect for the necessity of
cultural divisions. At the same time, however, such a confidence posed difficulties
for the Enlightenment's claims regarding the unity and universality of reason,
claims that were already challenged by the discovery of widespread cultural variety
within the world community.
All of this suggests that the central Enlightenment metaphor of women's
relationship to nature conceals considerably more than it reveals. In the eighteenth
century context, we can isolate two variant emphases, both of which contributed to
strong efforts to contain female sexuality and to confine women's space within the
new interior of the bourgeois domestic sphere. On the one hand, woman, like
nature, provided a moral antidote to the worst abuses of civilization. Nevertheless,
women's virtue could offer a justification for her necessary privatization. How else
could her spirituality, innocence or purity be protected and preserved? On the other
hand, woman as nature inhibited the progressive side of society and its rational
reconstruction. Insofar as woman represented a backward, traditional, irrational
force, she had to be controlled, contended with and contained. Masculine science
in this respect usurped the role of unclothing, scrutinizing and ultimately
controlling female nature in much the same manner that science hoped to master
the external universe in its entirety.3
In the place of the authority of tradition and revelation, the Enlightenment
substituted the authority of progress and looked to science as a certain method for
arriving at truth. Some eighteenth century writers refined earlier versions of
historical writing and began to narrate the relationship between past and future
within a rationalistic model of historical explanation. Here too, however, women
were portrayed in ambiguous terms. On the one hand, as victims of oppression,
women were surely the potential beneficiaries of historical progress. I would

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underscore the word "beneficiary" for women were never seen as creators of their
own fate, as historical actors. In the most fully realized version of a philosophy of
history, we find Hegel's World Spirit on horseback cast as Napoleon, the warrior
and emancipator. On the other hand, insofar as hesitations existed about the
corrupt, even exploitative, path which civilization seemed to be taking, women's
"natural" and unchanging relationship to the family and the reproduction of
children was asserted, for it offered a reassuring anchor to the now rapidly
disappearing comforts of a more traditional social structure.
These incongruities are best viewed against the alterations occurring in the
eighteenth-century from a life form associated with sociability to one of
domesticity.4 The moral centre of this new domestic universe was an elevated
concept of childhood and maternity, a family existence which initially was the
special contribution of the bourgeois class. Significantly, the bourgeois ideal of
privacy, of the home as a sense of place in an otherwise uncertain universe, first
emerged at a time when public existence was becoming more and more variegated.
Once the bourgeoisie wrested state power, however, bourgeois publicists tended to
spurn the forms of sociability which had accompanied and abetted the class's social
and political rise.
In the cosmopolitan urban public world of eigtheenth-century society
networks of sociability independent of royal control had developed and places
sprung up where strangers might regularly meet. Their distinguishing political
feature was an articulated existence beyond the realm of official public functions.
This new public life appeared within coffeehouses, cafes, coaching inns, theatres,
opera houses and urban parks. Especially in the large capital cities the public also
came to mean a life passed outside of the direct purview of one's family, even of an
older kinship structure whose boundaries were far wider than the newly popular
definition of the isolated nuclear family. Likewise, it is essential to notice that the
public sphere of eighteenth-century society was one which also stood in opposition
to the secretive and hierarchical aspects of court society in the absolutist state. It
carried the seeds of a more democratic public existence, outside of the sphere of the
state proper. Significantly, on this terrain women began to play a more prominent
role in public life as salonières, theatregoers, members of reading societies and,
among the popular classes, as participants in political manifestations.
In continental Europe the salon was widely regarded as a powerful force, "a
vast engine of power, an organ of public opinion" or, in Montesquieu's words, "a
kind of republic ... a new state within a state".5 This novel institution was largely the
creation of aristocratic women. It played a particularly important role in fostering
social intermingling and marriage among otherwise segregated social groups and
classes. Salonières organized, according to their own "rules" of comportment, a
terrain upon which manners and talk were decisively altered. The ridicule heaped
on the précieuses by numerous male writers is a strong indication of the
intrusiveness and violation with which they regarded women's interventions on the
terrain of civilized discourse. In any event, the arts of enlightened conversation
were practiced by the salon guests, in a potentially democratic atmosphere where
behaviour, not social rank, was the deciding factor in gauging one's social
acceptability. Here, the literary and political aims of the bourgeoisie were fostered.
The eighteenth-century salon was not a feminist institution, yet neither was it a
wholly male domain. In the interior of the family drawing room, a demi-public
world where women had a recognized place, a form of institutional life was created
which established some of the political prerequisites of a more mature democratic
society. The salon was a transitional institution, located somewhere between the
aristocratic past with its large public households and the new private space of the
foyer, the invention of the nineteenth century bourgeoisie. Notably, women were

