CITIZENS WITHOUT CITIZENSHIP

For most of the long nineteenth century, European women did not possess citizenship rights. Despite waves of democratic revolution and political reform — in the 1780s and 1790s, in 1848 and again in the 1860s and 1870s — women remained excluded from the formal sites of political power and representation until the end of the century.

In the pre-revolutionary world, citizenship — the possession of civic and political rights — was restricted to property-owning, tax-paying heads of households. Since women could not own property in their own right in most European countries, women could not be citizens. Citizenship was male, and it was restricted to a certain kind of man. But the French Revolution of 1789 changed the way citizenship was conceived virtually overnight when the representatives of the Third Estate (‘commoners', in reality the male professions) announced themselves to be the representatives of popular sovereignty. Having constituted themselves as the National Assembly, they derived their authority not from God or the king, but from the people. In revolutionary France, though, citizenship was still restricted — to independent males over the age of 25 who could meet a minimum property requirement. Women were defined as ‘passive citizens' and to all intents and purposes they were non-citizens. When this distinction between active and passive citizens was abolished in 1792 and all men over 21 were given the right to vote and to bear arms, women were explicitly excluded.

Yet, Thomas Paine's Rights of Man published in 1791 had offered a new conception of citizenship based upon the idea of inherent human rights.

These seem, on the surface, to be feminist challenges to the revolutionary conception of citizenship. But these were abstract appeals to natural rights and had a limited impact on legislators and on the populace in France and elsewhere.

Let us begin in revolutionary Paris. Few women demanded full citizen­ship rights during the Revolution but large numbers participated in the political process. They behaved as citizens.⁹ The key events in which women played a central role are well known: the march of 6000 Parisian women to Versailles in October 1789 to protest to the king, Louis XVI, and the National Assembly about the shortage of bread, and their accompaniment of the king and his wife, Marie Antoinette, back to Paris; the involvement of armed women wearing liberty caps in processions in 1792 demanding a recognition of the legitimate power of the sovereign people which in turn induced a second revolution and the establishment of a republic; and in 1793 the conflict between militant women of the Society of Revolutionary Repub­lican Women and the Jacobins, resulting in the silencing of women's political voice and the destruction of women's organisational infrastructure.¹⁰ But women were also active in the political sphere as demonstrators and rioters, pamphleteers, journalists, speech-makers and as political activists on the streets, in the workplace, at home and in the revolutionary clubs.

[women] engaged in decisive collective demonstrations of force and acts of violence; they were the key actors in the co-optation of the armed force available to the authorities who supported the constitutional monarchy. These acts, in combination with women's discourse — everything from shouts and slogans denouncing tyrants, proclaiming liberty, and validating the sans-culottes to formal addresses before the Legislative Assembly demanding women's right to bear arms — contributed to the delegitimation of constitutional monarchy, a reformulation of rights and respons­ibilities of citizenship, and a redefinition of sovereignty as the will and power of the people.¹¹

These are bold claims for citoyennes who had no political legitimacy to their name. Not all of the thousands of women involved were conscious of their political role. Few explicitly claimed rights for themselves as women and only a minority demonstrated a sustained engagement with political concepts. But it is equally true to say that active women were not motivated primarily by their relationship to subsistence as some have claimed. As housekeepers responsible for eking out a meagre living, women were at the front line at times of economic hardship, but their actions must be seen in the context of broader social relations encompassing tensions between producers and consumers, householders and the authorities. Remembering that plebeian women were likely to be breadwinners in a proto-industrial household

economy and not housewives responsible merely for consumption, women who had no other means of access to political dialogue engaged in the food riot as ‘proto-citizens'.¹² In revolutionary Paris, not all women put food before politics: ‘Bread, but not at the price of liberty' was the call of women at Versailles in 1789.¹3 Women's relationship to consumption was not con­fined to the domestic hearth; the availability and price of goods was a matter very much a part of the political sphere.

