In 1790 Condorcet published an article ‘On the Granting of Civil Rights to Women’. This set out with rigorous clarity the argument for sexual equality and the need for women to enjoy the same rights as men, especially voting rights, and it advocated the strict application of the human rights principle of legal individuality and of ‘equal liberty’: whatever is valid for one person is necessarily valid for all, or, as he put it, ‘either no individual member of the human race has any true rights, or everybody enjoys them’. But when he submitted his draft constitution to the National Convention on 15 and 16 February 1793 Condorcet did not even mention votes for women, thereby giving up all attempts to put into practice what he had previously supported. There was thus something oddly shocking about a policy aimed at the political and legal exclusion of women from modern democracy; it contradicted so flagrantly the very principles of the Declaration of the Rights of Man that various explanations have been put forward to account for it. The usual reason given is that people gave up in the face of the ‘traditional view’ – some would say the ‘patriarchal’ image – of the relations between the sexes (Rosanvallon 1992: 130–48).

In Condorcet's case there are however certain clues indicating less straightforward conclusions to be drawn.