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associated in the public mind with a new shape of life which integrated alternative
sources of status into the culture of the traditional elite. In its form as well as its
content the salon possessed a feminist dimension.
It is important to keep these facts in mind when considering Rousseau's
attacks on the "corrupt women of Paris", his contempt for the artifice and
convention of Court-centered and aristocratic life, le monde, and his efforts to
substitute natural domesticity for the more public lifestyle of upper-class women.6
His arguments on the family and on male and female nature were taken as a defense
of the moral value of the domestic sphere, and accommodated a more restricted
definition of woman's role tied especially to her maternal functions. He seemed to
be insisting that for society to exist it may still be necessary, if not wholly desireable,
for men to acquire carefully fabricated, artificial selves, a feature, that is, of political
association itself. Women, however, would achieve a form of self-realization
through the cultivation of their natural selves in the private sphere. Rousseau,
however, was not alone among the Enlightenment philosophers in his approach to
these topics. The idea of women's corruption as symptom and cause of spoiled
civilization, and its obverse or the link between republican values and domestic
virtues, was at the heart of Enlightenment metaphors on women's status as the
index of the level of civilization.
Montesquieu, for example, not only subscribed to this conviction, but also
abhorred "the unrestrained liberty" of aristocratic women, especially their role as
power-brokers in courtly society.7 He insisted that the vices of aristocratic luxury
led to the corruption of its women. Their unrestrained liberty and vanity spilled
over into the public domain of the Court wherever ambitious courtiers were
reduced to seeking advancement through the good offices of powerful women. He
therefore favoured liberty for women under a republican constitution, a chastened,
less sumptuous and more continent ideal of womanhood, which, like Rousseau's
ideal, unalterably fixed women within the domestic realm. In an Aristotelian
manner Montesquieu concluded that democracy was compromised and corrupted
as a result of either too much equality, which bred despotism, or too much
inequality, the mark of aristocracy. And like Aristotle, he insisted on the
patriarchal presuppositions of republican rule. This was the real meaning of private
virtue, at least for women. The corrupt desire for complete equality in a republic
turned despotic had its analogue in the private sphere
If respect ceases for old age, it will cease also for parents; deference to
husbands will be likewise thrown off, and submission to masters. This
licentiousness will soon captivate the mind; and the restraint of command
be as fatiguing as that of obedience. Wives, children, slaves, will shake off
all subjection. No longer will there be any such thing as manners, order or
virtue.8
The forward march of civilization required the domestication of women.
Republican women, however, would be freed from the abhorrent domestic slavery
of the Oriental seraglio or other polygamous regimes, just as they would be
harboured from the temptations of licentious freedom in the disintegrating
aristocratic order. Montesquieu put forward a new ideal of women's private virtue
within a male-defined, restricted family setting. Cosmopolitan, urban "society" and
its female actors would no longer be needed in the virile political constitution of the
new republican polity.
Montesquieu's writings are indicative of the ambiguous legacy of critical
Enlightenment opinion. Certainly, the question of women's freedom was addressed
and women's virtue applauded. However, the discussion of women was more often
employed as a vehicle for what were deemed to be more basic issues, such as the
attack on political despotism. Nevertheless, the strong connection between familial

