Society of Republican and Revolutionary Women

The Society of Republican and Revolutionary Women was a women’s political association during the French Revolution. In Simone de Beauvoir’s history of women’s subordination, its members’ attempt to enter the Conseil Général, followed by their exclusion from political clubs, makes visible the limits placed on women’s participation in a revolution conducted in the language of freedom.

Political Setting

Women had participated in revolutionary events, including demonstrations and riots, but participation did not ensure influence over the Revolution or its outcomes. De Beauvoir describes women’s political efforts as obstructed by both class and sex: working women were constrained by their position, while politically active women of the bourgeoisie were often denied a separate basis for collective action. Women’s clubs were generally joined to men’s clubs and taken over by them, leaving women without durable independent organization.

The Delegation to the Conseil Général

On 28 Brumaire, 1793, Rose Lacombe, an actress and president of the Society of Republican and Revolutionary Women, led a delegation of women that forced its way into the Conseil Général. The action brought the women’s demand for a political presence directly into the assembly. The prosecutor Chaumette answered by insisting that women should remain women and assigning them childcare, household work, and motherhood as their proper tasks.

The assembly barred the delegation from entering. Women were soon excluded even from the clubs where they had been learning politics. The sequence—from collective action, to an official defense of domestic roles, to institutional exclusion—shows how a public claim to political participation was redirected into an argument about women’s supposedly natural duties.

Suppression and Historical Significance

The Society’s challenge did not secure lasting access to revolutionary institutions. De Beauvoir places its suppression alongside the failure of other women’s claims during the Revolution: Olympe de Gouges’s 1791 proposal for a declaration of women’s rights was unsuccessful, and she was later executed. Although the Revolution brought reforms including equal succession rights for girls and boys and a divorce law in 1792, de Beauvoir characterizes these gains as limited; women’s clubs, meanwhile, were closed or placed under male control.

The Society’s brief appearance therefore stands for a broader contradiction in the Revolution’s history: women could act collectively in public, yet the institutions claiming to remake political life denied them an autonomous political role. Its significance lies not in a lasting institutional victory but in the clarity with which its confrontation with the Conseil Général exposed the boundary between women’s participation and women’s power.