Gender

Sarah Richardsonsarah.richardson@warwick.ac.uk

Overview

• Gender and the Enlightenment• Rousseau’s views• Inferiority or equality?• Critiques of marriage• Education• Women and authority• Education

Gender and the Enlightenment

• Debates on gender differences and roles intensified during Enlightenment

• ‘Feminocentric’ as male writers focused on ‘woman’ and ‘woman’s nature’

• Issues of female rights permeated fiction, poetry, plays, essays on political economy, treatises on law, philosophy, animal taxonomy

Salon of Madame Geoffrin

Montesquieu

Madame Geoffrin

Voltaire

Dide

rot

Rousseau

Nine Living Muses including Elizabeth Montagu, Angelica Kauffman, Catharine Macaulay

Rousseau

• Born in Geneva in 1712 • 1728 left Switzerland travelled through

France, Italy, England and Switzerland. • 1750 published Discourse on the Arts and

Sciences in which he argued that morality had declined with the progress of culture

• Discourse on Inequality attacked private property

• Social Contract (1762) offered a model of man's political redemption

• Emile a treatise on education written in 1762

• Died in 1778 near Paris

Rousseau and Gender

• Clear distinction made between men and women • Natural and hierarchical order in the family predicated on sexual difference which

denies women any directly public role • Women should be trained for their particular role in a manner different from that of

men• General Will an ideal and not necessarily something expressed as the will of the

majority• Society needs to be governed by good laws which provide the initial education that

will set the people on their way to civic virtue • Most obvious conclusion is that women should participate as citizens if the general

will is to manifest itself • Yet in Emile it is made clear that participatory citizenship is to be a specifically male

prerogative • In Social Contract Rousseau promotes the patriarchal family as the only natural

society.

Inferiority or Equality?

Marie de Gournay, De l’egalite des hommes et des femmes, 1622

• Francois Poullain de Barre, The Woman as Good as the Man, 1673

The ‘woman’ question

• Montesquieu, Persian Letters, 1721

• Sophia, a person of quality, Woman Not Inferior to Man, 1739

• A Lady, Female Rights Vindicated, 1758

Critiques of Marriage• Mary Astell, Reflections on

Marriage, 1706 • Daniel Defoe defined marriage

without love as ‘conjugal lewdness’ in 1727

• Zilia, heroine in Letters from a Peruvian Woman by Madame de Graffigny renounced marriage in favour of friendship

The Law

By marriage, the husband and wife are one person in law: that is, the very being or legal existence of the woman is suspended during the marriage, or at least is incorporated and consolidated into that of the husband; under whose wing, protection, and cover, she performs everything…William Blackstone, Commentaries on the Laws of England, 1765-9

• Louis de Jarcourt, in vol. 6 of the Encyclopedie in 1756 argued authority of husbands was arbitrary and could be contested

• Marie-Jeanne Riccobini addressed issues such as adultery and illegitimacy

• Jeanne-Marie Le Prince de Beaumont made case for opting out of the ‘uterine economy’ of love and marriage

Education• Some questioned whether

women were capable of reasoning and rational debate.

• Mary Astell, Serious Proposal to the Ladies in 1694 advocated founding a women’s university

• In 1732, University of Bologna conferred degree on Laura Bassi

Emile

• Account of women and education occurs primarily in book 5 of Emile although also in the novel, Julie ou La Nouvelle Héloise.

• Men are strong and active, evincing power and will • Women are weak and passive, lacking resistance • Her duties are to please, attract, counsel and console her mate

to make his life pleasant and happy. • She has rights only so that she might perform her duties

better. • If a woman possessed true literary or artistic talents she

should not aspire to cultivate them at the expense of her domestic duties

Sophie

Her dress is extremely modest in appearance, and yet very coquettish in fact: she does not make a display of her charms, she conceals them; but in concealing them, she knows how to affect your imagination. Everyone who sees her will say, There is a modest and discreet girl; but while you are near her, your eyes and affections wander all over her person, so that you cannot withdraw them; and you would conclude, that every part of her dress, simple as it seems, was only put in its proper order to be taken to pieces by the imagination.

Critics of RousseauMadame de Beaumer, editor of Journal des Dames: ‘I love this sex, I am jealous to uphold its honour and rights. If we have not been raised up in the sciences as you have, it is you who are the guilty ones; for have you not abused the bodily strength nature has given you? Have you not used it to annihilate our capacities…’The Swedish poet and essayist, Charlotta Nordenflycht :

Woman is prevented from grasping any truth,People amuse themselves by laughing at her stupidity. But when the seeds of stupidity finally grow into sinsThen much poison is spread and much blame assigned,Then there is no appealing to the suppression of her intellect,Then she is the embodiment of weakness and a woman.Nature, then, is blamed, and blood and heart decried. Because it is seen as an affront for women to be wise and learned.

Critics of Rousseau

• Spanish reformer and educational writer, Josefa Amar y Borbon argued in 1790 that education for women would enhance the quality of a couple’s relationship in marriage as well as a woman’s personal satisfaction in life

• Mary Wollstonecraft used the ‘association of ideas’ to counter Rousseau:

Everything they see or hear serves to fix impressions, call forth emotions and associate ideas, that give a sexual character to the mind… this cruel association of ideas which everything conspires to twist all their habits of thinking, or to speak with more precision, of feeling, receives new force when they begin to act a little for themselves; for then they perceive that it is only through their address to excite emotions in men, that pleasure and power are to be obtained.

Women and authority

• As women were so powerful and influential because of their sexual allure, they should be suppressed and kept under control.

• Samuel Johnson: ‘Nature has given women so much power, that the law has wisely given them little’.

• Montesquieu: ‘except in special cases, women have almost never aspired to equality, for they already have so many natural advantages that equal power means Empire for them.’

French Revolution• Petition of women of the third estate to the king, asking that

women’s voices be heard and that the king take up their cause: ‘we ask to be enlightened, to have work, not in order to usurp men’s authority, but in order to be better esteemed by them…’

• Ladies Request to the National Assembly likened the place of women to slaves: ‘the French are a free people. Yet still you allow 13 million slaves shamefully to wear the irons of 13 million despots.’

• Condorcet’s Plea for the Citizenship of Women in July 1790 • Olympe de Gouges Declaration of the Rights of Woman and

Citizen in September 1791.

BritainEdmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France in 1790Mary Wollstonecraft challenged Burke in her Vindication of the Rights of Man (1790). Her Vindication of the Rights of Woman quickly followed in 1792. Claims were echoed in domestic novels such as Charlotte Smith’s Desmond, Thomas Holcroft’s Anna St. Ives and Mary Hays, Memoirs of Emma Courtney The issue of female political rights briefly reached parliament in 1797

ConclusionDid women have an Enlightenment?

Women’s Political Club, France 1790