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and political institutions within the older patriarchy was a well-established theme in
Enlightenment writings, suggesting to many that when the head blew off, the body
was sure to follow. Indeed, the challenge to the king's authority by democratic and
liberal natural rights theorists throughout the century climaxed in the bourgeois
revolutions of the late eighteenth-century. In this atmosphere, in the 1790s several
authors formulated a more outspoken set of demands linked, of course, to the
political claims of women within the Revolution itself.
The feminist writers of the late Enlightenment insisted upon a consistent
application of the political assumptions of their age. If the grounds for universal
human rights were to be meaningful, they argued, they must apply to all sentient
human beings without exception. As Mary Wollstonecraft exclaimed, "the nature
of reason must be the same in all."9 The Marquis de Condorcet insisted that the
abridgement of any right would risk the foundation of all freedom: "Either no
individual of the human species has any true rights, or all have the same; and he or
she who votes against the rights of another, whatever may be his or her religion,
colour, or sex, has by that fact abjured his own."10 Finally, musing on the question
of women's inclusion in the political community as well as her maternal
responsibilities, Theodor Gottlieb von Hippel proposed the reform of childrearing
so that men might share this responsibility which is rightfully theirs as well and so
that women would not be precluded from playing a larger social role. He asked:
"And is the mother to deny herself the privilege of becoming acquainted with ...
[larger societal] circles? Is she to raise her children for society without ever learning
herself what society really is?"11
These convictions represent the highpoint of the feminist spirit of this age.
They were usually accompanied, however, by the presumption that women
possessed separate natures from men. No matter how rationalists sought to situate
this admission within an egalitarian ethic, they ran the risk of admitting that women
were emotional, sentimental and feeling creatures, e.g., irrational and lacking in
conscience, and therefore unsuitable subjects of justice and the state. As radical
democrats, they sought to suppress these ambiguities by linking female nature to
virtue within a theory of republican motherhood, the outcome of which was to
undercut the strongest claims they had mounted for female citizenship. The
presuppositions of this theory, for example, were remarkably similar to those of
Rousseau who sought to deny women any political rights. Indeed, the theory, like
the virtuous woman herself, represented a middle class ideal and reflected
developing patterns of bourgeois domesticity.12 Republican motherhood was
especially well suited to an age in which sexual differences were exaggerated on
account of the cultural segregation which was coming to exist between men's and
women's spheres in a period when the household was no longer the site of
production.
In their coordinated embrace of the ideology of republican motherhood, with
its attendant notions of a domestic setting for women's social influence, feminists
and their opponents re-animated a very ancient dichotomy between woman as
natural and man as cultural. Implicit in such a simile is, of course, a political
relationship of domination between the powerful and the powerless. For if a social
relationship is transformed into a fixed and irreversible set of natural qualities, if
women are made to be the bearers of ignorance and men of knowledge, then,
woman's nature functions as the cause of her domination. Yet this reading is
complicated by the motherhood metaphor which associated women with
nurturance and educative tasks, and even suggested that they are the bearers of a
new morality through which the artificiality of civilization could be transcended.
As Ludmilla Jordanova has observed, the Enlightenment version of men as culture
"implied not just the progressive light of reason but also the corruption and

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exploitation of civil society."13 The dialectic betwen the terms of this metaphor,
therefore, provides a useful clue to the puzzling endorsement of Jean-Jacques
Rousseau's views on education and domesticity by Mary Wollstonecraft and other
members of the feminist Enlightenment.
Although Mary Wollstonecraft rebuked Rousseau for devising a separate and
unequal educational programme for girls, she endorsed Montesquieu's and
Rousseau's denunciations of the "unnatural" practice of aristocratic women and
their bourgeois followers who renounced maternal duties in order to participate in
le monde. In A Vindication she celebrated such "natural" orientations as
breastfeeding, close maternal supervision of children, a central role for moth
the rearing, socialization and education of their children in place of nur
governesses. Doubtless, she would have repudiated the earlier eighteenth-
salonière's riposte to Rousseau's programme for domesticated, lov
motherhood, including nursing one's own children, as the "conceit of the bre
While calling for women's right to equitable employment and entert
claims of female citizenship, Wollstonecraft's overriding aim was to provide
rational foundation for family life by re-educating middle-class wome
uplifting the vocation of motherhood. Self-disciplined, rational mothers wou
longer be seduced by the pleasurable, sentimental enticements of le monde. M
class women, privileged by their social location in the family and their t
rational education, might recuperate the worst features of femininity
simultaneously regain the best aspects of natural woman. Rational, edu
family life emerges as a substitute for the eighteenth-century public sphere in
elite women participated. Despite a strong endorsement for women's civil
the feminist programme of bourgeois radical publicists such as Wollstonecraf
at odds, to an important extent, with the most immediate example of w
public participation, namely, the involvement of women in the French Revol
which will be discussed below. This fact further highlights the internal
inconsistencies and limitations of the liberal project of human freedom: woman,
once constituted as a rational subject, was able to be subjected more completely to
the "order" and constraints of the realm of reason. As the subject of republican
freedom, woman became simultaneously an object and an instrument of power.15
According to the logic of republican motherhood, woman's major political
task was to instil her children with patriotic duty. It followed, then, that the home
could serve as the nursery of the state. As citizens, women would be educated
beyond their limited horizons and wholly self-oriented concerns in order to
embrace the larger polity, but in a passive not an active manner. This was
Wollstonecraft's reply to Rousseau's denial of women's political status, particularly
his claim that the nursery marm was unsuited to the task of citizenship. Like her
German contemporary, Theodor Gottlieb von Hippel, she attempted to provide a
civil justification for women's maternal role so that woman's devotion to her
children and her role within the larger polity might be reconciled.
The ideology of republican motherhood was embraced by feminists, therefore,
as a possible response to a strictly misogynist construction of the dual spheres of
home and state. It recommended a way to alleviate the tensions between a theory of
natural rights with egalitarian implications and a gendered construction of sexual
difference. However, its potential for providing women with a route into the public
sphere was undermined by simultaneous commitments to woman's nature. Any
claim to citizenship based primarily on woman's performance of her maternal duty
was easily refuted. If woman's service to the community was viewed as a function of
her mothering role, the most likely consequence would be to offer women political
representation in a mediated fashion.
Accordingly, theorists as divergent as the German Idealist, Johann Gottlieb

