Robespierre insisted that women drove progress and that their presence was necessary for the Enlightenment to spread: “the lumiere of letters has begun to reappear [after the Middle Ages], and it is women who will accelerate the happy revolution that will be the result.” Far from insisting that women had a separate nature that necessitated their exclusion from such [academic] gatherings, Robespierre felt that the “travails of the human mind” would be perfected by bringing together men’s and women’s different qualities, and that the “way to do this is by adding women to literary societies.”

Here, Robespierre was taking the opposite position from that of Rousseau. …Prejudices against women, he proclaimed, were the “scandal of an enlightened century”; he urged other academies to follow Arras’s example [and allow women entry into Academic Societies]. Though Robespierre’s language did not proceed from the same premises as modern feminism, resting instead on the ideas of complementarity, his convictions were clear. It was nothing but prejudice that excluded women; they deserved the same rights as men to cultivate their intelligence; society would benefit from their inclusion.