The Moral Sex: Woman's Nature in the French EnlightenmentThis book deals with a question that currently has a great deal of resonance among historians, feminists, and literary scholars: How was the nature of women redefined and debated during the French Enlightenment? Instead of treating the Enlightenment in the usual manner, as a challenge to orthodox ideas and social conventions, Lieselotte Steinbrügge interprets it as a deviation from a position staked out in the seventeenth century, namely, "the mind has no sex." In breaking with that view, the philosophes shifted the debate to categories like morality and sensitivity and took up economic issues as well. They inadvertently backed women into the corner of domesticity, where middle-class women remained for some time to come. |
Contents
Introduction | 3 |
Reason Has No Sex | 10 |
Emotionalizing the Female Mind | 18 |
The Moral Sex | 30 |
The Sexualization of Female Existence | 41 |
The Historical and MoralPhilosophical | 54 |
Egoism as the Competitive Societys Ruling Passion | 60 |
The Return of the Golden Age in La Nouvelle Héloïse | 70 |
Other editions - View all
The Moral Sex: Woman's Nature in the French Enlightenment Lieselotte Steinbrügge No preview available - 1995 |
Common terms and phrases
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