prepared the collective psychological ground for attacking absolute monarchical authority. Just as tyrannical fathers could not be tolerated, so too must despotic kings be eliminated.
Once the revolutionaries had curbed the power of the monarch with constitutional checks on his authority, they turned to making legislation that would limit the power of fathers over their children. They established family councils that could make decisions previously enjoyed by fathers exclusively; eliminated so‐called lettres de cachet through which fathers could imprison children of any age; made inheritance equal among all children, girls and boys alike, ending the system of primogeniture that gave preeminence to the eldest son and future patriarch; and lowered the age of consent to 21 for women and 25 for men so that children might marry as they wished, free of their fathers’ control. They also gave women equal rights to divorce, but they stopped short of acknowledging them as citizens. Women, no matter what status they might enjoy, could not vote. “Fraternity” did not embrace “sorority” when it came to participation in politics and law‐making, a situation against which many women vociferously protested.
Questions about women’s place in politics intensified as the revolution became more radical after 1792 and especially in the aftermath of the execution of the king. The elimination of the father/king entirely by the “band of brothers” who ordered his death ushered in a period in which no single authority figure could be tolerated. Fathers virtually disappeared from the iconography celebrating the revolution. French republicans, unlike their American counterparts, eschewed the mantle of “founding fathers,” insisting instead upon their permanent fraternal status. But this raised the question of where women fit in and made male republicans especially anxious when women insisted on engaging in public, political activities. Seen as threatening the stability of the republic by behaving in “unnatural” ways when they ventured into the political realm, women became figures of disdain and abuse. This was especially so in the case of Marie‐Antoinette, whose trial for treason against the republic revolved around charges of sexual promiscuity and the corruption of her husband and son. Standing in for all women, the queen represented for republicans the dangers to the state of women acting politically. By putting her on trial and executing her; by repressing the societies and clubs women organized to participate in revolutionary politics; and by emphasizing the proper role of women as mothers inhabiting the domestic, private sphere of home and family, where their primary task was the education of their children in morality and virtue, the band of brothers shut down any question of “fraternity” including women and strengthened their ties to one another.
With Napoleon’s rise to power, the fraternal conception of politics lost ground to a newly conceived paternal ordering. In the representations of the Napoleonic era, brothers became fathers, presiding lovingly over domesticated wives and adored children. Women became mothers, more highly valued than in prerevolutionary iconography for the educational and moral benefits they could bestow on their children. Under the civil laws consolidated under the Napoleonic Code of 1804, which drew heavily upon the patriarchal model of ancient Rome and which were settled upon the rest of Europe by the armies of France, women became the dependents of their husbands and fathers. Men did not own their wives and children, as in earlier patriarchal regimes, but the marital power granted them by the code gave them administrative control over virtually all of women’s legal, civic, and financial affairs. The code also regulated women’s sexual activities in such a way as to criminalize female behavior that did not accord with the state’s intentions that women exist exclusively as wifely, motherly, domestic, virtuous beings. Adultery and illegitimacy, for example, on the part of women – but not of men – were punished by the state, conferring upon women – but not men – a legal accountability for private sexual acts. As one historian has noted, the Napoleonic Code made women’s virtue, now a sexual rather than a political quality, a matter of state control (Smith, 1989).
Liberalism explicitly denied women political citizenship. The potential contradiction between, on the one hand, a liberal ideology that had legitimated the dismantling of aristocratic power and authority and the enfranchisement of middle‐class, and later working‐class, men in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and, on the other, the denial of the claims of women to full citizenship was resolved by appeals to biological and characterological differences between the sexes. New definitions of femininity evolved whose qualities were antithetical to those that had warranted widespread male participation in the public sphere. Men possessed the capacity for reason, action, aggression, independence, and self‐interest. Women inhabited a separate, private, domestic sphere, one suitable for the so‐called inherent qualities of femininity: emotion, passivity, submission, dependence, and selflessness. These notions had been extant in political thought for centuries, extending as far back as Aristotle, but a new explanation for women’s incapacities and legal and political disabilities emerged: all derived, it was claimed insistently, from women's sexual and reproductive organization. Upon the female as a biological entity, a sexed body, nineteenth‐century theorists imposed a socially and culturally constructed femininity, a gender identity derived from ideas about what roles were appropriate for women. This collapsing of sex and gender – of the physiological organism with the normative social creation – made it possible for women to be construed as at once pure and purely sexual; although paradoxical, these definitions excluded women from participation in the public sphere and rendered them subordinate to men in the private sphere as well (Kent, 1987).
Under the law of coverture, married women had no rights or existence apart from their husbands. “By marriage,” wrote the English jurist Sir William Blackstone, “the very being or legal existence of a woman is suspended, or at least it is incorporated or consolidated into that of the husband, under whose wing, protection and cover she performs everything, and she is therefore called in our law a feme covert…. Her husband [is called] her baron, or lord.” A married woman had no legal rights to her property, her earnings, her freedom of movement, her conscience, her body, or her children; all resided in her husband. Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries women and their male allies in feminist, revolutionary, and anti‐colonial movements challenged these holdovers of aristocratic patriarchal society, insisting that rather than protecting women in the domestic sphere of home and family, these legal disabilities exposed them to the brutalities of the world at large.
Western Models in a Colonial Setting
Europeans took the Western binary model of gender with them when they colonized lands in Asia and Africa, and found themselves operating in settings governed by entirely different norms for men and women. In their ignorance of gender rules pertaining to other cultures, they made assumptions about how various non‐Western societies functioned, leading them, frequently, into difficult situations. In one remarkable instance, European beliefs and misunderstandings of gender arrangements in non‐Western lands provoked profound violence. In November and December 1929, a dramatic series of demonstrations, protests, risings, and riots involving tens of thousands of Igbo‐ and Ibibio‐speaking women took place throughout southeastern Nigeria. In the course of the “Women’s War,” or Ogu Umunwaanyi, as the Igbo people called it, over fifty Igbo and Ibibio women were killed by British troops; an unknown number were wounded and otherwise traumatized.
On November 24, 1929, rumors that British colonial officials planned to tax Igbo women reached the village of Oloko in southeastern Nigeria. Upon hearing the news, a large crowd of women surrounded the compound of the village chief, Okugu. There they “sat on” him, a locally recognized practice undertaken when men committed offenses against women. When “sitting on a man,” women danced and sang until the object of their grievance acknowledged his offense and promised to make restitution. In this particular instance, the chief not only refused to admit to any wrongdoing, he set male members of his compound on the women, causing injury to eight of them. In response to Okugu’s transgressions and owing to the persistent rumors of taxation of women circulating in other towns and villages, enormous crowds of women – amounting to tens of thousands – geared up for political resistance just as they would for any serious ritual activity. They chalked their faces, removed their clothing, and covered their heads and torsos with palm leaves. Carrying staffs,
