Fighting Women

Abstract

Marked gender divisions in the showing of those taking up of military service persist. With the coming of conscription, these allow men, and not women, to be clearly assigned concomitant rights of French citizenship. Women had certainly fought as soldiers in the French army both before and during the Revolution, but the issue of the right of women to bear arms was not about the rights due within equalities of gender. The limited visual iconography of female sign-up suggests, instead, a misogyny born out of Rousseau and the cultural spheres of the Enlightenment. When women were shown in the thick of combat, the nature of their participation focused on their defence of hearth, home and loved ones.