Natalie Zemon Davis

With its Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen, the French Revolution opened a whole new stage in the history of women, despite their conspicuous absence from the playbill. The coming century would see women put in their place as never before, their subordination to men codified in all manner of new laws and rules; and yet the period would also witness the birth of feminism, the unprecedented emergence of women as a collective force in the...