Discussion of Women’s Political Clubs—Amar

Discussion of Women’s Political Clubs—Amar

In a follow–up to Fabre d’Eglantine’s speech on 29 October, Jean–Baptiste Amar proposed an official decree on 3 October forbidding women to join together in political associations. A deputy tried to argue that this notion ran contrary to the right of freedom of association, but he was shouted down by the other deputies.

The materials listed below appeared originally in The French Revolution and Human Rights: A Brief Documentary History, translated, edited, and with an introduction by Lynn Hunt (Bedford/St. Martin's: Boston/New York), 1996, 136–38.

October 29, 1793

https://chnm.gmu.edu/revolution/d/487/

487

In the morning at the market and charnel-house [mortuary] of the Innocents, several women, so-called women Jacobins, from a club that is supposedly revolutionary, walked about wearing trousers and red caps; they sought to force the other citizenesses to adopt the same dress. Several have testified that they were insulted by these women. A mob of some 6,000 women formed. . . .

Your committee believed it must go further in its inquiry. It has posed the following questions: 1) Is it permitted to citizens or to a particular club to force other citizens to do what the law does not command? 2) Should the gatherings of women convened in popular clubs in Paris be allowed? Do not the troubles that these clubs have already occasioned prohibit us from tolerating any longer their existence? These questions are naturally complicated, and their solution must be preceded by two more general questions: . . .

1) Should women exercise political rights and get mixed up in the affairs of government? Governing is ruling public affairs by laws whose making demands extended knowledge, an application and devotion without limit, a severe impassiveness and abnegation of self; governing is ceaselessly directing and rectifying the action of constituted authorities. Are women capable of these required attentions and qualities? We can respond in general no. . . .

2) Secondly, should women gather together in political associations? . . . No, because they will be obliged to sacrifice to them more important cares to which nature calls them. The private functions to which women are destined by nature itself follow from the general order of society. This social order results from the difference between man and woman. Each sex is called to a type of occupation that is appropriate to it. Its action is circumscribed in this circle that it cannot cross over, for nature, which has posed these limits on man, commands imperiously and accepts no other law.

Man is strong, robust, born with a great energy, audacity, and courage; thanks to his constitution, he braves perils and the inclemency of the seasons; he resists all the elements, and he is suited for the arts and difficult labors. And as he is almost exclusively destined to agriculture, commerce, navigation, voyages, war, to everything that requires force, intelligence, and ability, in the same way he alone appears suited for the profound and serious cogitations that require a great exertion of mind and long studies and that women are not given to following. . . .

In general, women are hardly capable of lofty conceptions and serious cogitations. And if, among ancient peoples, their natural timidity and modesty did not permit them to appear outside of their family, do you want in the French Republic to see them coming up to the bar, to the speaker's box, to political assemblies like men, abandoning both the discretion that is the source of all the virtues of this sex and the care of their family?

Decree:

The clubs and popular societies of women, under whatever denomination, are prohibited.