The writer offers a comparison of suffragist rhetoric in France and the U.S. in 1848. She points out that the revolutionary French Second Republic in March 1848 abolished slavery and introduced the principle of "universal" male suffrage, deliberately leaving out women. She details the ensuing vigorous Parisian campaign for female suffrage. She then situates the July 1848 Seneca Falls Convention in the U.S. with reference to the events in France, and she compares the women's rights rhetoric in both settings. In addition, she contextualizes both with respect to earlier English debates on slavery and suffrage. In doing so she reestablishes some vital elements of a still incomplete historical record, thus challenging and revising recent arguments by various French and American scholars regarding both the theoretical marginalization of women from political rights in republics since 1789 and the alleged distinctions between French and American feminisms during that period. The texts of various documents from the era are provided.
