The active participation at all levels in the American war by the women both of the threatened community and of its equally threatened masters contrasts interestingly with the part played by their forebears in the English Civil War of the previous century. From any point of comparison it is clear that the greater freedoms in the New World, the breakdown of certain systems and hierarchies, and the necessary solidarity of colonial life, all combined to create conditions in which women’s contribution, both as individuals and as a sex, had a far greater chance to flourish. In the ragged and painful English conflict, however, nation turned in upon nation; a network of deep and often contradictory allegiances determined the decision ‘For the King’ or ‘For Parliament’, and the battlelines, when drawn, all too often severed parents from children, and friend from dearest friend.
In these circumstances, the community of female interest had little hope of being born. One quite exceptional example of women’s joint action fared so poorly as to be a discouragement rather than example to others. This was the occasion when ‘the men durst no more petition’, and ‘the women took it up’; the dangerous issue was the arrest of four parliamentary radicals in 1649. For three days in succession a crowd of women, hundreds strong, petitioned Parliament for their release, only to be repeatedly repulsed by armed soldiers counter-attacking with pistols cocked, and dismissed at last with this contemptuous rebuke from the Mother of Parliaments:
That the matter they petitioned about was of a higher concernment than they understood, that the House gave answer to their husbands [i.e. that Parliament was only accountable to men] and therefore desired them to go home, and look after their own business, and meddle with their husbandry.8
Well might the women, ‘assured of our creation in the image of God, and of an interest in Christ equal unto men . . . wonder and grieve that we should appear so despicable in your eyes’, as they later wrote. But in the era of revolutions which the world was now entering, this was to be only one of many reminders to women that, though all were to be equal in each new revolutionary commonwealth, some were bom with that little something that made them more equal than others.
Collective action by women may have been crushed; individually, however, they were indispensable, particularly to a banished Royalist. ‘Indeed women were never so useful as now,’ wrote one harassed absentee to Sir Ralph Verney.9 On behalf of their lords, aristocratic females turned ‘gallant She-Souldiers’ to fight for their interests and to defend their property. Of numerous impressive examples, one of the most heroic was Lady Mary Banks who in 1643 held Corfe Casde against the Parliamentary forces, personally defending the whole of the upper ward with only her daughters, her waiting gendewomen and five men – all of whom, however, hurled down stones, boiling water and red-hot embers so successfully that the besiegers ‘ran away crying’.10 Such heroism was not of course the monopoly of the upper classes, although aristocratic heroines are more likely to have come down to history by name. Many unsung ‘she-souldiers’ also served in the Civil War, most notably at the siege of Lyme, a small port in Lady Banks’s county of Dorset. There, women defenders assisted the fighting men by day, filling their bandoliers in the heat of the battle and hurling stones or any other projectiles in between, while at night they kept watch so that the men could get some sleep against the next day’s assault. Their efforts were warmly commemorated by a local poet, who shows a lively sense that more than the house of Stuart had been overthrown ‘in this late Tempest’:
To most ’tis known
The weaker vessels are the stronger grown . . .
Alas! Who now keeps Lyme? Poor female cattell
Who wake all night, labour all day in Battle
And by their seasonable noise discover
Our foes, when they the works [earthworks] are climbing over.11
Equality to fight alongside men also meant the same right to suffer as men had. Many women did so during the nine years of this bitterest of wars, though not all with the spirit of the maid maimed by a shell at the defence of Lyme, who refused all sympathy for the future loss of her livelihood with the firm pronouncement, ‘Truly, I am glad with all my heart that I had a hand to lose for Jesu Christ, for whose Cause I am as willing and ready to lose not only my other hand, but my life also.’12 What seventeenth-century Englishwomen never had was any influence on the course of events which promoted them to this spurious equality of suffering. High or low, they had no voice in councils, whether of Star Chamber or parish pump. Excluded from policy-making, condemned, however vigorous and able they were, to reactive roles and tactics, the women of the English Civil War with their huge losses of husbands, sons, homes and friends too often seem the victims of others’ revolutionary zeal rather than victors in any cause of their own.
