 On the basis of natural rights, Condorcet moves immediately to tackle the question of political representation, as it concerns all women as well as the particular circumstances of married women. Alluding to the English principle of no taxation without representation, as popularized in France in Jean-Louis Delolme’s 1771 Constitution d’Angleterre [Constitution of England], Condorcet insists that “all women have the right to refuse to pay taxes levied by parliaments”; adding that he has found no “substantial arguments against these points, at least as far as widows and unmarried women are concerned” (McLean and Hewitt 1994, 297). However, while unmarried women and widows might be admitted to political rights, the much thornier problem of married women’s rights remains to be tackled. Condorcet confronts the question head-on, knowing that even English law, to which he has just appealed, is strongly prejudiced against married women. Under English common law, an unmarried adult was considered to have the legal status of a feme sole (in law book French), while a married woman had the status of a feme covert. Colloquially speaking, husband and wife were one person as far as the law was concerned, and that person was the husband. Women were restricted from owning property, signing legal documents, entering into contracts, obtaining an education, or keeping her own salary, without her husband’s permission. In pre-revolutionary France, as the historian Dominique Godineau (1998, xix) points out, women were likewise conceptualized according to their roles as mothers and spouses, thereby “placed outside of the public and hence outside of the city”. The same was true of their position in the Encyclopédie, she observes, where Diderot considers that the (masculine) word citoyen— that is, one who possesses political rights—is only attributable “to women, young children, or to servants as one would [refer] to the members of a family of a citizen in the strict sense of the word; they aren’t really citizens”. Thus, in pre-revolutionary France political individuals represented families (including family servants, where applicable), not merely themselves. In short, if rights inhered in independent persons, then according to tradition and legal reasoning, a woman was not strictly speaking a legal personality. A woman’s legal rights were merged with those of her husband (and prior to marriage, with her father). A married woman counted for nothing before the law; and therefore could not count as a citizen whose natural rights had to be respected by the state.