But what of those women who can be identified as militant or politically conscious? What did they do to allow us to see them as active citizens? Apart from engaging in food riots, women found spaces in which to demonstrate their political will: they attended executions, they observed the revolutionary tribunals, they spectated at political clubs, they gathered in groups on the streets, they wore revolutionary symbols such as the liberty cap, and they incited their menfolk to defend the revolution. Women, it was said, were ‘firebrands'. All of this developed women's political consciousness and ‘attests to the women's understanding of their entitlement to the rights and responsibilities of citizenship.'¹⁴ French women found alternative ways of expressing their political will, sometimes independent of, and at other times alongside, their menfolk, but always in the knowledge of their place as members of the popular sovereignty. ‘By identifying with the Rights of Man and the Constitution of 1793', writes James McMillan, ‘and by publicly advertising their commitment to the Revolution by word, deed and even dress... women effectively made themselves into active citizens, whatever the law might say.'¹⁵

Women who engaged in political action during the Revolution con­tributed to the democratisation process, but their participation did not break through gendered restrictions on what political democracy meant.¹⁶ In France, the bourgeois republican sphere of political debate and the forma­tion of public opinion was structurally and ideologically masculine.¹⁷ The banning of all women's political clubs and associations in 1793 by the Jacobin authorities, set in the context of the policy of terror pursued by the Committee of Public Safety, was a warning shot across the bows of women's claims to equal rights. It foreshadowed further attempts to restrict women to the private sphere, whilst women's political clubs were seen as a threat to republican order.

Perhaps we should not be surprised at this outcome to the gender issue in the French Revolution. Male revolutionary leaders had never indicated that they would make concessions despite women's political commitment. On the contrary, women's political participation was tolerated just as long as it was instrumental to the revolutionaries’ cause. Women could be useful on the barricades as firebrands, but also because the militia were less likely to fire upon women. Underlying this toleration was a deeply held belief that a woman’s place was not on the barricades or in the revolutionary clubs, it was in the home, in the private sphere. By 1793, the female revolutionary was considered potentially dangerous and out of control. According to the Jacobins, woman’s nature predisposed her to emotional outbursts and incite­ments to disorder; as such women could not be allowed the responsibility of political duties — they were a liability. ‘Since when is it permitted to give up one’s sex?’ expostulated the male Jacobin Chaumette, in reply to those who were angered by the suppression of women’s political clubs:

Since when is it decent to see women abandoning the pious cares of their households, the cribs of their children, to come to public places, to harangue in the galleries, at the bar of the senate? Is it to men that nature confided domestic cares? No, she has said to man: ‘Be a man: hunting, farming, political concerns, toils of every kind, that is your appanage’. She has said to woman: ‘Be a woman. The tender cares owing to infancy, the details of the household, the sweet anxiety of maternity, these are your labours: but your attentive cares deserve a reward. Fine! You will have it, and you will be the divinity of the domestic sanctuary; you will reign over everything that sur­rounds you by the invincible charm of the graces and of virtue.’¹⁸

Revolutionary leaders thus appropriated the language of Rousseau to rede­fine citizenship on the basis of separate spheres when they became fearful of women’s subversion of traditional gender roles. Active citizenship remained a male preserve, not just in France but also in the Netherlands where women’s participation in the Batavian Revolution of 1795 had mirrored some of the forms of French women’s activity: the forming of clubs, the planting of liberty trees and the writing on women’s issues in political journals. But women’s actions were in the sphere of popular politics, and when the revolu­tionaries consolidated the system of government such expressions of popu­lar sovereignty were no longer desirable, hence limiting the space within which women could act.¹⁹ Male revolutionaries sought to solidify the division between the public and private spheres which women revolutionaries thought they had dissolved. In France the reversal of the truly revolutionary Constitution of 1791, which had defined marriage as a civil contract, which limited the powers of the male head of household over women and children, and which introduced divorce, was finally accomplished with the Civil (or Napoleonic) Code of1804. Incorporating a combination of liberal theory and republican virtue, the code consigned women to a subordinate status which was to some degree worse than the situation under the pre-Revolutionary regime. Virtue applied to women', writes Bonnie Smith, ‘whereas rights belonged to men.’²⁰

