 Indeed, a great deal of the ambivalence that one detects in Condorcet’s 1790 essay belongs to the times, not merely in the sense of the day’s prejudices—which, as we have seen, he strongly combated—but rather also with respect to the extent to which the opportunity for achieving women’s rights was eclipsed by an increasingly negative, even openly hostile climate toward women who were perceived to be overly “public” and insufficiently modest and “domestic”. In the face of women’s heightened political involvement during the popular revolution, those few representatives still favoring political equality for women appear to have retracted their former support. Despite his pronounced early and visible commitment to women’s voting rights, Condorcet’s public silence on the issue when presenting his introductory report on the draft constitution to the Convention in 1793 still remains perplexing. The constitutional debate occurred after the removal of the distinction between passive and active voters, so that the denial of women’s rights was made more explicitly than ever a matter of sexual difference rather than one of property or class position. In addition, from the declaration of the Republic in September 1792 until women’s political participation was proscribed by the deputies of the Convention in the fall of 1793, popular women’s activism in the streets and in the galleries of the Convention was accelerating, but so too was a campaign against women in the revolutionary press. (On this period, see especially Levy, et al. 1979 and Godineau 1998).