1The first panel of the symposium, chaired by Virginie Adane, entitled “Women, work, and revolutionary engagement(s),” was dedicated to the analysis of the ways in which women’s political stances could affect the way they conducted their business. Natacha Coquery (Université Lumière Lyon 2) focused on French women’s experiences of the luxury market during and after the French revolution, as sellers and as consumers. While products considered as luxury were considered frivolous and looked down upon by most revolutionary authorities, the market was especially fruitful, as consumers’ needs and demands did not stop with the revolution. Coquery focused on how French women participated in this changing part of the economy, which soon represented an international market, as the shops and the sociological profile of the consumers evolved. She highlighted the creativity of business owners who profited from the political changes by selling second-hand objects who belonged to the nobility or families who fled the country, or by advertising their products differently. On the other side of the Atlantic, women business owners in Philadelphia had to develop strategies to be able to continue their dealings during the revolutionary era as well. Michelle McDonald (American Philosophical Society) focused on the strategies employed by women who managed or advertised their business differently during these times of crisis, and her paper analyzed the fates and professional lives of the women who signed the Non-Importation Agreement of 1765. To import or to boycott British goods was a strong political stance in that context, and the women who signed their name on this petition drawn by other entrepreneurs wanted their position to be clear to the eyes of their patrons and neighbours. Women shop owners embraced the boycott, and sold only the “homespun” cloth and materials preferred by the rebels. McDonald underlined that some of these women adopted these stances while it was advantageous to do so, and went back to importing fashionable British goods when it became socially and politically possible to do so without hurting their business or their reputation. McDonald concluded that the motivations behind these women’s activism was a form of pragmatism, rather than a strong revolutionary stance.

2Moderated by Agnès Delahaye (Université Lumière Lyon 2), the second panel of the day shed light on the diversity of roles women took during wartime when they were on or near the battlefield. Marion Trevisi (Université Picardie Jules Verne) explored the boundaries of what was accepted, reprimanded or even rewarded on both sides of the revolutionary conflict for women who took up arms in France. Women soldiers petitioned to access military pensions after the war ended, and the archives show that their fellow soldiers or supervisors often supported them in this tedious judicial process by writing them recommendation letters to be included in their appeal. The contents of these letters show how female presence in the army, while being officially prohibited, could lead to a form of tolerance, or even respect or between men and certain women who could be admired by their peers for their combat abilities as women. Women’s experience of violence as subjects and spectators rather than as perpetrators was the subject of the next presentation given by Geraldine Schang (Universität Bremen). Schang focused on the complex nature of Hessian women’s presence in the Loyalist war camps during the American revolution, and on these women’s experience of mobility. Their journeys to, from, and within America were difficult and conditioned on their marital status, since they travelled as wives of soldiers, or ultimately, as widows or daughters. This status gave them responsibilities during the war, as they had their own duties and work to tend to in the camps. They also had to adhere to the strict sets of rules of the military camps even as civilians, within sites which constituted new forms of domestic spaces away from their own homes.

3In continuity with Schang’s observations on women’s mobilities during the period, the third panel of the symposium chaired by Carine Lounissi (Université de Rouen-Normandie) was dedicated to the question of circulations, and women’s oppression during the Age of Revolutions. The two presentations that followed were focused on Black women whose life trajectories were changed in the aftermath of the American, or the French revolution. Seynabou Thiam (Université Paris 8) discussed the lives of Black Loyalist women during and after the American revolution, as they were forced to leave the United States for Canada. After Lord Dunmore’s 1775 proclamation, which stated that enslaved people who would fight alongside the British in the revolution would be freed, Thiam showed that many women did join the British forces despite the danger this change represented, and fled the country after the war ended. These trajectories are recorded in the 1783 Book of Negroes which contains the names of thirty-six women who left the country. However, Thiam showed that despite the fact that they were supposed to be considered free women legally, Black Loyalists were quickly disillusioned about their status in Canada, for example. The archives show that some women were re-enslaved illegally, or that the living conditions of the formerly enslaved populations who came to territories such as the isle of Prince Edward were extremely difficult. Julie Duprat (Bibliothèque Historique de Paris/FMHE) focused on the French territory, and on the history of Black women’s involvement in the fight for the abolition of slavery across the the country. Black women of different status were part of this fight, and the scope and modalities of their involvement diverged as well. Some figures were well-known by their contemporaries, such as the elderly leader Jeanne Odo, who was made the symbolic “face” of the fight, as her image was disseminated by abolitionist circles. Despite their erasure in the archival material, the involvement of lesser-known individuals such as Jeanne Aleba who petitioned the government with her cellmates, show that the extent of Black women’s politicization was very large, even though little evidence remains. Duprat also explored how the numerous “fêtes” across the country celebrating the abolition of slavery in France were not only attended by Black women, but that they also contributed by giving speeches or writing songs.

