Overview

This book explores and compares the roles, mentalities, and destinies of elitist and working-class women in Europe’s most dramatic revolutions: England’s “Puritan Revolution” of 1640-1660, France’s 1789 Revolution, and Russia’s 1917 Revolution. By providing one of the most detailed analyses to date of how feminist historians, sociologists, and specialists theorize gender, sexuality, and patriarchy the author draws connections to current debate over the causation of sociopolitical revolutions; and how such scholars speculate about the long-term implications of such revolutions for women in the USA and in other countries. This book briefly outlines the stage-by-stage progression of events in the English, French, and Russian Revolutions, thus enabling the general reader to contextualize more easily its discussion of women’s revolutionary experiences in those countries. This book reappraises the relative importance ascribable to gendered/cultural and to statist/geopolitical factors through the disastrous revolutionary careers of three consort queens: i.e., Henrietta Maria of England, Marie-Antoinette of France, and Alexandra Feodorovna of Russia. by contrasting their political failings with the political acumen of three earlier regnant queens in these three countries: i.e., Elizabeth I, Cathérine de Médicis, and Catherine II (“the Great.”) Finally, this book demonstrates how women of humble social station used these unheard-of revolutionary situations either to express their grievances and voice their social aspirations or, on the other hand, to reaffirm their long-held allegiance to traditional principles, customs, and religion. It concludes by discussing race/ethnicity and statism as challenging issues that need to be confronted in any current discussion of women’s revolutionary experiences.

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Reviews

In this masterful, deeply researched study, Bailey Stone expertly dissects the role and status of women in the genesis, course, and outcome of three European revolutions that defined the modern era. Arguing that gender as a historical phenomenon is best examined through its intersectionality with class, nationality, politics, and war, the author shows how the breakdown of public order and state collapse created a space for rethinking and recreating gender and family relationships in opposition to established patriarchies, only for this space to be narrowed or closed once revolutionary regimes solidified or were replaced by others devoted to restoring order. As this major study--illuminating our past as well as our present--demonstrates beyond any doubt, all patriarchies have their fragilities, making progress towards equality a possibility, if not an inevitability. * Thomas E. Kaiser, Professor of History Emeritus, University of Arkansas at Little Rock *

Author Information

Bailey Stone is an Emeritus Professor of European History and International Affairs and taught primarily at the University of Houston. Currently, Bailey Stone works in the Five Colleges Associates Program at Amherst, MA, and has been a member of the Five Colleges International Relations Seminar at Amherst

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