"IT WOULD BE EASY TO APPLY TO WOMEN EVERYTHING I HAVE SAID ABOUT MEN": THE SILENT FEMINISM OF SOPHIE DE GROUCHY

Joan Scott, in her seminal text on feminism in the French Revolution, wrote of the "Paradoxical" position which the new, exclusively male, definition of citizenship had put women who sought inclusion in the political sphere. Women were driven, she argued, either to deny their difference from men, or affirm their womanhood and thus undermine their case. This article argues that there was, however, a third, equally paradoxical, yet potentially more effective way that political women in this period argued for their inclusion in the political sphere. This was by refusing to engage with the subject at all. I suggest that, in certain contexts, almost total silence on the subject of women could in itself be a powerful political argument. Drawing on scholarship from the field of contemporary gender and development studies, as well as the example of Sophie de Grouchy (1763-1822), a political actor during the French Revolution and wife to Condorcet, himself an outspoken advocate for womens rights, this article interrogates the importance of silences in intellectual history. Constructing a tentative methodology for reading these omissions, I argue that doing so is essential for the evolution of the history of feminism.