French Revolution: Female Gender Roles

Before the French Revolution women were thought of as "passive" citizens and they had no political influence. They were unable to vote or hold office. Women were thought of as "failed man," and that the fetus was not fully developed while in the womb. They were considered servants to men and their education reflected that. During the French Revolution however, women were not able to be kept out of politics.

The Revolutionary era of women wanted equality of rights within their marriage. They wanted the right to divorce, more rights for widows over their property, and rights for widowed women over their minor children. They wanted publicly guaranteed educational opportunities for women, like what were available for men, training, licensing and support for midwives, rights to employment, and the exclusion of men from certain woman-dominated trades, such as dress-making.

On October 5th, 1789 the Women's March on Versailles occurred. It consisted of around 7,000 angry working class women marching to Versailles to demand lower bread prices. They brought with them weapons and sang songs about killing Queen Marie Antoinette. The women broke in to the palace and killed two guards, and stuck their heads on pikes. The Queen escaped through a secret passage before they ransacked her room. The mob gathered in the courtyard demanding the Queen come to the balcony. Even though there were muskets pointed at her she did appear. Her bravery did a lot to calm the crowd. The women still demanded bread and that the royal family move back to Paris. The King reluctantly agreed and the family made their way back to Paris.

Many reforms before this time were extremely discriminatory toward the working and peasant classes – male suffrage was limited to men who paid at least three days of wages as taxes, and female suffrage of course did not exist. Public aid was restricted even for able-bodied men and women who could not find employment because much of the aristocracy had fled.

There were other non-violent, yet still active, women who expressed their feelings through writing. Although women did not gain the right to vote and little was done to improve equality towards women, this was one of the first times that women were participating and involved in politics. They were protesting and acting out in the same ways as men and this led to the ability of generations to come to advance on what these women accomplished.

Because Germany is a neighbor of France, many of the policies and reforms made in France slowly leaked their way into Germany and German politics, especially when the western states of Germany were occupied by France. The French Revolution was arguably the beginning of the women’s rights movement in Germany.