In France and the Netherlands the definition of citizenship came to be embodied by the public or active man. In Britain, where democratisation was a more gradual and peaceful process, public discourse on citizenship was carried on in radical clubs and reform societies, rather than on the streets. This is significant for the form that the citizenship debate took in Britain. In contrast with France, where the Revolution had so disrupted social life that women had been able to mark out for themselves a political space, in Britain radical reformers more quickly discredited female crowd violence as undis­ciplined and unhelpful. The power of the people was not harnessed in the name of popular sovereignty. Instead, male reformers preferred formal, rational debate in smoke-filled rooms to the confusion of the crowd. As Anna Clark points out, the retreat ‘into respectability and constitutional politics’ shut out women from political debate and pushed them into the corresponding respectable sphere for women — the home.²¹ In Britain as in France, women who advocated female citizenship in public were accused of overturning the gender order, of acting contrary to their nature, of ‘wearing the breeches’. This was to continue to be a common refrain.

In the immediate aftermath of the revolution in France, the contest over popular sovereignty and citizenship abated, whilst in Britain radical politics was only just beginning to rethink notions of citizenship to encompass wider sections of the population. In the north of England and in Scotland, both the nature and extent of women’s work and the importance of radical religion provided women with a platform from which to speak about the reform of parliament. In the industrial towns, women formed female friendly societies and reform societies such as the Blackburn Female Reform Society, founded in 1819 ‘to assist the male populations of this country to obtain their rights and liberties’.²² In Glasgow, women participated in reform marches wearing liberty caps and carrying banners although they refrained from demanding women’s political rights outright. Women’s involvement in reform cam­paigning gradually forced a widening of the discourse on citizenship to encompass the language of the home, of domestic life, of children and of female virtue. The Queen Caroline Affair of 1820 seemed to encapsulate this shift away from the masculine citizen and towards a broader-based con­cept of political participation. Caroline of Brunswick was the estranged wife of the newly proclaimed King George IV. When she returned to claim her crown upon the King’s ascendancy to the throne, her corrupt and profligate husband took steps to divorce her. Caroline became a popular sympathetic symbol for republicans, for advocates of political reform and for supporters of women's rights. The affair brought domestic issues — marriage, wife abuse, child custody — into the political realm, and provided an arena for respectable women to enter the political fray. Caroline was represented as a courageous and rational woman, allowing other women to see themselves as rather more than weak or passive wives and mothers. This was a woman­hood that ‘encompassed the virtues of courage as well as purity'.²³

In France and in Britain, women's attempts to appropriate the language of the abstract rights-bearing citizen had few concrete results. The messages of writers like Condorcet, Olympe de Gouge and Mary Wollstonecraft were lost as formal political institutions were constructed which excluded women. But women's involvement in revolutionary and radical politics did prompt a change in the discursive landscape. Women certainly acted as if they were citizens, but it is clear that their definition of citizenship was not necessarily the same as that of the men they supported. In France this disjuncture resulted in the repression of politicised women. In Britain, radicals were more accommodating, understanding that the politics of reform had to encompass the politics of the hearth. By the 1830s and 1840s, male and female reformers and revolutionaries in both countries were using the ideology of separate spheres, domesticity and the notion of women as moral agents to bolster their demands for political change. The images of rioting women, of ‘the furies at the guillotine', the ‘revolutionary termagents', were replaced by the image of the virtuous, modest woman who was at once an example to her sex and no threat to the other. The noisy, theatrical Olympe de Gouge thus no longer stood as a role model, ‘having forgotten the virtues fitting for her sex' — apparently she had not even the grace to go to the scaffold in an appro­priate manner according to one commentator; instead she falsely claimed to be pregnant in order to postpone her execution. By contrast, Charlotte Corday, murderer of the demagogueJean-Paul Marat, was represented in the post-revolutionary years as the ideal revolutionary woman — youthful, modest, innocent — who approached the guillotine serenely and heroically.²⁴ Corday embodied the acceptable virtues of woman; virtues which were to be used later to reshape the language of citizenship so that women could find a place in the political sphere.

