On 5 October 1789, several thousand Parisian women marched on the royal palace at Versailles to demand bread and the king.
This was an important episode in the French Revolution. But it had a significance of its own. To the English philosopher Edmund Burke, the women's march overturned the ‘natural' gender order.
In his influential pamphlet opposing the Revolution, he wrote disparagingly of ‘the horrid yells, and shrilling screams, and frantic dances, and infamous contumelies, and all the unutterable abominations of the furies of hell, in the abused shape of the vilest of women.'1 The man was not there. Yet, in his imagination he conjured a picture that equated women's engagement in politics with the undermining of civilisation. Women contributed significantly to the great national and political revolutions of the nineteenth century, but they gained little in return. From the French Revolution of 1789 to the Russian Revolution of 1917, Europe witnessed the age of revolutions, the rise of nationalism and the heyday of the empire-building nation-state. There is no period in the historian's calendar more crowded with momentous events. But, in all this drama, women have been customarily allotted only walk-on parts — as bread-rioters, mothers, writers and salon hostesses.Yet, this was the time when concepts of citizenship, civic virtue and sovereignty entered their modern forms, and when these concepts were ‘gendered in ways that signified sharp, deeply embedded cultural distinctions and differential valuations of human endeavour in both the public and private spheres.'2 Revolutionaries and reformers who sought to overturn the ancien regime and pursue political democracy and national sovereignty, did not, in the main, discard existing notions of male and female gender roles. On the contrary, male-dominated movements for democratic change incorporated gender difference and inequality in their reconstruction of citizenship. It was increasingly difficult for politicised women to express themselves in the public domain because the very notion of the public woman was becoming incompatible with respectability.
For separate spheres silenced the ‘respectable’ woman. If a woman expressed grievance in public, she was liable to be ridiculed by conservatives and radicals alike as ‘unnatural’. For women to speak of politics, let alone to mount the barricades, was to turn the world upside-down. To claim rights as political citizens, women had to speak in a language and with a sentiment resonant with duty, responsibility, family and respectability.Revolutions and nationalist uprisings litter the course of the nineteenth century and women played a prominent role in these events. Those who forsook their ‘natural’ sphere for the unnatural realm of politics were cast as symbols of the end of the old order and of civilisation. Women’s political activity is always regarded as exceptional because their actions are taken to represent the violation of the natural order, and yet, simultaneously, women are also called upon both to represent the ‘inviolate centre’ of the nation and to be responsible for its maintenance.3 At a crucial moment in the formation and consolidation of nation-states, women were identified as bearers of culture and custom and as essential components in the generation of the nation as mothers and educators. Women’s involvement in national and political movements, then, is paradoxical. As has been pointed out in respect of Ireland but might be more generally applied: ‘women came onto the public stage in large numbers through the great nationalist movements... However, their involvement in the revolutionary movements was not matched by their place in the newly created states.’4
For some women the overthrow of tyranny or of absolutism was enough in itself. Others saw democratic reform and the formation of the nation-state as an opportunity to stake a claim to equal citizenship. Not surprisingly, the rhetoric of universal rights and national sovereignty raised expectations amongst women; when these expectations were not fulfilled after the French Revolution, the 1848 revolutions, the unification of Italy and Germany and the creation of an Irish state, women realised they would have to continue the struggle themselves. For some, then, the national struggle became a feminist struggle.