From the death of one king to the death of another: it was to take a further century and a half, another repetition of the earth-shattering assault on the divine right of kings, before women were admitted even as junior partners in the bloody business of revolution. The events in France, from the convulsion of the 1780s to the horrific ensuing dégringolade, throw into relief the flat black irony of Edward Bulwer Lytton: ‘Revolutions are not made with rose-water.’13 The women of the French Revolution were in fact far removed from the dainty femininity suggested here; and all the perfumes of Arabia would not sweeten hands steeped to the elbows in ci-devant blood. For in France, for the first time in history, women became a revolutionary force – and the impact of this was not the least shocking of the ceaseless shocks of that tortured time and place.
The prominence of women in the French Revolution owed something to the example of the successful American struggle in the New World. At bottom, though, the conditions of the people of France under the ancien régime were such as to have eroded many of the crucial distinctions between male and female long before those between aristo and sansculotte came under scrutiny – there is no democracy to equal that of the starving. Maddened just as much as their men by hunger, frustration and despair, the women of Paris contributed a major part of the force which set in motion ‘the great engine of Revolution’ and which subsequently powered its remorseless progress through the churning seas of blood.
For the women were there, as recording angels, avenging goddesses or raging fiends, depending on the perspective of the observer, from the very onset of the struggle. It was a woman, dressed as an Amazon, who led the attack in the storming of the Bastille. If this was a hollow victory, the empty fortress symbolic of the bankrupt regime it had both epitomized and propped up, then the action on the ‘Day of the Market-Women’ certainly was not. Originating when angry women combed the markets of Paris in vain for bread, the riot drew to a head as it found a focus for its discontents in the king’s absence from his city in crisis. So began the march to Versailles of 5 October 1789, whose outcome sealed the fate of Louis XVI, Marie Antoinette, the Dauphin, and all the rest of the doomed Capet dynasty.
Not all of the 8000 or so women on the famous march were ruthless revolutionaries daring all for the ‘glorious cause’. A nurse, Jeanne Marin, later deposed that she had been forced along by a gang of about forty women, who thrust a cudgel into her hands, threatening to use it on her if she refused. All her protests and evasions (she had not had her breakfast, she had no money, not even a sou) were shouted down with the repeated cry, ‘March! March! You won’t need anything!’14 In this ad hoc battalion of Amazons, not all were even female – the ranks were swelled by an unknown number of men disguised as women, while some undisputed males had been press-ganged by the women as leaders or NCOs. Within the corps of women, there were divisions remarkable even to themselves – poissardes or fishwives, market-traders and those who traded in the lowest common denominator of all, human flesh, the Paris prostitutes, had found common cause with bevies of smartly dressed, well-spoken bourgeoises, who, however, proved themselves as vocal as their sisters of the marketplace and every bit as violent.
For, once unleashed, the fury of the female mob was
terrifying. They swept down on Versailles, pausing only to pillage shops and taverns as they went, and stormed first the national assembly, where the deputies, even under the formidable Comte de Mirabeau, were helpless in the face of the onslaught. A deputation to the king, hastily arranged to placate the raging ringleaders, foundered when their spokeswoman, a flower-seller from the Palais Royal, only manāged to utter, ‘Sire, we want bread’ before fainting. Her comrades had to be prevented from stringing her up from the palace railings. The onset of night, with a steady downpour of rain, seemed to damp down the vengeance of the Furies. It was a delusion. Before dawn they had overrun the palace, tearing the guards to pieces, wrecking the royal apartments in search of the queen and howling for every last drop of her hated Austrian blood. Before the day was out Marie Antoinette and all her family were returning to Paris on the last journey they would ever make, as prisoners of the people, the die cast by the anger of the women.
