Thread:Angie Y./@comment-1672596-20140421194620/@comment-1672596-20140423122123

Eh, oh well, I guess I'll try to hunt that book down if all else fails.

As far as how women are treated in the late 18th century (pre-French Revolution, specifically), I know Marie Antoinette was definitely literate (as she was a pretty big fan of Jean-Jacques Rousseau's treatises, which ironically led to her death by another fangroup of Rousseau, the Jacobins), and I do know that Jean-Jacques Rousseau treated his illiterate lover extremely poorly (even Gaston treated women far better than Rousseau did, and that's saying a lot), not to mention abandoned his own out-of-wedlock children to their deaths at an orphanage (back then, orphanages had an extremely small survival rate), which is something even Gaston would have been aghast at (since he actually did want to have progeny, based on his proposal to Belle). I think Martha Washington was also treated reasonably well, and I think women during that time were at least literate enough to read the bible, though I'll need to find data to back that up. From what I can tell, women were actually treated fairly well (though again, I don't have raw data to back it up and need to find it), not perfectly, but definitely decently with some exceptions.

During the French Revolution, though? Women definitely were treated extremely horribly. I know that various women were raped by the Jacobins, pregnant women were carved open and had their insides pecked with bayonets by the Jacobins, then left to bleed out and die, some women were stripped naked, bound to a tree, and then had their lower halves chopped off, and they were also victims of "Republican Marriages" (That's where they strip you and another person naked, tie the both of you to a log, and then literally send you down the river, where you eventually drown). And regarding the rapes, neither age nor even whether they were even alive by that point exempted them from being violated (in other words, the revolutionaries committed pedophilia and/or necrophilia as a result). Even with the guillotine (the closest thing to a merciful execution, especially considering the types listed above), any female victims often had their bodies placed in lewd positions based on 120 Nights of Sodom by Marquis de Sade (apparently some of the Jacobins were big fans of Sade's works as well). I think one abbess was even shoved into an oven. Sometimes women inflicted similar sufferings as well, including wearing body parts as trophies. You can read up on some examples here: http://www.culturewars.com/CultureWars/Archives/Fidelity_archives/parricide.html