Enlightment Debate On Women

The Enlightenment Debate on Women Author(s): Sylvana Tomaselli Reviewed work(s): Source: History Workshop, No.
20 (Autumn, 1985), pp. 101-124 Published by: Oxford University Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4288651 . Accessed: 05/03/2013 10:34
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The Enlightenment Debate on Women by Sylvana Tomaselli

In the Spring of 1982 History Workshop Journal changed its subtitle from 'a journal of socialist historians' to 'a journal of socialist and feminist historians'. The addition, that issue's editorial explained, was owed, in part, to a recognition that while its socialism and its feminism were not unconnected, the Journal was engaged in 'the construction of a new, autonomous feminist history'. Such a change, it was hoped, would encourage feminist contributions and widen the field of debate. More recently, last Spring, the Journal published a lucid account of the state of this debate and the trends within feminist history, Sally Alexander's 'Women, Class and Sexual Differences'. Quite apart from very simply, but very effectively, presenting 'the dilemma for a feminist political strategy' as 'the tension between the plea for equality and the assertion of sexual difference',1 the article shows some of the implications of a radical feminist perspective for the history of women. In seeing language and the structure of desires, including women's desires, as male, such a feminism, it argues, is writing women out of history. The present essay pursues Sally Alexander's reflections. It seeks to put women back in their place in history by examining a forgotten tradition which linked women, not, as is all too swiftly done, to nature, but to culture and the process of its historical development. In so doing, however, this article takes the 1982 editorial and its vision of the autonomy of feminism to the letter. For in setting out to widen the debate, it considers a theory of history which,
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while by no means inimical to socQilism,2 is more often than not associated with liberalism, not to say, capitalism. The four-stages theory, that is, the view that society proceeded from a primitive condition of hunting and gathering communities, to a pastoral, then an agricultural and finally, a commercial stage, will provide, along with the account of the growth of manners and politeness, which it embodies, the back-drop for our discussion. Characteristic of eighteenthcentury Scottish political economy, this history of civilisation also has its Continental variants. Amongst these, we shall only have leave to consider some of the French versions. Our purpose is to offer a re-interpretation of what eighteenth-century thinkers argued the positions of women to be. It is also to challenge the facile alignment of the conceptual opposition of woman to man under the perennial nature-culture dichotomy. That such an alignment still needs to be challenged is something we shall now endeavour to illustrate before we turn to what is properly our historical inquiry. One would have thought the conception of woman as civilising a commonplace, indeed, an unassailable assumption within Western culture. Yet judging by some recent currents in feminism, in radical science and other forms of culture critique, including ecology, to think of woman within the register of civilisation and culture or, inversely, of civilisation and culture as pertaining in an essential way to the realm of the feminine is to commit nothing short of a confusion at the most fundamental philosophical level, a category mistake. One need only open Carolyn Merchant's The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology and the Scientific Revolution - influential in North America and to a lesser degree also here - to find the notion of nature and that of womanhood as if tied tqgether by an indissoluble bond. 'Women and nature', its first sentence tells us, 'have an age-old association - an affiliation that has persisted throughout culture, language and history'.4 Within an overall thesis that man's perception of nature has changed in,the last four centuries, Merchant argues that while man distanced himself from nature by culture, he persistently identified woman with nature and that: At the root of the identification of women and animality with a lower form of human life lies the distinction between nature and culture fundamental to humanistic disciplines such as history, literature, and anthropology, which accept that distinction as an unquestioned assumption. Nature-culture dualism is a key factor in Western civilization's advance at the expense of nature. As the unifying bonds of the older hierarchical cosmos were severed, European culture increasingly set itself above and apart from all that was symbolized by nature.5 The development of science and technology as well as the advent of commercial society are phenomena which Merchant sees as rejecting
Enlightenment Debate on Women