By the 1830s and 1840s there were a few of both sexes who expounded the view that women were entitled to be politically active in their own right. In Britain, individuals drawn for the ranks of the Owenites, Unitarians, Chart­ists and anti-slavery campaigners put forward the argument for the extension of the franchise to include some or all women.²⁵ However, the majority of those who advocated universal manhood suffrage in Britain and in France were more inclined to emphasise women's indirect political influence within the family. In Britain, Chartism — a movement of working men and women for parliamentary reform established following the disappointing limitations of the 1832 Reform Act — encompassed large numbers of women, most of whom supported the aims of the People's Charter which demanded univer­sal adult male suffrage amongst other political reforms. However, although the majority of Chartist women did not claim political rights for themselves, nor did they accept that politics was an exclusively masculine sphere. ‘We have been told that the province of woman is her home, and that the field of politics should be left to men,' commented the Female Political Union of Newcastle-Upon-Tyne. ‘This we deny... is it not true that the interests of our fathers, husbands and brothers, ought to be ours?'²⁶ The belief amongst most Chartists, that ‘the proper sphere of woman is home', was not deemed antithetical to women's politicisation. According to the author of an 1841 Chartist circular, the notion that ‘women should not meddle with politics' was unsustainable since politics meddled with them, thus ‘ought not the woman who values her home — that human nest — to be sensitive of every­thing that threatens its welfare?'²⁷ For Chartists like Thomas Wheeler, questions of employment and wages, welfare and consumption all impinged upon a woman's sphere and necessitated her interest in politics and her duty to support her menfolk in their struggle, if not her right to the vote.

The Chartists' appeal to women contributed to the redefinition of the political. True, male Chartists and their counterparts in France, constructed a vision of the future which rested upon the practice of domesticity in working­class homes. ‘Public functions belong to the man; private functions belong to woman', opined the journal L’Atelier, a mouthpiece of French skilled workers. ‘If you remove woman from the function for which she is destined, lead her to the political theatre and give her the right to speak there, you will have all the inconveniences of the babbling of infants and the influence of sensuality.'²⁸ But, the ideology of separate spheres was helpful to political radicals. It demonstrated to the middle classes that political radicalism was not to be equated with drunken, violent masculinity. The advantage of this appeal to the domestic meant that women had to be included in the political struggle as active participants, and this caused most Chartists problems as their desire to protect women came into conflict with the realities of every­day life for the majority of women who required not protection but rights.

So, women were citizens without citizenship. As in France during the 1789 Revolution, British women, in the 1830s and 1840s, found a space and a language in Chartism and political radicalism more generally in which to articulate their political demands. And the excitement surrounding political reform — in 1832 and 1867 in Britain, in 1789, 1848 and 1871 in France — encouraged women of all social classes to engage in political dialogue, to think of themselves as political subjects. Margaret Mylne, an inhabitant of Edinburgh at the time of the 1832 Reform Bill, commented on how, hith­erto, politics had not been considered a polite talking-point for ladies, but the prospect of a more democratic and public politics ‘drove [Edinburgh’s] inhabitants, both male and female, half frantic with delight’.²⁹ Although few women claimed the vote, in their public speaking, their collective protest and their petitioning and canvassing, working women developed an understand­ing of themselves as a conscious group just as their middle-class sisters were doing in relation to the contemporaneous anti-slavery movement. But whereas in Britain the political struggle continued, if in abated form, in the 1850s and 1860s, across the rest of continental Europe it intensified culmin­ating in the revolutions of 1848 and the national struggles of 1860—71.