16.
According to the passage, which one of the following is a true statement about the purpose of the women’s political clubs mentioned in line 20?
Women’s participation in the revolutionary events
in France between 1789 and 1795 has only recently
been given nuanced treatment. Early twentieth
century historians of the French Revolution are
(5) typified by Jaures, who, though sympathetic to the
women’s movement of his own time, never even
mentions its antecedents in revolutionary France.
Even today most general histories treat only cursorily
a few individual women, like Marie Antoinette. The
(10) recent studies by Landes, Badinter, Godineau, and
Roudinesco, however, should signal a much-needed
reassessment of women’s participation.
Godineau and Roudinesco point to three
significant phases in that participation. The first, up
(15) to mid-1792, involved those women who wrote
political tracts. Typical of their orientation to
theoretical issues—in Godineau’s view, without
practical effect—is Marie Gouze’s Declaration of the
Rights of Women. The emergence of vocal middle
(20) class women’s political clubs marks the second phase.
Formed in 1791 as adjuncts of middle-class male
political clubs, and originally philanthropic in
function, by late 1792 independent clubs of women
began to advocate military participation for women.
(25) In the final phase, the famine of 1795 occasioned a
mass women’s movement: women seized food
supplies, held officials hostage, and argued for the
implementation of democratic politics. This phase
ended in May of 1795 with the military suppression
(30) of this multiclass movement. In all three phases
women’s participation in politics contrasted
markedly with their participation before 1789.
Before that date some noblewomen participated
indirectly in elections, but such participation by more
(35) than a narrow range of the population—women or
men—came only with the Revolution.
What makes the recent studies particularly
compelling, however, is not so much their
organization of chronology as their unflinching
(40) willingness to confront the reasons for the collapse of
the women’s movement. For Landes and Badinter,
the necessity of women’s having to speak in the
established vocabularies of certain intellectual and
political traditions diminished the ability of the
(45) women’s movement to resist suppression. Many
women,and many men, they argue, located their
vision within the confining tradition of Jean-Jacques
Rousseau, who linked male and female roles with
public and private spheres respectively. But, when
(50) women went on to make political alliances with
radical Jacobin men, Badinter asserts, they adopted a
vocabulary and a violently extremist viewpoint that
unfortunately was even more damaging to their
political interests.
(55) Each of these scholars has a different political
agenda and takes a different approach—Godineau,
for example, works with police archives while
Roudinesco uses explanatory schema from modern
psychology. Yet, admirably, each gives center stage
(60) to a group that previously has been marginalized, or
at best undifferentiated, by historians. And in the case
of Landes and Badinter, the reader is left with a
sobering awareness of the cost to the women of the
Revolution of speaking in borrowed voices.