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Fichte, and the English Utilitarian, James Mill, agreed that women would be
represented adequately through household suffrage.16 They argued that the
(propertied) male, taking account of the interests of the other family members,
could then cast a ballot on behalf of marital rather than individual will. It was
precisely this last claim that provided the occasion for one of the most important
feminist socialist tracts of the early nineteenth century, William Thompson's
Appeal of One-Half of the Human Race, which insisted that male despotism in the
family undercut any possibility of harmonious marital life, and concluded that
women must have political and legal rights of their own, but that equality would
require a further change toward a society of mutual cooperation.17
In the 1790s, however, the ideology of republican motherhood was
enormously popular. Even Condorcet, whose proposals regarding women's
citizenship went further than most people in his time, ventured after the events of
1789 to reassure his countrymen that although women should be granted political
rights, they need not be expected to exercise them fully, surely not to assume
political leadership or to wield real power.
And so it is scarcely necessary to believe that because women may become
members of national assemblies, they would immediately abandon their
children, their homes, and their needles. They would only be the better
fitted to educate their children and to rear men.18
As it turned out, however, during the French Revolution women were coerced
into reassuming their domestic responsibilities. If left to their own course,
revolutionary women of both the middle classes and the working classes would
have preferred to occupy a larger political role.19 In the course of the revolution
women of all classes and social categories in Paris, the uncontested centre of
revolutionary politics, were drawn into the political sphere. To some extent there
was a class divide among women. Educated middle class women preferred to
publicize their grievances and petition for their demands, which included changes
in education, family law and women's right to employment. Their tactics ranged
from petitioning to sending delegations to government, joining existing political
clubs, forming correspondence societies and federations of women's groups, and
authoring political journalism. Women of the popular classes were mobilized
primarily by economic grievances and they joined men of their class in active
popular protest. Subsistence demands were manifested in bread lines,
demonstrations, marches (as in the famous march on Versailles which forced the
king's return to Paris), petitions, protest in the galleries of the National Assembly
and Section assemblies, food riots and insurrections, and popular taxation (the
enforcement by crowds dominated by women of a "just price" on merchandise
handled by shopkeepers and grocers).
Educated women began to articulate an ideology of republican womanhood
that stressed woman's civic virtue and endowed her domestic roles with
revolutionary importance. Etta Palm D'Aelders, the Dutch-born feminist,
demanded legal equality for women and proposed a network of women's clubs to
administer welfare programmes throughout the country. She emphasized women's
patriotic role as enlightened teachers of civic values to children. She also called for
the care of indigent women, a national federation of all women's clubs and circles,
and for women's deputations to the National Assembly to press their demands. In a
classical republican gesture, she contrasted the frivolity of women under the
degraded state of despotism with revolutionary republican womanhood wherein
women would be "restored to the dignity of their being [to] be the model for all civil
virtue".20 Pauline Leon went still further when she petitioned the National
Assembly for women's right to bear arms.21 Best remembered, however, is Olympe
de Gouge's 1791 "Declaration of the Rights of Women," a powerful summary of the

