If this is the case, she will earn more than some men, but a man will always be the best-paid person in the workshop, because men have reserved to themselves those processes which require greatest skill and longest apprenticeship.
Her demand is not for equal pay, but for the chance to do equal work. The Revolution will do something for her. By the school is actually turning outwork, and the Committee of Public Safety rushes to employ it.
The idea is floated that it could become an official government printer. But by , the school has disappeared from the records. For the female typographer, and the female in general, the Revolution is over. More likely, the woman of Paris is a textile worker of some sort. She may be employed at a workshop, or as an outworker.
Her fortunes in the Revolution will depend on her training and adaptability. If she works in gauze, or is a fine embroiderer, she will be out of a job, like so many who catered to the elegant taste of the Old Regime. If her fingers are tough enough to deal with hemp without bleeding, perhaps she can earn a living. Many women — for example, fan-makers and button-makers — were part of sophisticated multi-stage processes of manufacture, but little mechanised production was involved, and Godineau questions how far their working patterns prefigure those of the 19th century.
On the eve of the Revolution 80 per cent of the domestic servants in Paris were women, and we know less of their lives than we do of the lives of women who were part of a more visible labour force. The women who worked in a large household with many servants might have an uncomfortable time during these years. Her employers might emigrate, and leave her adrift in the vast pool of unemployed. If they stayed, they might suspect her of spying on them for the authorities. At the same time, the Revolutionary authorities might think her a repository of aristocratic notions.
The maid-of-all-work in a humbler household would live on very intimate terms with her family and might go with them in the evenings to a popular club or to the district assembly, but no one had a very high opinion of the independence of thought allowed to domestic servants, and the fact that so many women were servants cannot have helped their chances of being seen as free and equal political beings.
What can we know about the private lives of these women? They expected to love their husband and their children, and to be loved in return. They were working women as well as wives and mothers — few of the families of unskilled or semi-skilled workers could survive on one income — and they bore the responsibility, whether helped by their husbands or not, of putting food on the table and procuring the necessities of life, like soap and candles.
This was not always a matter of having the money to pay for them, but of finding the articles in the first place. Cyclic famine was familiar from the closing years of the Old Regime. During the Revolution the mother of a family had to contend with a complicated and shifting pattern of hardship.
Sometimes there was no bread, sometimes there was plenty of bread but of a pitiful quality. Price maximums, imposed in , solved one set of problems and ushered in another, as supplies to the capital dried up.
It was the women who joined the bread queues before dawn, or waited at the city gates to ambush carts and set up forced sales of whatever commodity was in short supply. Sometimes women looted, but more often they enforced a rough and ready sort of justice. This role — of forceful, informal regulator of the day-to-day economy — is a very important one. But Dominique Godineau brings home to us that these women have not only material, but emotional concerns.
They suffered political rebuffs, but the personal ones were more acute. Dissatisfaction is personal, as well as political; when divorce is introduced in , 71 per cent of the petitions filed come from women.
The Revolution gave a precarious kind of independence to divorced women, and some protection and assistance to unmarried mothers. The fall of Robespierre and the Thermidorean reaction took these gains away. We cannot write the sentimental history of a woman of the Revolution.
Happy lives leave few traces in police records. We know about the women whose husbands beat them up, not about the ones who co-exist in harmony. But we can, by looking at their political demands, learn something of how they perceived themselves. Godineau leaves us in no doubt that, though women could not vote, they did not feel themselves excluded from sovereignty. Her approach, with its weight of detail and its mix of the statistical and the anecdotal, seems to give us greater access than ever before to what the women themselves thought: and what they thought was often surprising.
In the Year III, spinners in one government workshop maintained that as the workshop belonged to the nation, it belonged to them. They were not demanding the ownership of the means of production. They were asserting that they had it already.
The assertion of a fact, no doubt, is the way to make a beginning. Both male and female thinkers argued that nature had made women unfit to take part in the business of government. The contemptuous demolition of their argument by the deputy Condorcet is one of the most heartening texts to emerge from the Revolutionary years.
Godineau shows that demands for sexual equality are not restricted to the early years of the Revolution, as is sometimes thought. Condorcet was a Girondin; there were Montagnard politicians, far to his left on other issues, who clung devoutly to their Rousseau and their view of women as meek and dainty creatures requiring protection. Men who spoke in this way were afraid, there is no doubt: afraid of how women would exercise power, if they were allowed it.
Perhaps these men were the victims of their own success. They knew how naivety could be exploited, for they had done it. Perhaps they were at fault in characterising women as more foolish, more credulous, more easily-led than the uneducated working man. When one looks at the record of individual male politicians, it does not seem that, for instance, either Robespierre or Marat gave much by way of direct reward to the thousands of women who were their adoring followers. But what they did was to create a climate in which questions about equality could be asked.
Could equality be created simply by granting the franchise? He later helped oversee the development of the first prototype, an imposing machine designed by French doctor Antoine Louis and built by a German harpsichord maker named Tobias Schmidt.
Guillotin tried to distance himself from the machine during the guillotine hysteria of the s, and his family later unsuccessfully petitioned the French government to change its name in the early 19th century. Some members of the public initially complained that the machine was too quick and clinical, but before long the process had evolved into high entertainment. People came to the place de la Revolution in droves to watch the guillotine do its grisly work, and the machine was honored in countless songs, jokes and poems.
The theater even extended to the condemned. Many people offered sarcastic quips or defiant last words before being executed, and others danced their way up the steps of the scaffold. Fascination with the guillotine waned at the end of the 18th century, but public beheadings continued in France until Children often attended guillotine executions, and some may have even played with their own miniature guillotines at home.
During the s, a two-foot-tall, replica blade-and-timbers was a popular toy in France. Kids used the fully operational guillotines to decapitate dolls or even small rodents, and some towns eventually banned them out of fear that they were a vicious influence. Novelty guillotines also found their way onto some upper class dinner tables, where they were used as bread and vegetable slicers. As the fame of the guillotine grew, so too did the reputations of its operators.
Women represent less than 1. List of women executed in the United States since In the United States, prisoners may wait many years before execution can be carried out due to the complex and time-consuming appeals procedures mandated in the jurisdiction.
Nearly a quarter of inmates on death row in the U. In a study released today, the National Academy of Sciences reports that at least 4. Reasons to abolish the death penalty Execution is the ultimate, irrevocable punishment: the risk of executing an innocent person can never be eliminated. Others have been executed despite serious doubts about their guilt. It does not deter crime. More than a dozen states have found that death penalty cases are up to 10 times more expensive than comparable non-death penalty cases.
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