The early Rousseau’s egalitarian feminism: a philosophical convergence with Madame Dupin and ‘The Critique of the Spirit of the Laws’

Abstract

ABSTRACTFeminists have long criticized Rousseau for his patriarchal political theory. But when his lesser-known writings on women from the 1740s are taken into account, including a nearly 900-page manuscript critiquing Montesquieu from a feminist perspective, we see how the early Rousseau robustly converged in feminist ideas with his employer Madame Louise Dupin, before he gradually diverged from this egalitarian school of thought over the course of the 1750s. I add to the evidence of the early Rousseau’s egalitarian response to ‘the woman question’ by showing his philosophical convergence with the feminist arguments of the anonymous ‘Critique of the Spirit of the Laws’ (c. 1749) as well as Madame Dupin’s ‘Ouvrage sur les femmes’ (c. 1745–1751) – manuscripts largely in his secretarial hand. Through this triangulation of understudied texts, we find that the early Rousseau was not a patriarchal apologist, but rather a feminist secretary and a secretary to a feminist.