In retrospect this anger seems so overwhelming that political action alone was not enough to relieve it – every canon of female sanctity, of femininity itself, had to be violated, and as freely and publicly as possible. Contemporary commentators noted with wonder and horror that the respectable bourgeoises seemed to need no language lessons from the fishwives when they responded to a bishop’s demand for ‘Order!’ at the storming of the national assembly with ‘We don’t give a fuck for your order!’ and threatened to play boules with the head of the nearest abbé.15 Meanwhile the whores, who had no respectability to sacrifice for the glorious cause, were similarly driven to reach for their own expressions of excess, to find through new extremes of grossness that liberation from the controlling norms which all were frenziedly seeking in the anarchy of the moment. A curious and later famous incident secured the reputation of the Paris whores as the shock troops of the Revolution, in every sense of the term. In July of 1790, a band of prostitutes armed with pistols held up a detachment of the royal cavalry, ordering the soldiers to cry ‘Death to the king!’ and boasting ‘We’re all yours if you join the Revolution!’ When the soldiers refused, a beautiful young girl, very fair and no more than sixteen, began dancing before the troopers in the street, as an eyewitness recounted:
She had bared her breasts and was holding them in the palms of her hands, while she deliberately waggled her posterior like a duck. The other women immediately made a rush at her and lifted up her clothing, revealing to the blushing cavalrymen the prettiest figure imaginable, at the same time exclaiming, ‘If you’d like a taste of that, just shout “Death to the king!” first!’.16
This and other similar incidents read like recension of Edmund Burke’s grave reflection on revolution, made in the light of the American experience twenty years before: ‘People crushed by laws have no hope but from power. If laws are their enemies, they will be enemies to laws; and those who have much to hope and nothing to lose will always be dangerous.’17
For this brief, never-to-be-repeated period, revolutionary France abounded in such dangerous women. As a society out of control, it had shed the traditional governing principles and not yet restored or replaced them; riven from top to bottom it was, like a frontier society, wide open to the ambitious, the fearless and the tough. Among the earliest of the women who emerged without a trace and soared to heights previously unimaginable for a female was the complex figure of Théroigne de Méricourt. A gifted singer whose voice had been trained in London and Naples, a successful courtesan who had made a fortune in pre-Revolutionary Paris, she was the woman who led the storming of the Bastille dressed as an Amazon, and later in the same year, the women’s march to Versailles; at the assault on the Tuileries three years later in 1792, she commanded a battalion of Amazons.
Yet de Méricourt was much more than a ‘she-souldier’. An idol of the political clubs, she contributed vociferously to revolutionary discussions, and through her foundation of a number of women’s political clubs, drew the previously disregarded female ‘citizens’ into the debate. Eventually though, she sacrificed her wealth and risked her life for a cause which eventually betrayed her; espousing the moderate faction at the height of the Terror, she lost her popularity and was attacked and severely beaten by the Parisian revolutionary women she had championed. The shock destroyed her reason, and she was confined to a lunatic asylum for the rest of her life.
De Méricourt’s actions even at the height of her importance are not easy to assess. To contemporaries, even by the standards of the time, she often seemed free of all restraint of law, of custom, even of humanity: at the assault of the Tuileries, she used her influence over the mob to have a journalist who had lampooned her lynched before her eyes. Her reputation as a vampire pursued her to the end: ‘one of her last murders was that of a young Fleming, allegedly her first seducer. She . . . struck off his head with her own hand . . . then fell into a kind of maniacal ecstasy, singing a revolutionary ballad while she danced among the pools of blood.’18
De Méricourt was not at all exceptional in her ferocious antipathy to the ancien régime, nor in the fervour with which she sought its destruction. ‘Peace will set us back,’ wrote Manon Roland passionately: ‘We can be regenerated through blood alone.’19 A gifted self-taught intellectual, Madame Roland bestrode the salons as de Méricourt did the streets, shaping and influencing revolutionary policy and democratic theory as much through the force of personal argument as through her writings. Although not operating on terms of complete equality with her male colleagues – her first radical writings came out under her husband’s name, and her influence was at its height when he was minister for the interior in 1792 – Roland was the acknowledged powerhouse of the Girondin moderate party. Her career thus represents one of the earliest points in history when a woman claimed and was granted, on merit and in her own right, a pivotal place at the nerve centre of a major political enterprise.
