Artifact 1

This artifact was excerpted from a paper titled “Feminism and the Enlightenment,” written for HUMN 541, Enlightenment and the Modern World. It came from the beginning of the paper.

Feminist thought hearkens back to the early fifteenth century, “when, by invoking Lady Reason, Christine de Pizan first challenged French male writers who demeaned women in print” (Offen 34). By the seventeenth century, women and some men criticized how women were not treated as equals. The cleric Francois Poullain de la Barre said in 1673 that the mind had no sex and that aside from the obvious physical differences, women were no different from men (34). He saw that women were as intelligent as men. Publications sprung up debating his claims, and by the time Mary Wollstonecraft was born in 1759, “the debate on the woman question [had become] a central feature of the Enlightenment exploration of human society, and feminist challenges to male hegemony began to bubble up through an increasing number of fissures” (35). Women had begun to stand up for their gender, and there was no silencing them. Many male philosophers tried to put women back in that comfortable (for them) box where they had been for centuries, but the more they fought, the more women fought back.

One of the ways that men and women (feminists) fought was over how men should treat women. The British had picked up a form of “gallantry” from the French; they treated women not exactly with respect but with an idealized kind of chivalry. There was this mythical idea about how knights treated their ladies and about how knights, in general, acted. This is how the British and French (and perhaps other countries following their lead) treated their women. Feminists did not want to be treated this way. They did not consider themselves to be delicate flowers, and the behavior was making the men more effeminate. In fact, “by the mid eighteenth century, men and women of the British middle ranks were becoming more like each other—in social attitudes and behavior, in educational and professional aspirations, in conversational codes, even in their reading matter” (Taylor 41). This was happening with the greatest frequency among literary professionals, who often gathered in mixed company. The supposedly more enlightened men saw a dilemma. How were they to spread Enlightenment values without encouraging the enlightened women, also known as “Amazons” or femme philosophes? These early feminists protested, of course. And “if one were looking for a flashpoint in British feminism’s relationship to the Enlightenment, this would be a good candidate” (Taylor 42). The feminists wanted to be treated as equals, and they were happy with the way the Enlightenment was progressing. But men would not give in so easily.

Neither were men very compromising about the education of women. The Enlightenment brought about a division in thought about how boys and girls should be educated. Some said educating boys at home was better, and some said sending boys to boarding school (an option for middle class and above only) was better. Arguments for both raged back and forth, until consensus about boarding school as the right choice was reached. The same debate occurred with the schooling of girls. Most people had no problem with girls being educated at home, learning what would make them good wives and mothers, nothing more “stimulating” mentally. But feminists objected, and many, like Mary Wollstonecraft, argued for some coeducation (mixed boys and girls). As far as girls learning the same subjects as boys, “it was possible to argue simultaneously for an absence of gender differences in mental capacity, which made women’s equal education possible, and for the presence of gender differences, which could potential entrench existing inequalities” (Cohen 234). This could have opened the door for equal educational opportunities for women much earlier than it did, but it did not. Women often educated themselves in isolation, by reading from their father’s library and/or listening to their brothers being educated. This was the only way open for women to learn the classics.

Works Cited

Clark, Anna. “Women in Eighteenth-Century British Politics.” Women, Gender and Enlightenment, edited by Sarah Knott and Barbara Taylor, Palgrave Macmillan, 2005, pp. 570-586.

Cohen, Michéle. “’To think, to compare, to combine, to methodise’: Girls’ Education in Enlightenment Britain.” Women, Gender and Enlightenment, edited by Sarah Knott and Barbara Taylor, Palgrave Macmillan, 2005, pp. 224-242.

Eger, Elizabeth. “’The noblest commerce of mankind’: Conversation and Community in the Bluestocking Circle.” Women, Gender and Enlightenment, edited by Sarah Knott and Barbara Taylor, Palgrave Macmillan, 2005, pp. 288-305.

Hesse, Carla. “Women Intellectuals in the Enlightened Republic of Letters: Introduction.” Women, Gender and Enlightenment, edited by Sarah Knott and Barbara Taylor, Palgrave Macmillan, 2005, pp. 259-264.

Offen, Karen. European Feminisms, 1700-1950: A Political History. Stanford University Press, 2000. https://hdl-handle-net.ezproxy2.apus.edu/2027/heb04531.0001.001.

Patu and Antje Schrupp. A Brief History of Feminism. MIT Press, 2017. ProQuest Ebook Central, https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/apus/detail.action?docID=4987377.

Sapiro, Virginia. “Mary Wollstonecraft and Enlightenment ‘feminism’.” Perspectives on Feminist Political Thought in European History : From the Middle Ages to the Present, edited by Tjitske Akkerman and Siep Stuurman, Taylor & Francis Group, 1998. ProQuest Ebook Central, https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/apus/detail.action?docID=166938.

Taylor, Barbara. “Feminists versus Gallants: Sexual Manners and Morals in Enlightenment Britain.” Women, Gender and Enlightenment, edited by Sarah Knott and Barbara Taylor, Palgrave Macmillan, 2005, pp. 30-52.

Taylor, Barbara. Mary Wollstonecraft and the Feminist Imagination. Cambridge University Press, 2003.

Tomaselli, Sylvana. “Civilization, Patriotism, and Enlightened Histories of Woman.” Women, Gender and Enlightenment, edited by Sarah Knott and Barbara Taylor, Palgrave Macmillan, 2005, pp. 117-135.

Wollstonecraft, Mary. A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. Amazon Press, 2026.