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arguments of her contemporaries, in which she demanded a national assembly for
women, women's legal rights in the family and their rights to free speech and free
assembly and to employment.22 Whereas republican men dreamed of recreating in
France the ancient republic, revolutionary women looked forward to an
unprecedented age of women's freedom. They drew upon bourgeois standards of
femininity, maternity and domesticity to expand the language of political freedom.
In their protest, they stretched the ideology of republican motherhood to its
farthest limits.
The climax of women's political influence was reached during six months of
1793 when women formed a cross-class radical pressure group exclusively for
women, the Society for Revolutionary Republican Women (SRRW), allied with
the Enrages, the most radical elements within the revolutionary movement. They
supported the security measures of the terror, demanded that all women appear in
public in revolutionary attire, and mobilized around the economic grievances of the
poor and price controls. Opposition to the Society came from within the
revolutionary leadership and from market women, religious women and former
servants who objected to their dress codes and economic proposals. Street fighting
among women was a visible sign of the class divisions among women. The decision
of the Assembly, following a petition of market women, to outlaw the SRRW was
the prelude for a ban on all political association by women. The Society's defeat
signaled a turning point in the Revolution, anticipating the rapidly growing
centralization of power under Jacobin rule and the subsequent period of reaction.
In the Assembly discussion women were accused of meddling in politics and
being unsuited to the political requirements of governing in a commonwealth of
laws: that is, not having the moral and physical strength to debate, draw up
resolutions and deliberate. Most significantly, the attacks on women's position in
the revolutionary public sphere were waged on behalf of a theory of republican
motherhood. Thus, women were denied the most fundamental political right of
meeting in political associations purportedly because of the conflicting demands of
their nature. They were to be confined to the family where their function involved
educating men and preparing children's minds and hearts for public virtues. In the
words of the Assembly representative, Andre Amar, speaking on behalf of the
Committee of General Security woman's sole moral calling was to work within her
family to fortify love of country:
... morals and even nature have assigned her functions to her. To begin
educating men, to prepare children's minds and hearts for public virtues, to
direct them early in life toward the good, to elevate their souls, to educate
them in the political cult of liberty, such are the functions after household
cares. Woman is naturally destined to make virtue loved.23
From then on, the story is one of defeat and reversal for revolutionary women.
In 1794, in the wake of the Thermidorean defeat of the Jacobins, all attempts at
legal and social reform for women were curtailed. Over time most of the reforms
that had been granted were retracted. The Napoleonic code, against which
feminists struggled in the next century, was the absolute nadir in this trajectory.

Review

In conclusion, it is possible to draw some preliminary observations regarding


the intimate relationship between the form of political institutions and t
opportunities for women in public life from the preceding account of the eighteen
century public sphere. Both salon women and revolutionary women w
advantaged by situations of uncertain political control, situations in which
authority of older political institutions was being eroded and where t

