Women's Rights During The Ancien Regime

Throughout the Ancien Regime, women were hardly considered to be people capable of rational thought, and the disorder of the revolutionary government meant that much of the planned policy that may have helped women was never enacted. This disorder also meant that women, many of whom had been speaking out for gender equality, were silenced as terror swept the nation. While it is easy to look at these events through a bitter feminist lens, the Revolution was built on top of ideas that had existed for centuries, and although the revolutionaries moved to erase the old order; deeply ingrained prejudices are not easily erased. In the beginning, the French Revolution did intend to exclude women from the universal struggle for “liberty, equality,

If anything, they were reduced to the point of relative nothingness. Single and Married women had seen their rights continue to shrivel up, and they had no control over their person or property. While these domestic rights saw some mild expansion during the revolutionary period, the few political rights that women had possessed were snatched away . In the pre-revolutionary days, they had been able to vote in some circumstances and had the opportunity to act as regents. As the monarchy was swept into the dustbin of history, this power that could never have been exercised by ordinary women was naturally lost, and that was unfortunate for all women. However, the men of the revolution did not set out to purposely disempower women by doing away with the power of regency. It was simply a natural consequence of the abolition of the monarchy that unfortunately affected women the

(Abray) However, this argument specifically targets women unnecessarily. During the Ancien Regime, neither man nor woman had the opportunity to gain serious political experience due to the country’s long history of absolute monarchy. While there were some political opportunities for the general public, such as the ability to sit on the Estates General, there was no real political experience to be gained in this forum. Even the nobles who worked closely with the king never had opportunities to exert authority. The counter to this argument is that once the revolution was truly underway, men were given a means by which they could gain this experience, while women only seemed to participate in politics when they were arriving with pitchforks and making forceful demands that could not be refused. Women always had to take extra initiative to make their voices heard, especially after the clubs had been abolished, and this was largely due to the longstanding stereotypes surrounding the fairer