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women and their world and, significantly, ones in which woman has no hand. Thus what may have been a male conceptual construct, the equation of woman with nature, is eventually endorsed by Merchant herself. This opens the way for an easy partnership between feminism and ecology, for the state of affairs which the latter movement criticises is one which woman did not bring about. She is its victim, no less than nature is. Nor is Merchant alone in her conviction. Reading Mary Daly's Pure Lust: Elemental Feminist Philosophy affords numerous instances of the identification of Woman and Earth and a radical critique of man's lecherous attitude to both.6 Again, a similar argument is to be found in Susan Griffin's Woman and Nature: The Roaring Inside Her.7 Just as we have seen Merchant do, Griffin makes hers the allegedly male thesis that women are more a part of nature, more material, than man.8 The text orchestrates two voices, one male, the other female. 'Since patriarchal thought does', Griffin writes, represent itself as emotionless (objective, detached and bodiless), the dicta of Western civilization and science on the subjects of woman and nature in this book are written in a parody of a voice with such presumptions. This voice rarely uses a personal pronoun, never speaks as 'I' or 'we', and almost always implies that it has found absolute truth, or at least has the authority to do so. In writing this book, the paternal voice became quite real to me, and I was afraid of it . . . . Much research went into the reconstruction of this voice: I tried to preserve its style and tone accurately. The other voice in the book began as my voice but was quickly joined by the voices of other women, and voices from nature, with which I felt more and more strongly identified, particularly as I read the opinions of men about us.9 With these dichotomous voices, male and female, as her starting point, Griffin produces a chronological table of the landmarks in modern science, in the male voice, to which the excluded female voice can neither add, nor retort. From this perspective, science, and the culture from which it emanates, are not woman's own. She constitutes an object, not an agent, within the scientific world, one that is to be investigated and exploited as the rest of nature has been and continues to be. Having emulated the style, Griffin ends by endorsing the male contention. Her account of the relation between man, culture, civilisation and science, on the one hand, and women and nature, on the other, and the analogous thesis put forward, albeit in a very different genre, by Merchant or Daly, find an echo in Brian Easlea's Science and Sexual Oppression: Patriarchy's Confrontation with Woman and Nature.'0 Within its pages we encounter yet again the view that the seventeenth century Scientific Revolution heralded a new attitude towards nature, one directly linked to the increased subjection of women. Easlea conceives of the development
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of science and philosophy in the modern era as the history of the 'demothering' of nature. Treated as something external, disenchanted, to be studied, analysed and probed into by man, nature becomes a thing to be used, mastered and overcome. This change of attitude towards nature has its counterpart in man's alienation from woman, motherhood, and sexuality. Easlea traces the course and manifold manifestations of man's remove from his allegedly once integrated self - a self living in harmony with nature and woman and conceiving itself as pertaining to the same order of things - from the seventeenth century through the Industrial Revolution and down to the present day. The solution to the contemporary predicament lies, according to him, in a socialist feminism, fuelled by an ethics of compassion, solidarity and cooperation. The logic of his description of the growth of modern society as the growth of a uniquely male society and world outlook leads him, whether unwittingly or no, to rest his hopes on women as the untainted, unspoiled voice of the future. Common to all these views therefore is the virginal quality of their representation of woman. After Hegel's bureaucrats, after the proletariat, women now seem to embody the potentials of an universal class. Except at the cost of dismissing a good deal of feminist literature, of writings by ecologists and a growing number of histories of science and culture which attempt to be sensitive to issues raised by feminism, this view of the relation between man and culture and woman and nature cannot be readily ignored. Nor is this simply a recent and ephemeral trend. The assumption that Western civilisation simply does regard woman as part of nature, not culture, and that this belief can essentially be taken for granted runs through much of the literature on women from Simone de Beauvoir onwards. Indeed, the latter has been a source of inspiration for a great number of feminist studies, not least of which is Sherry B. Ortner's 'Is Female to Male as Nature is to Culture?', an article which drew a considerable amount of attention in the United States. " In the words of a recent critic: The nature/culture split entered feminist discourse with Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex. De Beauvoir located men squarely in the realm of Transcendence as Being-for-themselves and women in the bog of Immanence as Beings-in-themselves. De Beauvoir's model offered an unambiguous linkage from nature/culture, woman/man, to oppressed/ oppressor. It made 'women . . . the bearers of ignorance and men of knowledge', rather a baffling notion to set as the basis of feminist discourse. In de Beauvoir's argument, men and men alone are declared the agents and bearers of culture; women, the flip side of the coin, outside civilization, in nature, are inessential to culture though they are a necessary condition for the reproduction of human life, a process de Beauvoir does not find one of the tasks of culture.'2
