This chapter traces the emergence of published women’s rights demands in Western Europe and America. While this history begins with seventeenth-century French debates and broadened through the eighteenth century, it was in the immediate run-up to, and then during the course of, the French Revolution that arguments for women’s civil and political rights flared up and arrived at their modern expression. From Condorcet to Olympe de Gouges, many more writers of both sexes advocated les droits des femmes, demanding legal, educational, economic, and social equality with men. Early expressions of these claims sometimes met with scorn and disbelief, particularly from influential German philosophers, but the claims would nevertheless resurface periodically and gain momentum throughout the nineteenth century, especially during the revolutionary upheavals of 1848 and 1870–1 (and eventually in 1917 Russia), and the women’s suffrage campaigns in the West. Many advocates of women’s rights in France and in the English-speaking world, including Sarah Grimké, made common cause with abolitionists (of Black slavery) and with early social reformers and socialists. As democratic ideas slowly made headway, claims for women’s inclusion and equal rights grew louder and more insistent, ultimately fostering attitudinal changes and proposals for legislative action in many nation-states.

This chapter shifts from male soldiers and issues of masculinity to the role of women in military plays. Described are the multiple and overlapping roles of women in the military–theatrical endeavor, which presents an alternative to traditional gestures such as contrasting active (male) citizenship with passive (female) domesticity. This chapter continues an examination of totalizing processes in Revolutionary-era theatricalized conflict by including French citoyennes in the military–theatrical endeavor. Interrogated here are three main categories for women and war in 1790s drama: female soldier (femmes-soldats; filles-soldats) plays, works about vivandières and cantinières (women providing service roles to combat units), and plays about the Revolution’s “militarized domestic sphere,” a wartime home front where armed conflict created specific forms of violent domesticity. With attention to military plays penned by women about their fellow citoyennes, as well as to recent feminist scholarship on women and war, this chapter explores a dramaturgical practice whereby women sought to reimagine citizenship after efforts to assert their rights in the political sphere ran asunder.

Quentin Skinner's neo-Romanism has proved a hugely rich resource for understanding the thought of women philosophers. So why do they not form part of his discussion in Liberty before Liberalism? I argue that this is partly a consequence of Skinner's focus on the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, when women political philosophers were apparently fewer. When we look at the eighteenth century, particularly at its second half, with the sort of attention to contextual detail Skinner recommends, we find a number of women philosophers embracing and developing a republicanism which emphasizes liberty as non-domination. These women aligned themselves with the tradition of neo-Roman political thought and therefore ought to be studied with equal care. Moreover, a study of their works reveals neo-Roman republicanism in a different light from that of their predecessors, one which takes their position as women in society – as mothers, but also as potential citizens and policy makers - as central. I focus on two authors in particular:Olympe de Gouges and Manon Roland.