Women in Revolutionary Belgium: From Stone Throwers to Hearth Tenders

Abstract

In 1789 women throughout the Belgian provinces drafted political treatises, coordinated clandestine meetings, led processions, and heaved stones from their housetops onto the retreating Austrian armies below. Having routed the Austrians, the Belgian revolutionaries declared national independence in December. The Austrians returned within the year. But forty years later, as the Belgians waged a second and ultimately successful revolution for independence, the granddaughters of the revolutionary women of 1789 only watched the turmoil. Few directly participated in the struggle. Belgian women in 1789 expected to share fully in the public world of revolution; by 1830 their descendants had come to view political events as belonging to the alien male world beyond their foyers.1 This forty year period which separated the eighteenth-century stonethrowers from their nineteenth-century hearth-tending descendants has been heralded by modern European historians as one of great economic and political progress. The first European society to experience this 'progress' the simultaneous industrialization of the economy and liberalization of politics was Belgium. Historians of 'the democratic revolution' and industrialization have only recently discovered Belgium, having concentrated instead on the French Revolution and English industrialization.2 Therefore, it should probably not be surprising that no one has studied Belgian women in this era of revolutionary change. However, the failure of historians to examine Belgian women's experience in the two revolutions-also reflects wider features in the historiography of women. As Carolyn Lougee explained in her 1977 review essay, over the last two decades most modern women's historians have shifted their 'focus from public events to private experience'.3 Although numerous studies of revolutionary French women in the eighteenth century have appeared, historians of women in nineteenth-century Europe have tended to confine their studies to the domestic world of the bourgeoisie and the employment of nineteenth-century female artisans and workers. Questions of change in the public world of early nineteenthcentury Europe have been left to political historians whose interest in women's place in that world is virtually non-existent. Historians who have studied women's interaction with public events in earlier periods of European history recount a remarkably consistent story of the narrowing of women's roles in periods of economic and political transition. Based on her study of seventeenth-century England, Roberta Hamilton argued that the development of capitalism in the seventeenth century caused the 'decline of family and domestic industry, . . . shattered the interdependent relationship between husband and wife, (and) led to the identification of family life with privacy, consumption, domesticity -