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democratization ot political life had become a real possibility, situations where new
authorities had not yet secured their legitimate hold on national life and where the
common interests among women of different classes obtained a real basis in society.
Education was a critical variable in explaining the response of women to
revolutionary appeals, as well as their ability to communicate their own demands,
to derive inspiration from the important activities of constitution drafting and
lawmaking, to write for the revolutionary press and to become its readership. Oral
political communication was equally important. The activities of reading aloud and
debating in public places where common women congregated during the
Revolution reproduced on a wider, more significant scale many of the most
important aspects of Enlightenment public opinion and salon life. In urban Paris
women encountered one another on the street and in the cafes, markets, stalls,
workshops, galleries of clubs and national legislatures. In no sense were they
confined to home and church.24 Street level contact among women and men was an
important dimension of the construction of a revolutionary public sphere.
I he openness ol revolutionary institutions to women s observance and
participation was another important consideration. Women were being educated in
political processes, acquiring political skills and acting upon their own interests in a
dynamic and fluid setting in which the methods and forms of political democracy
were also developing. A language of universal human rights became the common
property of revolutionary women of all classes as it had been for elite women earlier
in the century. In other words, the institutional and ideological elements of the
eighteenth century public sphere which encouraged universal participation were of
direct benefit to women of all classes.
I have chosen to speak about this particular context, but the same
generalizations apply to the participation of women in reform movements in the
nineteenth century, and indeed to the history of women and revolt since that time.
Women seem to advance in the most democratic moments of a struggle and the
silencing of women often signals the rigidification of the movement as a whole. In
the period under review, it is important to observe how commitments to equality
were undercut by an ideology of sexual difference embedded within a theory of
republican motherhood. Moreover, the ambiguities of such notions as republican
motherhood impress upon us the way in which reason, in the guise of freedom, has
so often supported domination.
On the one hand, woman's human status, her right to be a subject like any
other, was incompletely defended in Enlightenment thought and in the
revolutionary public sphere. On the other hand, to the extent that women were
admitted to the standards of rationality — as bearers of rights, interests and virtues
— they were subjected to the same mechanisms of self-control and self-discipline as
all other reasoning subjects. As Michel Foucault has repeatedly argued, modernity
has been sustained by drawing the self systematically into the orbit of social
discipline. To that extent, one might conclude that the price of women's freedom
was precisely their ability to internalize the moral law, for woman to become a
moral subject like any other. Yet woman's claim to subjecthood was not deemed to
be a natural one in the usual sense of a Law- or God-given right to freedom, but
instead presumed to be a product of her unique biological capacity to bear and
nurture children. And, as most eighteenth-century writers observed, the parental
relationship was not just a nurturant, but a tutelary and authoritative one.
Woman's special place, in this regard, was constructed on the ground that, as
mother, she was ideally suited to become the instrument of discipline not only of
herself but of others: an ever-present regulator of behaviour. The privatized sphere
of bourgeois family relations was the site upon which woman's power was best
exercised.

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The potential for women's political participation was eclipsed in the end by
appeals to women's nature and by a narrow conception of women's virtue.
Increasingly, reason and freedom served the aims of order and power. As political
control was re-established under a more centralized state structure in the process of
revolutionary change in France, for example, women were driven back toward the
private sphere. In a more general sense, it seems that as eighteenth century men
were exploring a plethora of ways of acting in public, women's efforts to
accomplish the same were repeatedly repelled. It is as if man's ability to make
himself in public could only be affirmed if simultaneously woman was restricted to
realizing her nature in the private realm. There was, in effect, a gendered structure
to the relationship between self-fabrication and self-realization, and between public
and private life.25
It is striking to discover how much to naturalization, spiritualization and
containment of women were deemed to be necessary features of the most
purposeful efforts to create community. As republican men invested the public
sphere with an enlarged significance and contested for a greater share of political
power against the claims of aristocratic privilege and monarchical rule, women
were expected to sacrifice their public desires and to sublimate their political selves
in their maternal roles. Through an appeal to nature and according to the methods
of rational science, men prescribed women's duties within the home. The paradox
of republicanism is, perhaps, how dependent male freedom ultimately seems. The
tenuousness of men's carefully fabricated selves required corresponding claims
about women's inferior nature. It is as if man's subjecthood could only be attained
at the cost of woman's subjection. As a consequence, the two meanings inherent in
the very category of the subject — freedom and submission — were fractured along
gender lines. In reality, some women had to be stripped of their artificial selves and
all women had to be lured away from the temptations of artifice in order that they
might assume their "natural" place within the domestic realm. That is, the
participation of women in the public spheres of eighteenth-century society, whether
of an elite or revolutionary type, was precisely the "artifice" which the rationalized
domestic realm of bourgeois industrial society intended to supplant. The paradox
in the project of rational motherhood is made apparent whenever Wollstonecraft or
Rousseau argues that women need to be educated to their natural domestic roles:
for the question arises as to whether domesticity was not another form of artifice,
disguised as nature.26
Women were not banished to the family arena, of course, without any accruing
effects. Indeed, their place within the family was the precondition for an enrichment
of the individual as well as an enrichment of personal concerns which, while
compatible with the form of possessive individualism fostered by capitalism, also
carried the seeds of a critique of that same form of subjectivity. Nineteenth century
women utilized their moral perceptions and renewed emphasis on republican rights
for women in the public sphere to generate a political movement which allowed
women space within a reconstituted public realm. The most prescient thinkers
among them understood that this was only possible if the family, too, was radically
changed. They shared this belief with socialists who disavowed the notion that
personal and political domination could be held apart. As time passed the ideology
of republican motherhood waned in importance as a way of situating woman's
place in the polity. Nevertheless, throughout the nineteenth century, the multiple
discourses on women from across the political spectrum continued to be
constituted by antinomies between female nature and women's claims to a secure
position within the public sphere.