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Looking at the accounts of gender definitions produced on both sides of the Atlantic, the critic in question, Jean Bethke Elshtain, considers such feminists as Juliet Mitchell and Dorothy Dinnerstein to have fallen prey, no less than Beauvoir, though each in their own particular way, to the dichotomy. The primacy of the category of nature within feminine discourse can be traced back, however, at least as far as Mary Wollstonecraft's Vindication of the Rights of Woman. Outside of feminism, woman and nature have been bound together since early Christian readings of Genesis. Woman, the temptress, dragged man down and stood in the way of his transcendence of his appetites, his earthly desires. She stood in the way of salvation. But as historians like Eileen Power13 have sought to demonstrate, even in the Dark Ages attitudes towards women were by no means unambivalent. Indeed, the equation of women with matter is not as obvious as it is sometimes presented even within a Biblical perspective. For while Eve, on some accounts, did bring Adam down, down to earth, in fact, she did so by striking a blow for culture. Eve, you'll recall, led Adam to eat from the tree of knowledge, thereby alienating mankind forever from the most natural of all dwellings, Eden. In fact, the view that woman civilises, that she cultivates, refines, perhaps even adulterates and corrupts is as recurrent as the view that she is nature's most dutiful and untouched daughter, or to put it less palatably, a being closer to animals, one link, at least, lower than man in the Great Chain of Beings. Were the connection between woman and nature as unproblematic as some writers seem to think it is within our culture, there simply would be no language in which to articulate the questions which make up feminist discourse. We do indeed think of gender relations and differences in terms of other bipolarities just as we do conceptualise the dynamic between nature and culture in masculine and feminine terms, but our symbolic universe is far richer and more complex, perhaps also confused, than many critics of the relations between man and woman, man and nature, seem to suspect. Moreover, and this is perhaps what is really overlooked, such has always been the case. One reason why the thesis, that woman and nature are conceptually united, is advanced as if it were uncontentious, when the view that woman civilises seems no less tenable, might lie in the seeming difference between the orders of knowledge to which each account may be deemed to pertain. To put the matter in another way, the woman-nature thesis - as one might call it - is presented within a cluster of assumptions about theoretical knowledge and natural science. The woman-culture view - it cannot, at this stage, be referred to as a thesis - seems, for its part, to be anchored in nothing more than social practice, custom and convention. It is the subject matter of social, not intellectual, history: the fact which would belie the woman-nature thesis and show up the latter, as one historian has argued,14 for the ideology it is. Viewed in this manner, the position of women may be
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summed up as follows: at the level of the real, women partake in and shape culture, but at the level of the symbolic or the imaginary, they are excluded from it and represented as belonging to the outside realm of the natural. Still within this framework, we might conceive of women as endorsing the position they are given in the symbolic and the imaginary, taking it literally, that is, considering themselves outside of culture, a position which they then use strategically to criticise the place they are given both within the real and the symbolic or imaginary of the culture from which they are excluded and which they themselves reject. Difficult to verbalise and to conceive, this scheme of things raises some serious problems, not least of which is that touched on at the beginning of this essay, namely, language. What language are women to speak in? Some feminists try, as Mary Daly and Susan Griffin do, to invent their own language, their own mythologies, to speak in their own voices. Such solutions, even if successful, are really only solutions for those individuals, those poets, whose language it is. What tongue are the rest of us to speak in? Our purpose here is not to devise yet another language, nor to proffer an entirely novel way out of this predicament. What we will question instead is whether the woman-nature thesis really does reign supreme. For once the issue is pressed and investigated a little more deeply, it is at once clear that the woman-culture view, the notion that she civilises, can be articulated in terms of the relation between woman and the family, the family and civil society and, finally, in terms of the sexual division of labour. It isn't just a practice standing in the face of a conflicting worldoutlook. It is a position with its own theoretical tradition and history as we shall now attempt to demonstrate. Few periods gave as much consideration to the issue of the merit and demerit of the growth of society, of culture and civilisation as the eighteenth century. The categories of