Revolutionary Exclusion

• In Event: Historical Causes and Consequences of Women’s Political Inclusion and Exclusion

Abstract

Recent scholarship has drawn attention to women in democratization studies by probing the reasons for women’s enfranchisement (Teele 2014, 2018, McConnaughy 2013) and the impacts of it (Morgan-Collins 2021). Yet, little work has questioned or investigated why women were excluded from modern politics in the first place. Building on other work in which I demonstrate the widespread participation of women in the pre-democratic representative institutions in France, this paper investigates women’s political exclusion which began in the wake of the 1789 Revolution. In the pre-democratic context, political rights were locally rooted, deriving from economic activities, including but not limited to property ownership. As regular witnesses to the economic engagements of many women, most local officials understood women’s political rights to self-evidently follow these engagements. I argue that centralized political reforms associated with modern democratization, however, allowed abstract ideas about gender and family to take precedence over the economic realities of women’s lives. Political elites endeavoring to design a new polity according to lofty principles and idealized visions of society crafted rules that aligned with their ideological projection that women were not active participants in society. I use process tracing with particular attention to the sequencing in reforms to contrast my explanation with the alternatives that women’s exclusion was rooted in a shift in either the material basis of political rights or the material standing of women. I demonstrate that while there were important material implications of women’s political exclusion, we can only understand the process through which it occurred by appreciating the role of abstract ideas in the reform period. This work speaks to the growing literature focused on the complications and contradictions of the early democratization processes in Europe (Berman 2019, Ahmed 2010, Capoccia and Ziblatt 2010).

Author

• Carissa L. Tudor, University of Amsterdam