The Moral Sex Woman's Nature in the French Enlightenment

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 toorthodox 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." In breaking with that view, the philosophes shifted the debate to categories like morality and sensitivity and took upeconomic issues as well. They inadvertently backed women into the corner of domesticity, where middle-class women remained for some time to come.