The majority of men believed that women's participation in government was both unnecessary and redundant. Women were assumed to have the same interest and opinions as the men who represented them, and they were repeatedly assured that their husbands, sons, and fathers would always have their best interest at heart. Women were encouraged to support the Revolution by assuming the duties associated with being a good Frenchwomen, not by forming legions or social clubs that argued for equal rights. An aristocratic women's duty was to live simply and modestly, abjuring luxury, and wearing only French-mad

8. Roessler, Shirley Elson. Out of the Shadows: Women and Politics in the French Revolution 1789-1795. New York Peter Lang Publishing, 1996.

The process of politicization had its impact on the female as well as the male political consciousness. By the summer of 1791, women were participating avidly in clubs and popular societies, joining fraternal societies for both sexes, and attending, as spectators, the galleries of section assemblies, the national legislature, and radical clubs advocating for republican ideas. The women of France were enacting the vision of liberal citizenship that Condorcet so enthusiastically supported. They joined the Confederation des amis de la verite, which, along with the Cordeliers, was the leading club in the movement to establish a democratic republic. It drew leading feminists such as Etta Palm d'Aelders. The Confederation was especially devoted to improving women's condition; it was the first club to admit women as regular members and the first to establish a separate women's sector. Women seized the opportunity for representation and formed delegations and deputations that actively petitioned the legislature. The women's section, as announced by Palm in a speech to the Confederation on March 8, 1791, was designed first to lobby for justice for women- for the elimination of primogeniture, protection against wife beating, a comprehensive divorce bill, and political equality for women (7).

The cahiers des doleances, May 1789, served as the first opportunity for the women of France, along with the rest of the country, to share their grievances. The cahiers des doleances also demonstrated how a woman's social class determined which issues she chose to embrace and fight. Women were denied representation in the Estates-General, but they made certain that their concerns were included in the cahiers. It is in these notebooks that the wide difference between reforms desired by the market women and those desired by bourgeois and noble women becomes evident. The market women demanded protection of their professional rights through the reestablishment of medieval trade guilds, complained about their work conditions, filthy hospitals, and the social injustice of making a living through hard daily work, while others earned money through taxes and lived lazy, extravagant lives. In contrast to the practical concerns and frustrations of the workingwomen, the requests of aristocratic women focused on civil rights issues such as obtaining the vote, representation, equality in marriage, and initiating divorce. The demands of the two classes of women overlapped in education and prostitution. The women of France reasoned that the lack of education was directly causing the rise in prostitution, without an education poor and desperate girls had to resort to selling themselves to survive. The women assured the men in the cahiers, they were not seeking education and job opportunities to compete with the them, or provide a diversion for well-off women who had children no care for, but to offer an alternative professions to impoverished women, and consequently to preserve the family life.

At this early stage of the Revolution it was apparent that the political intervention and involvement of women of the popular class had gone beyond previous experience. The very fact that the women turned to the National Guard and the National Assembly for assistance indicates their appreciation and understanding of the new political context, and their identification with the Revolution. Women, denied the formal rights of citizens, joined the struggle to create a new political culture founded on the ideas of equality and popular sovereignty. From the outset of the Revolution, women's aspirations for the refinement of grievances merged with the wider goal of establishing a new political and social order. Women were now capitalizing on the political tools that the Revolution was providing to make changes. The cahiers included req

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