Nor were these women, on the classic pattern of female endeavour, merely serving the cause of men. In keeping with an upheaval of such violence, the equally revolutionary ideas of feminism now took root and began to flourish. Previously these had been little more than the seeds of scattered impulses borne across the surface of human thought by random winds. In France alone, ‘la question des femmes’ had been under discussion for many years, the terms of the argument laid down by women like the gifted Marie le Jars de Gournay. The adopted daughter of Montaigne, Marie was a staunch defender of women’s right to education and a remorseless campaigner against any ideas of women’s ‘natural’ inferiority. Her independence and refusal to adopt ‘feminine’ frills and furbelows or submissive, ingratiating manners also mark her out as a proto-feminist, as do her Egalité des hommes et des Femmes (1622) and Grief des Dames (1626). But now feminist challenges, protests and demands gathered together to find an articulate political form, as in the ‘Petition of the Women of the Third Estate to the King’:
. . . all women of the Third Estate are born poor. Their education is either neglected or misconceived . . . At the age of fifteen or sixteen, girls can earn five or six sous a day . . . They get married, without a dowry, to unfortunate artisans and drag out a gruelling existence . . . producing children whom they are unable to bring up . . . If old age overtakes unmarried women, they spend it in tears and as objects of contempt for their nearest relatives. To counter such misfortunes, Sire, we ask that man be excluded from practising those crafts that are women’s prerogative . . .20
Considering that the women were suffering a massive invasion of their traditional crafts by men who already earned an average daily wage of thirty sous, while women could expect only fourteen or fifteen, their protest seems very mild, an impression reinforced by the timid final disclaimer: ‘We ask, Sire, to be instructed and given jobs, not that we may usurp men’s authority but so that we might have a means of livelihood.’ Male pamphleteers like the Marquis de Condorcet were less circumspect in drawing attention to the wrongs and grievances of the women, which had made the female sex into ‘the Third Estate of the Third Estate’
:
Is there any stronger proof of the power of habit, even over enlightened men, than to see the principle of equal rights being invoked in favour of 300 or 400 men . . . while being forgotten in the case of 12,000 women?21
To a woman, however, goes the credit for unfurling the full flag of feminism in France with the rousing battle-cry, ‘Man, are you capable of justice? It is a woman putting the question . . .’ At the onset of the Revolution, the constituent assembly of France had proclaimed the Rights of Man. In September 1791 Olympe de Gouges published a full-blown feminist riposte, her ‘Declaration of the Rights of Woman’:
Woman is born free and her rights are the same as those of a man . . . The law must be an expression of the general will; all citizens, men and women alike, must participate in making it . . . it must be the same for all . . . All citizens, be they men or women, being equal in its eyes, must be equally eligible for all public offices, positions and jobs, according to their capacity and without any other criteria than those of their virtues and talents . . .22
Whatever the temper of the times, this was revolutionary stuff. There was more to come. With no more formal intellectual training than Manon Roland, de Gouges nevertheless succeeded in seeing beyond the French women’s immediate economic grievances into the heart of their problem, exposing the way in which all their disabilities fed off and fed back into one another in an ever-more-vicious circle of deprivation. The low wages of women, she argued, and their lack of job prospects, arose out of women’s lack of education, and forced them into early marriage or onto the streets; lack of education gave men a reason for refusing women political rights; and the lack of political rights made it impossible for women to legislate for any reforms, or to obtain the right to education, wage parity or equality before the law. The subsequent history of feminism has only confirmed the substantial accuracy of de Gouges’s basic analysis.
The Women's History of the World Page 20