4During the last panel of this first day, both speakers explored how the Revolution was narrated through personal and print writings. Bertrand Van Ruymbeke (Université Paris 8) chaired this panel entitled “Storytelling, networks, and self-representation in revolutionary America.” Julia Martins (Université Paris 8) examined how white women experienced and described violence during the American Revolution, shifting the focus away from battlefields to everyday civilian life. Through diaries, she showed how war permeated domestic spaces: rumors, fear, military occupation of homes, public executions, displacement, and gendered violence were part of these women’s daily lives. These intimate writings reveal political awareness and moral conflict, as women interpreted events as they experienced them. Violence thus appears as an embodied, anticipated, and remembered condition in the self-narratives exploited in this presentation. Nele Sawallisch (Universität Trier) turned to printed and widely circulated materials, analyzing fugitive slave advertisements as evidence of public, institutionalized violence. Sawallisch’s paper focused on Black North American experiences across the relatively porous United States-Canada border, and highlighted how print culture functioned both as a tool of racial control and as an archive of resistance and mobility. Sawallisch described these advertisements as not only widely circulated because they often were published more than once in several newspapers, but also because they were codified, with hyper realistic descriptions of the fugitive women and ended in warnings or threats.

5Claire Delahaye (Université Gustave Eiffel) moderated the first panel of this second day, which approached gender in the “Age of Revolutions” from a broader perspective: in light of the relative scarcity of sources produced by women, a sustained focus on masculinity remained methodologically necessary. Benjamin Bernard (Yale University) took the example of Clément-Edouard de Moustier to study the way the groups such as the “jeunesse dorée” subverted gender norms as they were expressed by the French revolutionaries who held power. His micro historical approach to queerness and gender expression in post-revolutionary memoirs led him to discuss and analyze the lexical fields used to designate the anti-jacobins during this period of deep instability. Starting from a family story about de Moustier, Bernard confronted oral memory with archival records to assess how such narratives were constructed. Post-revolutionary memoirs, often written by descendants, reshaped episodes of instability into honor-preserving tales while reinforcing images of effeminate or extravagant muscadins and Incroyables. The changes in the social, political, and emotional lives of men during the American Revolution were the focus of John McCurdy’s talk (Eastern Michigan University). His paper explored the ways in which and the reasons why conceptions of manhood and citizenship were challenged and evolved during this era. Over time, enfranchisement redefined masculinity: voting rights and civic participation became key markers, elevating the status of unmarried men and young men as a distinct social group. Ideals of the self-made man and male friendship encouraged emotional expression and solidarity, while fraternal networks like the Freemasons mediated these new forms of masculine identity. Ultimately, the Revolution both reinforced traditional markers of manhood and created space for more diverse and publicly recognized expressions of male citizenship. Masculine bonds and male solidarity were the entry point of the following paper presented by Agnès Delahaye (Université Lumière Lyon 2), which focused on their links with violence against women and more specifically sexual violence during the American revolution. Delahaye argued that homosocial spaces such as militias and slave patrols fostered cohesion through the degradation and silencing of women. Although rape was legally a serious crime, settler and revolutionary sources reveal a male-centered discourse that framed it as an injury to male honor or property, marginalizing women’s testimonies. Cases involving British soldiers were exploited as patriot propaganda, while other assaults were minimized through humor, rumor, euphemism, or forced marriage. The paper also stressed the racialized dimension of this violence, particularly against enslaved Black women.

