Abstract
In the course of the seventeenth century, the notion of the ‘equality of the sexes’ became part of the vocabulary of many educated Europeans, especially in France, and probably elsewhere as well. While mainstream educated opinion continued to take male domination in all walks of life for granted, there was a — perhaps increasing — number of men and women who refused to accept is as a ‘natural’ or ‘divine’ ordering of the world. Many of them believed that the opportunities open to women should be enlarged, in particular in intellectual life. The notion of the ‘equality of the sexes’, though it was sometimes also applied to the body, usually foregrounded the equal cognitive potential of men and women. It is important to note that this feminist voice made itself heard well before the onset of the Enlightenment.1 Early-modern feminism cannot, therefore, be explained as a belated application of Enlightenment philosophy to gender: it should rather be regarded as one of the critical discourses that went into the making of the Enlightenment.
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Notes
See Baldesar Castiglione, The Book of the Courtier, transl. and intr. George Bull (London: Penguin, 1976), 210–25; on its reception, see Peter Burke, The Fortunes of the Courtier: The European Reception of Castiglione’s ‘Cortegiano’ (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1995).
Marguerite Buffet, Nouvelles observations … (Paris: Jean Cusson, 1668), 199–200.
See Francisque Bouillier, Histoire de la philosophie cartésienne (Paris: Delagrave, 1868), 436–7.
See Gustave Reynier, La femme au XVIIe siècle: ses ennemis et ses défenseurs (Paris: Tallandier, 1929), 165.
See Geoffrey V. Sutton, Science for a Polite Society: Gender, Culture, and the Demonstration of Enlightenment (Boulder & Oxford: Westview Press, 1995).
See Patricia H. Labalme, ‘Women’s Roles in Early Modern Venice: An Exceptional Case’, Beyond Their Sex: Learned Women of the European Past, ed. Patricia Labalme (New York & London: New York University Press, 1980), 129–52.
See Joan De Jean, Ancients against Moderns: Culture Wars and the Making of a Fin de Siècle (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 59–66.
See Aileen Douglas, ‘Popular Science and the Representation of Women: Fontenelle and After’, Eighteenth-Century Life, 18 (1994), 1–14; Mary Terrall, ‘Gendered Spaces, Gendered Audiences: Inside and Outside the Paris Academy of Sciences’, Configurations, (1995), ([0-9]+)–([0-9]+); Harth, Cartesian Women, ch. 3.
See Alain Viala, Naissance de l’écrivain (Paris: Éd. de Minuit, 1985).
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Stuurman, S. (2005). The Deconstruction of Gender: Seventeenth-Century Feminism and Modern Equality. In: Knott, S., Taylor, B. (eds) Women, Gender and Enlightenment. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230554801_24
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230554801_24
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