The moral sex : woman's nature in the French Enlightenment
Lieselotte Steinbrügge, Pamela E. Selwyn (Translator)
"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 Steinbrugge interprets it as a deviation from a position staked out in the seventeenth century, namely, "the mind has no sex."" "The division of the human being into two unequal sexes was by no means the work of the counter-Enlightenment, argues Steinbrugge. Rather, it occurred with genuinely Enlightenment arguments. The very concept of nature upon which equality was supposed to rest was used to legitimate the notion that women were less capable than men of rational thought and action." "This study shows that the emphasis on women's closeness to nature, and its contrast to enlightened masculine rationality, was associated with the social function of reason and the accompanying moral philosophical definition of sentiment. Because of their supposedly greater emotionality, women seemed predestined to represent pure human compassion. They became the moral sex."--Jacket
History
x, 157 pages ; 22 cm
9780195094923, 9780195094930, 0195094921, 019509493X
31408741
Introduction
Reason has no sex
Dividing the human race: the anthropological definition of woman in the Encyclopedie
The sensual turning point: Antoine-Leonard Thomas and Pierre Roussel
The sexualization of female existence
The historical and moral-philosophical dimensions of the feminine: Jean-Jacques Rousseau
The female reduced to natural instinct: Choderlos de Laclos
Female sensibility
Conclusion
Translation from the German: Das moralische Geschlecht