The Cost of Female Citizenship

Abstract

This chapter reveals how contests over commercial regulations ultimately prompted the National Convention to abolish women’s political clubs. At the outset of the Terror in 1793, the Convention passed a series of price controls called the Maximum. While legislating the controls, regulation-promoting Montagnards sparred with free market-defending Girondins over the political duties of buyers and sellers. Simultaneously, marketplace fights broke out between the Dames des Halles and the leading women’s club called the Société des Citoyennes républicaines révolutionnaires. The Dames, whose retail profits the Maximum initially outlawed, repeatedly brawled with the Citoyennes républicaines, who supported price limits to advantage consumers and sans-culottes. The Montagnard deputies seized the violence among women to silence the Citoyennes républicaines who criticized their attempts to accommodate merchant interests. Screening their factional attack, the deputies argued that irrational women had no place in politics and banned all female political assemblies. This chapter argues that the ban, long seen as a verdict on gendered citizenship, primarily emerged from disagreements over defining economic citizenship via commercial roles.