Women and the Promise of Revolutionary Rights

Revolutions spoke of universal rights, and women tested that language. In March 1776 Abigail Adams urged her husband John to 'remember the ladies' in the new laws; he dismissed the request. Women in America organized boycotts and ran farms and businesses during the war, and New Jersey's 1776 constitution allowed property-owning women to vote until 1807. In France, women marched on Versailles in October 1789, forcing the royal family to Paris.

Olympe de Gouges published the Declaration of the Rights of Woman and of the Female Citizen in 1791, and in Britain Mary Wollstonecraft's A Vindication of the Rights of Woman followed in 1792. Yet the French Convention banned women's political clubs in 1793, and de Gouges was executed. Comparison shows a pattern: revolutions mobilized women and used universal language, but most then restricted women's political rights, leaving arguments later movements would use.