nature and culture were absolutely pivotal to nearly every aspect of the Enlightenment. It produced perhaps the greatest reassessment of the value of society by contrasting it with a hypothetical state of nature out of which social life emerged in distinctive and progressive stages. It is often assumed that when writing the history of Man and society, eighteenth century thinkers were subsuming woman within the notion of man - yet one more example of the sexist categories of male political thought. But this was by no means always the case. We need not be shy. We can actually ask whether the history of society told the same tale for man as for woman, because that is a question which the eighteenth century itself asked. For those who gave the matter any thought, the history of civilisation, when written with women in mind, could only be viewed positively. Whatever the advantages or disadvantages of the progress of the arts and sciences, of the coming of commercial society and of the growth of manners and politeness, all were agreed that there was nothing in the
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infancy of mankind about which women need feel nostalgic. Woman's life in the state of nature or in primitive societies was not only confined to securing the means of subsistence, but it was marked in addition by their subjugation to the unremitting and universal tyranny of men. As long as commentators focused on women, the history of the species was unquestionably one of progress towards liberty. The issue of the condition of women present or past could be passed over in silence of course, but once raised, the question of the comparative freedom, and indeed happiness, of the savage and civilised woman seems to have afforded only one answer. This was true of such critics of the relation between the sexes and the condition of women in the eighteenth century as Catherine Macaulay (1731-91), as it was critics of civilisation like Denis Diderot (1713-84). Thus, Macaulay contends in her Letters on Education: But whatever might be the wise purpose intended by Providence in such a disposition of things, certain it is, that some degree of inferiority, in point of corporal strength, seems always to have existed between the two sexes; and this advantage, in the barbarous ages of mankind, was abused to such a degree, as to destroy all the natural rights of the female species, and reduce them to a state of abject slavery.15 Unlike the writers with whom we shall be principally concerned, Macaulay wasn't interested in tracing the history of the surpassing of these uncultivated ages. 'What accidents', she writes, have contributed&inEurope to better their condition, would not be to my purpose to relate; for I do not intend to give you a history of women; I mean only to trace the sources of their peculiar foibles and vices; and these I firmly believe to originate in situation and education only: for so little did a wise and just Providence intend to make the condition of slavery an unalterable law of female nature, that in the same proportion as the male sex have consulted the interest of their own happiness, they have relaxed in their tyranny over women."6 Had this historian of politics been a little more inclined to write the history of women, she might have been led to think of them as the agents, and not just the objects, of the process by which their condition was improved. Writers like Diderot, however, did not fail to take up the opportunity, when it presented itself, of thinking through the stages of the history of woman. Reviewing Antoine-Leonard Thomas's (1732-85) Essai sur le Charactere, les Moeurs et l'Esprit des Femmes dans les differents Siecles (Essay on the Character, Manners and Spirit of Women throughout the Ages), Diderot did have a lot of abuse to vent. Thomas, or so the review seems to indicate, had essentially wasted a brilliant chance to treat a subject of great interest
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Self-Portrait, Mme Vigee-Lebrun (1755-1842). One of the most successful painters of her time, she became a friend of Marie Antoinette, Painter to the Queen and a member of the Academy in 1783. She excelled at painting women and children, lived in England for several years and travelled extensively throughout Europe. Her Memoirs were published in 1835-7: two English translations exist.
Mme dEpinay, Jean-Etienne Liotard (Musee d'Art et d'Histoire, Geneva). Louise-Florence d'Esclavelles, Mme d' (1726-83) was a leading Enlightenment figure. A friend of Diderot, she collaborated with him on many projects and like Mme Vigee-lebrun kept a brilliant 'Salon'. She left letters; a work on education, Conversations d Fmilie and an autobiographical novel (publ. as Memoires, 1818).
,~-
,'I
7,
Mme de Pompadour, Maurice-Quentin de la Tour 1755: Louvre, Paris). Antoinette Poisson, Marquise de (1721-64). Mistress of Louis XV, she was an important patroness of the arts. Amongst the books shown here are volume four of the and Montesquicu's De L'Esprit EncyclopMcdie des Loix (The Spirit of the Laws).
Mlle Fel, Quentin de la [our (Mus6e AntoineIcuyer, Saint-Quentin). Opera singer (1713-94) and real actress, she helped introduce 'sensibility' on the stage. Painted, praised and admired, there is no doubt that thc.s four women not only conceived of themselves as partaking in culture but also as fundamentally shaping it. That is how they were rightly represented.
