YUKTI KAPIL
2022/1323
Compare the iconography of the French and Russian Revolutions with
regard to the portrayal of women and gender relations.
The French and Russian Revolutions, though separated by over a century and vastly different
historical contexts, both engaged in the construction of powerful visual vocabularies to mobilize
political sentiment. Women featured prominently in revolutionary imagery — but their portrayals
reveal enduring tensions between political symbolism and gendered realities. The comparison
highlights how the image of woman oscillated between liberation and containment — celebrated as
emblem and ideal, yet denied real political agency.
I. The French Revolution
In the iconography of the French Revolution,
women appeared most frequently not as historical
agents but as allegorical figures — primarily
Liberty, the Republic, or Justice. Monica Juneja
notes how Liberty was often portrayed as a “bare-
breasted woman,” her body idealized to evoke
strength, virtue, and fecundity — borrowing heavily
from classical imagery and religious iconography
(Juneja, 1998). These images served a dual purpose:
legitimizing the Revolution by giving it a
“maternal” face, and rendering its ideals visually
accessible to an illiterate public.
La République (1794) by Jean-Baptiste Wicar Yet this representation was highly ambivalent.
Dressed in Roman-style robes, wearing a Phrygian
cap and armed with a spear While Liberty stood tall on banners, real women
were increasingly sidelined from political spaces.
Ruth Graham traces how women’s early revolutionary enthusiasm — from bread riots to the march
on Versailles — earned them visibility, but also suspicion. The banning of women’s clubs in 1793
and the execution of Olympe de Gouges for her Declaration of the Rights of Woman signaled the
Revolution’s retreat into patriarchal order (Graham, ch. 10).
Importantly, Juneja identifies a tension between two inherited visual traditions: the Rococo and the
Herculean. The Rococo tradition, dominant in pre-revolutionary France, portrayed women as
decorative, passive, and eroticized, which influenced early revolutionary depictions of Liberty as
soft and nurturing. However, this feminine aesthetic was soon replaced by a more austere,
Herculean visual language, which drew from masculine ideals of muscularity, self-sacrifice, and
civic virtue (Juneja, 1998). This shift reflected a deeper discomfort with Rococo femininity and its
association with aristocratic decadence.
This ambivalence was mirrored in visual media. As Lynn Hunt argues in The Family Romance of
the French Revolution, the iconography of Liberty functioned as a substitute for women’s actual
presence in politics — a “symbolic compensation” for their exclusion (Hunt, 1992). When women
did appear outside allegory — as activists or market women — they were often depicted as
grotesque, disorderly, or threatening to republican virtue. Juneja points to such caricatures,
especially post-Thermidor, where female bodies were distorted to signal moral decay and political
chaos (Juneja, 1998).
II. The Russian Revolution
The Russian Revolution, in contrast, was steeped in
Marxist-Leninist ideology and an industrial context that
shaped its visual culture. Women were not primarily
allegorical but depicted as real participants in the
revolutionary project — the tractor-driving peasant, the
factory worker, the comrade-educator. Bernice Rosenthal
shows how Soviet iconography initially celebrated
women’s entry into the workforce and politics, breaking
with Tsarist-era passivity (Rosenthal, ch. 16).
However, the visual inclusion of women did not equate to
full emancipation. The “New Soviet Woman” was a
carefully constructed image — strong, productive, yet
What the October Revolution Gave to the Female
Worker and Peasant
also maternal and modest. Soviet posters frequently portrayed her holding a child in one hand and a
hammer or book in the other, reflecting the ideological burden of dual roles. As historian Wendy
Goldman notes, while early Bolshevik policies supported communal childcare and legal equality,
the Stalinist era reinforced traditional family values and curtailed reproductive freedoms (Goldman,
1993). This shift was echoed in state art: the female revolutionary became a wholesome mother
figure rather than a radical agitator.
