1789, 1979, and all that…
The French revolution in 1789 not only set the template for what a revolution is supposed to look like, it also created most categories of understanding contemporary social change. Our notions of left v. right come from it, as do our notions of reform/reaction/revolution.
A common interpretation of the Iranian revolution in 1979 is that it was the first revolution which was categorically different from all of the revolutions that had taken place after 1789. If the French, Russian, Chinese, etc, revolutions moved history “forward,” the Iranian revolution was something else entirely. The interpretive debate over the meaning of the 1979 revolution between Michel Foucault and his various critics is a good example of this. Because the social outcomes of the French revolution of 1789 forged so many of the categories we still use to look at the world, the outcomes of the Iranian revolution of 1979 seem confusing, bizarre, or out of step with the patterns of global social change that the date of 1789 marks as the beginning of our “modern” world.
So it was with much surprise that I came across several curious passages concerning the outcome of the French revolution for women in Immanuel Wallerstein’s recent fourth volume of his reassessment of global history in The Modern World-System (2011). In his third volume (1989), Wallerstein revisits the two great events of the “age of revolutions” of the late 18th century - the Industrial revolution and the French revolution - and submits them to a serious debunking. That book remains deeply controversial (if not ignored) in the history field, but subsequent revisions to East Asian scholarship - specifically the extent of market relations in 16th-18th century China - suggest that we do exaggerate the importance of the “age of revolutions” on world history. In Wallerstein’s new volume, he discusses the contradiction between the ideological claims of equality through citizenship in liberal thought and the actual implementation of unequal relations by excluding individuals from these promised rights throughout the 19th century. And he begins with the French revolution (pp. 149-153):
In the case of women, the whole matter started out badly. The royal decree summoning the Estates-General specified that women who held seigniorial fiefs had to choose male proxies to represent them in the Electoral College — nobles for laywomen, clergy for nuns. …Nonetheless, women (religious communities, societies of tradeswomen) did write cahiers de doléance.
It is well known that women played a major role in various popular demonstrations during the French Revolution, most crucially in the so-called October days in 1789, when the Parisian market women (along with national guardsmen) marched on Versailles and forced the royal couple to come to the capital to reside. …[T]wo months after these riots, on December 22, 1789, the National Assembly formally excluded women from the right to vote.
The Constitution of 1791 renewed the exclusion, and this was reiterated in a vote of the Convention on July 24, 1793, specifying that women were excluded from all political rights, which actually was something that at least aristocratic women had had in the ancien régime.
Wallerstein quotes historian Steven House in a footnote here:
‘When Philip the Fair solemnly convened the First Estates-General … in 1302, he received an assembly chosen by both men and women. For over five centuries, privileged women of all estates retained the vote, both local and national. Then in the 1790s, the revolution that proclaimed the rights of man abolished the political rights of women.’
Did the French revolution actually make things worse for women? Wallerstein contends the outcome was doubly edged.
Some improvements in women’s rights were instituted, it is true. Marriage and divorce became civil processes. Primogeniture was abolished, and the rights of illegitimate children and their mothers to financial support were promulgated. A law was passed permitting women to be witnesses in documents related to the état civil, although this matter continued to be controversial. And in the heated atmosphere of the Jacobin period, women began to organize. They began to play a much larger role in the popular societies. They stood outside the doors of the Convention, trying to control who would enter. They packed the galleries and shouted their views.
The Committee on Public Safety appointed a committee, headed by André Amar, to consider whether women should exercise political rights and whether they should be allowed to take part in political clubs. The answer to both would be no. The committee deemed that women did not have the “moral and physical qualities” to exercise political rights, and furthermore that it was the aristocracy that wanted women to have these rights “in order to put women at odds with men.”
[B]ourgeois feminists fared no better. Olympe de Gouges, author of the Declaration of the Rights of Woman and Citizen, was sent to the guillotine on November 3, 1793. Whichever the explanation for the Jacobin attitude, the situation did not change after the downfall of the Jacobins. In 1795, after the journée of 1er Prairial, the Convention excluded women from its hall entirely, even as listeners, unless accompanied by a man with a citizen’s card. And in 1796, the Council of Five Hundred excluded women from senior teaching positions. In 1804, the Napoleonic Code regressed over even the ancien régime. Previously, at least aristocratic women were allowed to handle property and legal matters. Now, in the more egalitarian mood of the French Revolution, all women were treated equally—all having no rights whatsoever.
As far as the texts of the new revolutionary codes went, the situation seemed quite bad for women. But, as recorded by many historians, Wallerstein looks beyond the letter of the law to peer into the social reverberations of the mass mobilizations of the revolution:
I have called this a mixed picture. One can emphasize the negative side. Abray says that it “stands as striking proof of the essential social conservatism [of the Revolution].” Knibiehler insists that it marks a “relative regression of the status of women,” one that, for George, was “more clearly inferior than that of the Catholic, feudal past, because now defined, cloaked and justified by the bourgeois deities of Reason and the laws of Nature.” Cerati asserts that the claims of women for greater rights during the French Revolution met with “a glacial reception from the [otherwise] enthusiastic [masculine] partisans of equality.”
