1793

In The Second Sex, 1793 marks a decisive collision between revolutionary claims of equality and the effort to confine women to domestic roles. Women who organized and pressed for political participation were barred from the Conseil Général and soon excluded from the clubs where they had pursued politics; the episode reveals how quickly revolutionary institutions could contain women’s activism even as the Revolution altered laws concerning inheritance and divorce.

Women Enter Revolutionary Politics

Women took part in demonstrations and riots, and women’s political clubs offered a space in which they could organize and learn. The account distinguishes this participation from control over the Revolution’s outcomes: popular women helped bring political pressure into the streets, while the fruits of the Revolution were largely taken up by others. Women’s presence in public action therefore did not itself grant them power to shape the new order.

The Confrontation of 1793

On 28 Brumaire, 1793, Rose Lacombe, president of the Society of Republican and Revolutionary Women, led a delegation that forced its way to the doors of the Conseil Général. The prosecutor Chaumette answered by defining women’s proper sphere through childcare, household work, and motherhood. The assembly barred the women from entering; soon afterward, women were also excluded from the political clubs in which they had gained experience. The sequence turned an organized demand for public participation into an occasion for reasserting gendered limits.

Uneven Revolutionary Reforms

The exclusion unfolded alongside reforms that had appeared to promise greater equality. In 1790, masculine privilege in inheritance was eliminated, and girls and boys were placed on equal footing in succession. The divorce law of 1792 loosened the strictness of marital ties. Yet these changes remained fragile: women’s political organizations were closed off, and legal reform did not overcome the material and social barriers that kept women from acting as an independent collective.

Historical Significance

The episode exemplifies the tension between formal revolutionary change and women’s actual access to power. The account links women’s marginalization to their position within family and class relations: bourgeois women lacked a separate economic basis for solidarity, while women from the politically active classes were constrained because they were women. The events of 1793 thus belong not simply to a story of revolutionary participation, but to a broader argument about how women could be present in political upheaval and still be denied recognition as autonomous political subjects.