Abstract
From the late seventeenth to the late eighteenth centuries, the intellectual climate of western Europe came to be dominated by a mood of optimism about the potential of individual human reason and the possibility of understanding the natural environment of humanity: this mood of optimism came to be known as the Enlightenment. In Britain, the work of John Locke and of Isaac Newton in the 1680s and 1690s set the scene for a century of expanding, horizons, as the belief grew that the laws which governed the physical and moral worlds could be understood and set out just as Newton had done in his work on gravity. In the process, men like John Locke, and, in France, Voltaire, Diderot and d’Alembert, challenged the authority of the Church and the literal interpretation of the Bible, asserting rather the right of the individual to enjoy freedom of speech, of conscience and of religion. That could be extended further, to assert, as did Jean Jacques Rousseau in the Social Contract (1762) and Thomas Paine in The Rights of Man (1791–2) that individuals had political rights as citizens, to a democratic voice in their government.
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© 1985 Jane Rendall
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Rendall, J. (1985). The Enlightenment and the Nature of Women. In: The Origins of Modern Feminism: Women in Britain, France and the United States 1780–1860. Themes in Comparative History. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-17733-2_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-17733-2_2
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