Even during the early 1920s, women’s visual representation often served state ends. The posters
celebrated labor participation but seldom addressed persistent gender wage gaps or the glass ceiling
in party leadership. Rosenthal observes that this duality — empowerment through labor yet
silencing of political autonomy — defined women’s iconographic fate in the Soviet Union. As with
France, the revolution used women’s image to symbolize change while limiting their agency.
Comparing the Visual Grammar of Revolution
Despite ideological differences, both revolutions shared a visual grammar that manipulated female
imagery to support state-building. In both cases, the female body was central to expressing
collective ideals — whether Liberty’s exposed chest or the strong arms of the kolkhoz worker. Yet,
these depictions largely reflected male fantasies about order, virtue, and regeneration.
In the French Revolution, female iconography was metaphorical: Liberty stood in for the new order,
but real women were seen as destabilizing if they stepped beyond their domestic sphere. In the
Russian case, the image of the working woman carried a literal, realist tone — a conscious
departure from bourgeois aesthetic — but she, too, was reduced to an idealized type: disciplined,
patriotic, and motherly.
The aesthetic also differed: French prints employed neoclassical and religious motifs, often
borrowing from Greco-Roman goddesses to elevate revolutionary ideals (Juneja, 1998). Russian
posters, especially under Socialist Realism, favored muscular realism, simplified forms, and bold
colors to communicate authority and clarity. Yet both styles shared the goal of national integration
and moral didacticism — often through the feminine body.
Furthermore, both visual cultures reveal a male-dominated revolution’s desire to appropriate
women’s symbolic power without redistributing political power. As Sheila Fitzpatrick argues, early
Soviet women were seen as tools for transforming society, not agents in their own right (Fitzpatrick,
2000). This echoes the way French revolutionary women were celebrated when passive (as mothers
or muses) but vilified when assertive (as marchers or pamphleteers).
Both revolutions experienced a moment of visual and political openness that was soon closed. In
France, the radical phase opened space for women’s demands — equal rights, divorce, education —
but these gains were reversed by 1795. In Russia, the post-revolutionary decade saw attempts to
transform family life and gender roles, only for Stalin’s regime to reinstate conservative norms
under the guise of socialist realism.
Visual representation in both contexts followed these political tides. In France, Liberty became
more sanitized and de-sexualized as the revolution turned conservative. In Russia, the working
woman gave way to maternal icons during Stalinist consolidation. Thus, revolutionary iconography,
while seemingly celebratory of women, was a site of ideological containment. The act of
representing women was not liberating in itself — rather, it delineated the acceptable boundaries of
femininity in the new regime.
Conclusion
The French and Russian Revolutions offer strikingly different yet structurally similar uses of female
iconography. In France, allegorical women masked real exclusions; in Russia, realist images of
workers disguised ongoing burdens. Both revolutions instrumentalized the female image to embody
a collective future, even as actual women remained confined by traditional roles or state ideologies.
In comparing the two, it becomes clear that revolutionary iconography often sustains gender
hierarchies even as it claims to overthrow political ones. The use of women’s bodies as symbols —
whether of liberty, labor, or motherhood — reveals the extent to which revolutions remain
ambivalent about real female agency. As the texts demonstrate, women were always part of the
revolution — but rarely its authors in either art or action.
REFERENCES
Fitzpatrick, S. (2000). Everyday Stalinism: Ordinary life in extraordinary times. Oxford University
Press.
Goldman, W. Z. (1993). Women, the state and revolution: Soviet family policy and social life, 1917–
1936. Cambridge University Press.
Graham, R. (1977). Loaves and liberty: Women in the French Revolution. In R. Bridenthal & C.
Koonz (Eds.), Becoming visible: Women in European history (pp. 236–254). Houghton Mifflin.
Juneja, M. (1998). Imaging the revolution: Gender and iconography in French political prints. In
Imaging the revolution.
Rosenthal, B. G. (1977). Love on the tractor: Women in the Russian Revolution and after. In R.
Bridenthal & C. Koonz (Eds.), Becoming visible: Women in European history (pp. 370–399).
Houghton Mifflin.
Hunt, L. (1992). The family romance of the French Revolution. University of California Press.
