In the early days of the Revolution, the women of Paris were highly engaged in politics. Their convictions spanned the political spectrum, often depending on their positions in society. The wealthy women of the bourgeois class often acted as salonnières, or worked in tandem with their husbands. That is not to say that they did not take part in street demonstrations, nor is it to imply that working class women were one unvaried force. There were divisions at all levels, and many Parisian women were concerned with economic conditions and high grain prices, while their neighbor might be demanding institutional reforms such as the right for women to establish their own political clubs.
As the salonnières had the opportunity and leisure time to write, historians have an easier time piecing together their opinions and activities. Madame Roland, for example, was a habitual writer and volumes of her letters are preserved at the Library of Congress. Many of these works have been digitized for remote access. The salonnières also had the funds to commission portraits, which was not an option for the lower classes.
To this day many radical revolutionary women are known only through the words of others who described them in passing and there is little evidence of what they looked like. The market women of Paris, often those selling fish (known commonly as les poissardes) or fruit in the local food markets, were highly engaged in politics, and not all of them were sympathetic to the revolution. Drawings and first-hand accounts of their speeches and political activities help to fill in the gaps, as few of them were able to write memoirs or books of their own. This explains the relative scarcity of material on the women of the lower classes as well as women who participated in the Haitian Revolution which followed swiftly on the heels of 1789.
There were many women writers during this time and not all of them were overtly political. Some wrote novels or poetry. Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun was a renowned painter, others were musicians. But the mere fact that they were visible, excelling in their craft of choosing, and writing as women, can be seen as politically and socially significant for the time. Author John Claiborne Isbell's book, Destins de femmes: French women writers, 1750-1850 (fully digitized by the Library of Congress) gives an excellent biographical summary of some of these women (along with bibliographies and a comprehensive list of writings by each author). The date range spans the full century surrounding the Revolutionary years, but some of the women of note for this Revolutionary and Post-Revolutionary/Restoration time period are:
There were also many outspoken women during this time who were not French but who witnessed and wrote about the French Revolution and the rights of women. Known as a Dutch spy, Etta Lubina Johanna Palm d'Aelders spoke to the issues of the day, as did the renowned English writer, Mary Wollstonecraft who authored A Vindication of the Rights of Women External,1792. Beate Barbara Juliane Freifrau von Krüdener was a Latvian writer who was in Paris in 1789 when the Estates General met. She published a novel, Valérie External in 1803.
For an overview of French women in history and the evolution of the French feminist movement, please see the research guide Feminism & French Women in History.
