Enlightenment thinking about gender

Abstract

Who made man the exclusive judge, if woman partake with him of the gift of reason? For man and woman, truth, if I understand the meaning of the word, must be the same; yet for the fanciful female character, so prettily drawn by poets and novelists, demanding the sacrifice of truth and sincerity, virtue becomes a relative idea, having no other foundation but utility, and of that utility, men pretend arbitrarily to judge, shaping it to their own convenience. The male is male only at certain moments. The female is female her whole life…everything constantly recalls her sex to her…a perfect woman and a perfect man ought not to resemble each other in mind any more than in looks. The Enlightenment devoted great energies to the definition of gender, so great in fact that some historians have seen this period as a watershed in European culture's attempts to define difference between the sexes. Gender, like the exotic, was an area of difference. It therefore challenged some very strong strands in Enlightenment thought, the strands that emphasised the idea of a universal human nature, and a universal human history, both validated by the possession of a single universal human form of rationality. It was no accident that by the end of the eighteenth century many thinkers such as Mary Wollstonecraft were to equate the denial of rights to slaves and the denial of rights to women. Each destabilised crucial Enlightenment assumptions. Yet in practice as well as in much Enlightenment writing, each was insisted upon. This chapter attempts to understand this contradiction.