But one can also evaluate the experience more positively. Landes points out that, after the French Revolution, “gender became a socially relevant category … in a way that it would not have mattered formerly.” Kelly compares the situation of the post-1789 feminists favorably with that of those involved in the famous querelle des femmes launched by Christine de Pisan and others in the fifteenth century. The earlier feminists, she says, lacked “the vision of a social movement to change events,” whereas after 1789 they “were animated by a notion of progress and of intentional social change.” And Moses insists that, whereas before 1789 feminism was an issue only for the upper classes, the French Revolution led to “the rise of a feminism more sweeping in its scope and more inclusive in its following.”
The negative evaluation lays emphasis on the changes actually achieved and the justifying ideas of the times. The positive evaluation lays stress on the development of the feminist movement and its mobilization.
Apart from the “justifying ideas of the times,” this sounds familiar to the changes in Iran over the past three decades. In fact, it is uncannily similar. I could point to many analyses, but let’s quote a 2007 article by Shahra Razavi, a feminist economist who has conducted numerous research projects in Iran since the 1979 revolution:
The developments under the Islamic Republic have been highly contradictory. The Islamist movement that captured state power in 1979 based its grievances against the monarchy and the United States, and its own system of government (the “governance of the jurisprudence” or velayat faqih) on a highly patriarchal, if not misogynous, interpretation of Islam. The transition to the Islamic Republic then led to the total moralisation of the “woman question” [le querelle des femmes] that went hand-in-hand with a powerful critique of modernist attempts at transforming society. Women who had been singled out by the opposition (both secular and Islamist) as symbols of decadence and crass consumerism under the monarchy were to bear the brunt of subsequent social and gender restructuring or “purification.”
Many regressive measures were put in place, such as the forced imposition of the veil, the expulsion of women from the judiciary and higher echelons of bureaucracy, the forced segregation of schools and universities, and heightened violence against women, both domestic and public. Under these repressive conditions it became extremely difficult for women activists with a secular orientation (like their male counterparts) to be openly engaged in any political activity inside the country. Many went into exile, and those who remained were silenced.
However, both the Islamisation of the public sphere and the social mobilisations of the revolutionary era were powerful forces that propelled large numbers of low-income women from traditionalist backgrounds out of the confines of their homes and into the public arena - a development that was beyond the control of any one group or political force and with long-lasting social consequences, even if thus far their access to any form of lasting institutional power has been limited.
[T]he creation of separate male and female spaces and the donning of hejab (head cover) in educational establishments, offices, and indeed all public spaces allayed the fears of traditionalist families regarding women’s presence in public life. Meanwhile, the revolution was experienced very differently by women who were secular upper and middle class compared to those who were from more traditionalist and working-class backgrounds.
A few simple statistics can help capture the contradictions unleashed by two decades of revolutionary Islamic rule. The Islamic Republic lowered the minimum age for marriage of girls from 16 years to 9 years - a highly controversial move, which effectively sanctioned child marriage. And yet, the mean age at first marriage for women before the Revolution was 19.7 years (1976); twenty years later it had gone up to 22.4 years (2003) [now it is 24 (2011)]. Female literacy, which was 35.6 percent in 1976, rose to 80 percent in 1999 (and for rural women it rose from 17.4 percent to 62.4 percent), and by 2001 more than 50 percent of university students were women.
Education has had a privileged position because it is viewed by the regime as a vehicle for disseminating its ideology, and school curricula were rapidly changed to beef up the Islamic content. Nevertheless, the social implications of the mass entry of young women into universities across the country have been potentially enormous but remain under researched.
The widespread availability of contraception, falling fertility rates, and women’s increasing access to education (at all levels, including tertiary) are making it increasingly likely that women of different social classes will seek paid work and greater financial autonomy.
Two points are worth mentioning after this lengthy comparison.
First, dropping all the metaphysical connotations of modernity that the French revolution supposedly symbolizes, as well as the connotations of anti-modernity that the Iranian revolution is equally charged with, it turns out that a crucial fact for both countries is that they experienced revolutions - large-scale mass mobilizations of the population that challenged existing political and social powers. Maybe 1789 and 1979 are not polar opposites after all.
Second, these mobilizations had unintended consequences for both countries well beyond the new regimes’ intentions for their citizens. Their populations believed the universalizing rhetoric of egalitarianism that their revolutions were based on, and the social transformations of the post-revolutionary period laid the groundwork for an empowered notion of women’s rights. In other words, against the wishes of the male French revolutionaries, their own actions let the genie out of the bottle. To anyone who visits Iran today, it is quite clear the same outcome is occurring in the Islamic Republic - not in spite of the 1979 revolution, but because of it.
