 The principle of justice requires that “we stop debarring women from the right of citizenship”. What then of women’s eligibility for public functions? In this section of the Second Letter, Condorcet considers the grounds for excluding women as voters and as public functionaries, and prepares the argument that will reappear in his 1790 essay. He refers first to the principle of utility: “Legal exclusions should therefore be made only when reason clearly proves their utility” (McLean and Hewitt 1994, 298). A “good election method” would allow, he maintains, for the elimination of persons tried and found guilty of certain crimes, as well as two categories of dependent persons, those in domestic service and those below the mandated age of civil majority. Except in one important respect, his criteria for the exclusion of these categories of person are consistent with eighteenth-century republican assumptions, which ultimately guided the drafters of the 1791 Constitution, who divided the population into active and passive citizenship. Only the former—approximately 15% of the French population and 61% of men (approximately 4, 298,360)—possessed the full rights of citizenship. They had to be males 25 years or older, who had occupied the same residence for at least one year, and had paid the equivalent of 3 days of salary. By the terms of France’s first post-1789 Constitution, all women were assigned the status of passive citizens; and French women did not achieve full citizenship until 1944. In contrast, even before the French Revolution Condorcet had opposed the passage of laws expressly excluding women, even from posts in the military or magistracy. Instead of legal prohibitions he looks to civil law and education to support women’s participation. He underscores the role to be played by education in countering the limitations attributed to woman’s physical and intellectual limitations, maintaining: