The Political Limits of the Patriarchy: Women’s Rights in Early Representative Institutions

Political scientists often assume that women had no political rights before the twentieth century. Archival records show that this is not the case and reveal an unlikely group of politically active women: Catholic nuns. Using novel data for more than 150 assembly meetings between 1493 and 1789, I demonstrate that ecclesiastical women exercised political rights systematically across France, despite a patriarchal church and monarchy. Ecclesiastical women had political rights because they were economic actors with a stake in state finances and local affairs. Theoretically, I argue that early representative practices ought to be viewed as a tool used by rulers to increase compliance with governance activities. Accordingly, rulers had an incentive to afford rights of representation to those actors on whose compliance they depended: most often, these were economic actors, including some women. From this perspective, select women’s inclusion should have been the default in many early representative institutions. This logic extends beyond ecclesiastical women in France, turning on its head the taken-for-granted assumption of women’s historical political exclusion.