6Chaired by Françoise Orazi (Université Lumière Lyon 2), the last panel of the symposium was about women’s expression of their political stances in response to the events of the revolutions, and the recognition they did or did not achieve as a result. Myriam-Isabelle Ducrocq (Université Paris Nanterre) focused on the role of the author and historian Catharine Macaulay in the dissemination of republican ideas in the transatlantic space, as her works about republicanism circulated in the United Kingdom, in the American colonies and in France. She defended the people’s right to contest authority, intervened in the controversies surrounding the Stamp Act and the American crisis, and maintained epistolary ties with American patriots, thereby embedding her work in a broader Atlantic network of reform. Macaulay’s pamphlets exemplify this transnational vision by linking British and American destinies and denouncing political apathy in the face of the Intolerable Acts. Renewed scholarly attention has restored her to the history of political thought, prompting further reflection on how to integrate women like Macaulay not merely as “female authors” but as thinkers in their own right within republican intellectual history. Emmanuelle De Champs (CY Cergy Paris Université) focused on the necessity to read Frances Wright’s historical and political works in their transatlantic context of origin. Wright’s intellectual career of thirty years was centered on the United States’ institutions which emerged from the Revolutionary era, and her writings offered a sympathetic view of these events at a time when this vision strongly diverged from public opinion in the United Kingdom. Wright promoted a “new moral world” grounded in mental independence and social equality, notably in her 4 July 1828 address explicitly invoking the Declaration of Independence while criticizing organized religion and the exclusionary nature of the male franchise. Wright’s career nonetheless exemplifies how transatlantic exchanges shaped reformist interpretations of the American Revolution and sustained a broader project of individual emancipation. The last paper of the panel examined how suffragist associations retold the American Revolution’s aftermath according to their specific group’s political agenda. Claire Delahaye (Université Gustave Eiffel) and Allison Lange (Wentworth College) focused on the centennial of the American Revolution in 1876 and the suffragists’ appropriation of the commemorated events in American history within their fight. It examined the contrasting strategies of leaders such as Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Lucy Stone, and Elizabeth Duane Gillespie of the Women’s Centennial Committee. While Gillespie and other organizers highlighted women’s patriotism and moral influence within traditional gender norms, Anthony and Stanton publicly invoked the Declaration of Independence to denounce women’s exclusion from citizenship and the vote. The centennial thus became a symbolic battleground over the meaning of equality and the unfinished promises of 1776, marking a turning point in the suffragists’ strategic use of history as a political weapon.

7As a way to conclude these two days, Virginie Adane (Nantes Université) presented the symposium’s keynote speaker Sara T. Damiano (Texas State University), with a lecture entitled “Generational Power and the American Revolution.” In her address, Sara T. Damiano focused on how Martha Stoddard Stevens, a woman landowner in Ashford, Massachusetts, embodied “Generational Power” during and after the American Revolution. Her paper explored the violence of the revolution through Martha Stoddard Stevens’ story, from the initial purchase of the lands she inherited to her death in 1785. Her status and stance on these properties subverted traditional gender roles all the while embodying a form of elite femininity during and after the American revolution. Damiano showed that Martha Stoddard Stevens used her gender as an argument in a legal battle over her lands to get her property back from the revolutionaries after it had been taken away from her. Her refusal to sell her lands throughout her life made her a hated figure in her community, as she challenged Ashford men’s access to property ownership, and therefore threatened their masculinity, since proper American manhood was tied to land ownership in the period, as studied in the fifth panel of the symposium. Across a broad temporal frame, this case study reveals an American woman’s relations to the state and body politics in the revolutionary era and early days of the republic.

8Over the course of these two days, the speakers examined the varied experiences and legacies of women across the Atlantic during the Age of Revolutions, from the 1770s to the 1870s. The symposium fostered dialogue between continents, enabling a connected and transnational understanding of revolutionary transformations. Through this methodological approach, the conference highlighted kaleidoscopic perspectives on women’s participation, resistance, and exclusion, drawing on diverse sources from letters and legal documents to pamphlets and visual media. These reflections may inspire further research in transnational history, revolutionary history, gender studies, and the study of marginalized voices, offering new visions of the interconnected stakes during the Age of Revolutions.