Recent historiography on the French revolution and gender

Abstract

This piece reviews recent work on women, gender, and masculinity during the French revolutionary era. The older argument that women were enclosed in a private sphere and excluded from politics has given way to a more nuanced and wide-ranging exploration of diverse groups of women, including prostitutes, Parisian market women, cross-dressed female soldiers, female school-teachers, and enslaved women seeking emancipation through marrying soldiers, to name but a few groups. The latest scholarship recognizes limitations on women’s formal political power but focuses attention instead on women’s creativity and the malleability of gender identity, both in France and in the colonies. Much of this work arose in dialogue with au courant approaches in fields such as the histories of capitalism, sexuality, or the transatlantic world. Some scholars are taking part in a broader move toward theorizing the category of “citizenship” in wider and more nuanced ways. The piece also explores emerging research in the history of revolutionary masculinity. Scholars currently follow two countervailing tendencies that are not always in sync. A strong vein of new work investigates manhood within homosocial worlds, notably within the military, building on new approaches to the cultural history of war. A second, equally exciting strand within the scholarship analyzes manhood within the family—a move that makes sense as scholars have reacted against conceptualizing revolutionary gender dynamics in terms of separate spheres. The essay concludes with reflections on possible directions for future research.