 In contrast to his 1787 work, in which women’s rights are part of a larger consideration of the elements of a just constitution, Condorcet’s 1790 essay Sur l’admission des femmes au droits de la cité [On the Admission of Women to the Rights of Citizenship] stands as one of the most concise and potent defenses of women’s rights in the entire history of feminist thought. It also needs to be set within the context of the monumental events that began in 1789 and led up to the adoption by the newly elected national assembly of the Constitution of 1791. By the terms of the 1791 Constitution of the new constitutional monarchy, as already briefly observed, the population was divided between active and passive citizens on the basis on the basis of wealth, thereby excluding the large majority of male citizens from full political participation. Complicated suffrage provisions restricted popular influence further. However, the new laws also categorized all women (without exception) as passive citizens, a departure from old régime legal practice whereby women could sometimes vote and act as regents. In addition to barring women from the voting process or from serving as magistrates or elected representatives, only men were granted the privilege of serving in the newly formed militias, an increasingly important function of republican citizenship during these same years. Gender divisions would, if anything, become even more pronounced after 1792 when the monarchy was abolished and France became a republic, the divisions between active and passive male citizenship were removed, and universal male suffrage established but nothing was done to alter women’s secondary political status before the law. Yet from the outset of the Revolution in 1789, in practice women were far from being wholly “passive”. Many militated for rights and participated actively in the clubs and societies of the revolutionary public sphere.