Female imagery was used quite a lot during the Revolution by its male leaders to denounce the most heinous or brutal of its acts; but women did play an influential role on the lowest level, frequently raiding warehouses where it was suspected grain was being hoarded and sold at unfair prices and then selling it off to the assembled mob at whatever price they deemed acceptable.

Officially, the voice of women was marginalised. There were some memorable attempts to establish a legitimate platform for female representation - namely Olympe de Gouges and 'The Declaration of the Rights of Woman and the Female Citizen' published in 1791 and the Society of Revolutionary Republican Women in 1793, but these were suppressed by October 1793 as part of the wider crackdown on non-Jacobin revolutionary groups. The movement never quite found an alignment with mainstream revolutionary politics.

Furthermore, Lynn Hunt has done some interesting work on political symbolism during the Revolution, with a particular emphasis on 'Marianne' or the Liberty figure. What we find is that in the time of the Terror, when the new revolutionary regime thinks itself to be threatened both by internal insubordination and foreign encroachments, the Liberty figure is replaced on an iconographical level with depictions of a sort of Titan 'Hercules' figure who strides forward and crushes the enemies of the Revolution under his feet. So perhaps the marginalisation of women could also be seen as a symptom of the Terror, where the various outcroppings of thought that had spiraled out from the societal upheaval were suppressed by a new polity that was aiming for cohesion against an internal threat.