During the winter of 1789–90, contemporaries in Paris observed intense controversy over the future of the lucrative colonial slave trade. The Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen, in proclaiming all men free and equal, raised questions about the legality of slaving. Both the abolitionist Society of the Friends of the Blacks and proslavery commercial lobbyists representing France’s chambers of commerce, influenced by developments in Britain and the United States, sought to force the slave trade onto the legislative agenda. Countering a consensus that the French revolutionaries never confronted the problem of the slave trade, this essay looks beyond the floor of the National Constituent Assembly to reveal the high-stakes debates that played out largely shielded from public view: in correspondence, in legislative committees, in the Jacobin Club, and in private meetings. This contest served as a proving ground for France’s new representative government and an engine for political innovation, engaging a broad cast of nonelected political actors in the process of lawmaking. Faced with the threat of bankruptcy, revolutionaries voted overwhelmingly to reconcile liberty, equality, and slavery, establishing precedents for future regimes.

Women comprise the majority of graduates from psychology doctoral programs, but equity is yet to be achieved in the professoriate. Publication drives career advancement, underscoring the need to investigate publication-based metrics of eminence. To our knowledge, authorship of invited submissions—a proxy of research esteem—has not been the focus of any psychology studies. In this cross-sectional study, authorship of invited submission(s) in five elite psychology journals (2015–2019) was investigated: Psychological Science in the Public Interest, Annual Review of Psychology, Trends in Cognitive Sciences, Annual Review of Clinical Psychology, and Annual Review of Organizational Psychology and Organizational Behavior. We hypothesized that women would be underrepresented. Author gender was classified using publicly available details (e.g., pronouns on professional websites). Primary outcomes were the proportion of women solo-, first-, or likely invited authors, relative to the proportion of women full and associate professors in psychology at R1 institutions (42.3%). Of 1,828 authorship positions (713 articles), 35.6% were occupied by women. Relative to the nominated base rate, women were disproportionately underrepresented. When the likely invited author on a multi-author publication was a woman, the first author was a woman on 51.0% of papers; when the likely invited author was a man, the first author was a woman on 34.1% of papers. These findings align with prior studies and extend the research by demonstrating that the gender publication gap in psychology is exacerbated in invited submissions and driven by particular subfields. Continued efforts are needed to redress gender disparities in authorship of invited submissions.