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NOTES

1. On these themes, see Carole Pateman 1980:67-88.


2. The category of the public sphere is derived from Jürgen Habermas' seminal study of the structural
transformation of the classical bourgeoisie public sphere which I have consulted in the French
translation: L'Espace Public: Archéologie de la Publicité comme dimension constitutive de la société
bourgeoise, trans, from the German by Marc B. de Launay (Paris: Pavot, 1978). See also Jürgen
Habermas 1974:3-24. Peter Hohendahl's The Institution of Criticism (1982) is a useful introduction to
the critical discussionof the literary and political aspects of this concept in recent times in German. My
own forthcoming study, Women and the Public Sphere, aims to account for the relationship between the
modern discourses on women and the rise of a feminist public sphere in the nineteenth century.
3. This point has been made forcefully by Ludmilla Jordanova (1980:42-69).
4. In a footnote to the discussion of society in Aspects of Sociology (1972), Max Horkheimer and
Theodor W. Adorno emphasize the political and class content of the concept of society. Reproducing
the definition of the nineteenth-century German politician and political theorist, J.C. Bluntschli, the
Frankfurt theorists remark upon the influence of the Third Estate on the rise of a modern sphere of
society, stressing that it is necessary to discriminate between the state and bourgeois society. Thus,
according to Bluntschli,
The princes maintain a court... For peasants and the petty bourgeois there are inns and pubs
of all kinds, in which they can meet, but there is no society. However, the Third Estate is social
... In it the general views are formed and the opinion of the society becomes public opinion,
and thus becomes a social and political force. Wherever urban culture bears its fruits and
blossoms, there too society appears as its indispensable organ. The countryside knows but
little of this — From court circles and court festivities, society is distinguished by the
bourgeois principle of the equality of the participants, the 'fellows'. No matter how different
the external rank and the inner value of its individual members may otherwise be, society still
energetically maintains a certain external equality of everyone in all of its forms, which
elevates the honour of the more inferior members, without diminishing the prestige of the
more worthy or denying it, and securing full employment and free intercourse for everyone ...
In its first stage society is not organized. Individuals can appear within it or withdraw from it,
according to their need and their mood. Society in this basic sense as not even capable of
organization [Unstaatlichkeitjis part of the essence of society. Norcan it be contained within
the borders of a particular ethnic community; it embraces natives and foreigners, citizens and
noncitizens, as well as men and women. It sends its links out beyond the domain of a
particular state and unites the educated classes of the civilized world. Arising primarily out of
private life and moving within private forms, it is withdrawn, with good reason, from all
direction by the state and all state authority (1972:33-34).
It is precisely these democratic aspects of society, independent of state supervision, authority and
surveillance which Habermas develops in his own study. By locating the classical phase of the bourgeois
public sphere on the terrain of society (bürgerliche Gesellschaft), Habermas highlights the political
significance of bourgeois society and its patterns of sociability. He also traces how this conception of
society rests upon a particular notion of the individual and encourages private forms of family life, e.g.
domesticity. However, initially at least, contrasts existed between two competing but complementary
aspects of bourgeois life, the social and the domestic, especially prior to the complete defeat of the
aristocracy. Richard Sennett makes a similar point in his study of eighteenth century life in The Fall of
Public Man. Finally, Habermas identifies the process whereby society and state increasingly converge,
under the hegemonic control of the latter, eclipsing the potential for independent political initiative
within capitalist society. Of course, Habermas's term the "refeudalization" of society is meant to
highlight a tendency within high and late stages of capitalism. In his recent study, The Policing of
Families, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Pantheon Books, 1979), Jacques Donzelot emphasizes what
Habermas and the earlier Frankfurt School theorists already intuited: e.g., the extent of political control
and supervision accomplished within society itself, a peculiarly modern hybrid domain of the public and
the private.
The following characterizations of eighteenth century social life are drawn from Habermas's
discussion of the public sphere (1974 and 1978) and Richard Sennett (1980).
5. Amelia Gere Mason 1891:124, 127-128. Cf. Carolyn Lougee 1976; Anne Liot Backer 1974; lacob
Bouten 1922; Evelyn Gordon Bodek 1974:185-194; Deborah Hertz 1978:97-108.
6. See Jean-Jacques Rousseau 1979, 1978, 1968, 1964 and 1960.
7. See Charles de Secondât, Baron de Montesquieu 1977.
8. Ibid.: 171, emphasis added.
9. See Mary Wollstonecraft 1975b:53. For other writings of the feminist Enlightenment, see Mary
Wollstonecraft 1975a: Mary Hays 1974; Theodor Gottlieb von Hippel 1979: Condorcet n.d. and
"Esquisse d'un Tableau Historique des Progrès de l'Esprit Human," "Lettres d'un bourgeois de New
haven à un citoyen de Virginie," "Essay sur la constitution de les fonctions des assemblies provinciales"
in Ouevres complètes, vols 8, 12, and 13, Paris: Nieweg, Brunswick & Heinrichs, 1804.

