Helen Maria Williams on Militancy: Women's Anger and Political Change in Letters From France (1790, 1796)

Abstract

Across the eight volumes of her Letters from France, Helen Maria Williams closely attends to women's participation in the French Revolution. This essay explores Williams's views on militancy by examining her representations of women's participation in the first and final insurrections of the Revolution: the storming of the Bastille on July 14, 1789 and the coup of Prairial III (May 20–23, 1795). Despite similar backgrounds and the same method of political participation, Williams depicts these angry women differently: she praises the women who storm the Bastille and condemns the women who march on the National Convention for bread, the constitution of 1793, and the Mountain faction. While Williams's views on gender and class influence the way she portrays women's militancy, I argue that the specific policies that the women militants fight for determine how she represents them. Williams only presents women's anger as a positive force for political change when it is motivated by democratic policies.