The Moral Sex: Woman's Nature in the French Enlightenment

Cover
Oxford University Press, 1995 - 157 Seiten
This 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.
 

Inhalt

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
The Function of the Feminine in the Utopia of Clarens
77
The Female Reduced to Natural Instinct
83
Female Sensibility
90
The Limited Scope of Female Sensibility
97
Conclusion
105
Bibliography
145
Index
155
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Lieselotte Steinbrügge is at Freie Unviersitæt, Berlin.

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