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10. On The Admission of Women, 1798:5-6, emphasis added.
11. On Improving the Status of Women, 1979:172.
12. On changes in eighteenth century family life, see Randolph Trumbach 1978; David Levine 1978;
Lawrence Stone 1977 and 1975; Philippe Aries 1962; Jean-Louis Flandrin 1979; James F. Traer 1980
and Edward Shorter 1975.
13. Jordanova, "Natural Facts," 1980:43. Cf. on the opposition between woman/nature, man/culture:
Ian Maclean 1980; and Anna Yeatman 1983.
14. Cited in Catherine Bodard Silver 1972-1973:844.
15. A suggestive analysis of these contradictory features of women's existence in the context o
nineteenth century society is Jacques Donzelot 1979. Readers may want to consult the writings o
Michel Foucault for some parallel considerations.
16. Johann Gottlieb Fichte 1973:286-289. James Mills' "Article on Government" is referred to by
William Thompson 1970.
17. William Thompson 1970.
18. Condorcet, On the Admission of Women, 1798:10.
19. The following portrait of women in the French Revolution is derived primarily from the importan
documentary study Women in Revolutionary Paris, ¡789-1795, Selected Documents, trans, with notes
and commentary by Darline Gay Levy, Harriet Branson Applewhite and Mary Durham Johnson, 1979.
Cf. Cahiers de Doleances des Femmes En 1789 El Autres Textes, preface by Paule-Marie Duhet, Paris:
des femmes, 1981. I have also consulted the following works: Olwen Hufton 1971:90-108; Scott H. Lytle
1955:14-26; Jane Abray 1975:43-62; Margaret George 1976-1977:410-437; Winifred Stephens 1922
Leon Abensour 1923.
20. "Etta Palm D'Aelders Proposes a Network of Women's Clubs to Administer Welfare Programs i
Paris and Throughout France" in Levy et al.. Women in Revolutionary Paris, 1979:71.
21. "Petition to the National Assembly on Women's Rights to Bear Arms" in Ibid.: 72-74.
22. "The Declaration of the Rights of Woman" in Ibid.: 87-96.
23. "The National Convention Outlaws Clubs and Popular Societies of Women" in Ibid.: 213-217;
also: "Women Protest the Suppression of the Society of Revolutionary Republican Women" an
"Women's Deputations Barred from Sessions of the Paris Commune," Ibid.: 218-220.
24. See the editor's general introduction to Women in Revolutionary Paris 1979:10.
25. Richard Sennett has called attention to these two aspects of eighteenth century society withou
drawing the full gender implications. See his The Fall of Public Man, especially p. 18.
26. Anna Yeatman has provided a very compelling interpretation of early nineteenth-century dome
ideology in her paper: "Gender Ascription and the Conditions of its Breakdown: The Rationalisation
the Domestic Domain and the Nineteenth-Century 'Cult of Domesticity'" (unpublished ms). Fo
parallel effort to interpret the ideological construction of modern privacy, see Leonore Davidoff, J
L'Esperance and Howard Newby 1976:139-175.

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