The Republican Mother: Women and the Enlightenment-An American Perspective

Abstract

THE GREAT QUESTIONS OF POLITICAL LIBERTY AND CIVIC FREEDOM, OF THE relationship between law and liberty, the subjects of so many ideological struggles in the eighteenth century, are questions which have no gender. Philosophes habitually indulged in vast generalizations about humanity: Montesquieu contemplated the nature of society, Rousseau formulated a scheme for the revitalized education of children, Lord Kames wrote four volumes on the history of mankind. The broad sweep of their generalizations has permitted the conclusion that they indeed meant to include all people in their observations; if they habitually used the generic he two centuries before our own generation began to be discomfited by it, then it is a matter of syntax and usage, and without historical significance. Yet Rousseau permitted himself to wonder whether women were capable of serious reasoning. If the Enlightenment represented, as Peter Gay has remarked, man's claim to be recognized as an adult, responsible being who would take the risk of discovery, exercise the right of unfettered criticism, accept the loneliness of autonomy, it may be worth asking whether it was assumed that women were also to recognize themselves as responsible beings. Is it possible, by definition, for women to be enlightened? The answers to that question have important implications for historians of political thought and for those who seek to write women's intellectual history. We should be skeptical of the generous assumption that the Enlightenment man was generic. Philosophe is a male noun: it describes Kant, Adam Smith, Diderot, Lessing, Franklin, Locke, Rousseau. With the conspicuous exceptions of Catharine Macaulay and Mary Wollstonecraft, women are absent even from the second and third ranks. They hover on the fringes, creating a milieu for discussions in their salons, offering their personal and moral support to male friends and lovers, but making only minor intellectual