ABSTRACT
Marie-Madeleine Jodin (1741-1790), author of Vues législatives pour les femmes (1789-1790), the first signed feminist treatise by a woman, during the French Revolutionary period, had a dramatic career in every sense. A deeply troubled childhood, forcible conversion to Catholicism at the age of nine, and her rebellion against a convent education kindled in this child of a Protestant Genevan watchmaker an enduring hatred of arbitrary authority, whether religious or secular, and infused in her a firm belief in equality and the right to citizenship. At eighteen she was imprisoned by lettre de cachet, in the Salpêtrière prison for prostitutes, for ‘libertinage’. She emerged after two years, probably through the good offices of Denis Diderot, a friend of her father, and began a successful though tempestuous career as an actress. In 1790, the last year of her life, she published her Vues législatives, addressed to the deputies of the Constituent Assembly, prefaced by the declaration: ‘Et nous aussi, nous sommes citoyennes.’1 This assertion – by someone doubly excluded from civic participation, as a woman and as an actress, along with the further identifier she added under her own name, ‘fille d’un citoyen de Genève’ – locates Jodin in the culture of the Radical Enlightenment and of republicanism, and flags her complex identification with Rousseau.2