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and importance. On a topic such as this, Diderot thought, there was no excuse for being as excruciatingly dull as Thomas. But however boring Thomas might have been, Diderot did not dispute his thesis. In fact, he accepted the claim that: In nearly every land the cruelty of positive laws has united with the cruelty of nature against women. They have been treated as imbecile children. There is no manner of vexation which man cannot with impunity exercise against woman amongst civilised people; the only retribution which she can exert leads to domestic trouble and contempt the extent of which varies with the level of civility the nation has reached. There is no manner of vexation which the savage doesn't exert against his woman; the unhappy woman in the cities is far unhappier still in the midst of the forests. Listen to the speech of an Indian woman from the banks of the Orenoco, and listen to it, if you can, without being moved by it.17 There followed the often cited account of North-American Indian mothers strangling their baby daughters to spare them the ignominy and suffering of a life of enslavement to men. It was indeed a very moving speech. The point behind such travellers' tales always remained the same. It was not that Diderot, or Thomas or the many other writers who dealt with the issue felt that modernity could be self-congratulatory with respect to the status of women. There was scarcely any discussion of women in the eighteenth century which did not find much to criticise and in the age of Enlightenment, education was the most frequent target of such criticisms. Even if the ideal curriculum for women was a subject on which there was considerable disagreement, no one in the period seems to have been pleased with what education they did receive.18 Catherine Macaulay and Mary Wollstonecraft are but two representatives of this critique. Not only were the prescriptions advocated to remedy this ill often very different from one another; so were the aetiologies. The little known, but not uninteresting, nor by any means atypical author of a two volume study entitled The History of Women from the Earliest Antiquity, to the Present Time, the Scottish physician William Alexander (d.1783), put the conspiratorial thesis most succinctly: in every age, and in every country, while the men have been partial to the persons of the fair sex, they have either left their minds altogether without culture, or biassed them by a culture of a spurious and improper nature; suspicious perhaps, that a more rational one would have opened their eyes, shown them their real condition, and prompted them to assert the rights of nature; rights, of which the men have perpetually, more or less, deprived them."9 As for the law, especially that governing property, the view that it was biased against women is at least as old as Cicero:
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History Workshop Journal But if I wished to describe the conceptions of justice, and the principles, customs, and habits which have existed, I could show you, not merely differences in all the different nations, but that there have been a thousand changes in a single city, even in our own, in regard to these things. For example, our Manilius here, being an interpreter of the law, would give you different advice about the rights of women in regard to legacies and inheritances from that which he used to give in his youth, before the passage of the Voconian law. In fact that law, passed for men's advantage, is full of injustice to women. For why should a woman not have money of her own?20
The realisation that the law was man-made found many an expression in the century, not least in the Encyclope'die where, for instance, the product of enlightened despotism, the 'Code Frederic', was treated with dismay by the Encyclope'die'smost prolific contributor, M. le Chevalier de Jaucourt. Nothing in his view justified its claim of the authority of the husband over his wife and household, least of all natural law, which it wholly
contradicted.21
The point then of such histories of women was not to promote selfcongratulation. What they revealed and highlighted instead was the fact that, however bad conditions were for women in civilised nations, they had been a great deal worse in primitive societies. As Diderot saw it, if women are subjugated in civilised nations, they are under complete oppression in savage nations and in all barbarous regions. Entirely occupied with meeting his needs, the savage has time only for his safety and his subsistence.22 Or Thomas: More than half the globe is peopled with savages; and in all these peoples women are very unhappy. Savage man, both ferocious and indolent, active by necessity, but drawn by an irresistible taste for sleep, knowing only the physical thing of love, having no moral notions which alone soften the empire of power, accustomed by mores to consider might the only law of nature, rules despotically over beings which reason made his equals, but whose weakness subjugates them to him. Women are amongst the Indians what helots were amongst Spartans, a vanquished people, forced to work for its vanquishers. And so it is that by the Orenoco . . .23 Nor was this theory peculiar to the French Enlightenment. In Scotland, Alexander devoted much of his work to demonstrating the same point and John Millar (1735-1801), in The Origins of the Distinction of Ranks, argued that
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we may form an idea of the state and condition of the women in the ages most remote from improvement. Having little attention paid them, either upon account of those pleasures to which they are subservient, or of those occupations which they are qualified to exercise, they are degraded below the other sex, and reduced under that authority which the strong acquire over the weak: an authority, which, in early periods, is subject to no limitation from the government, and is therefore exerted with a degree of harshness and severity suited to the dispositions of the people.24 Millar was the only author who tried to resist judging the nature of the relations between men and women in early societies by contemporary standards. This makes for the somewhat awkward tone of the book, which seeks both to give an accurate and fair account of the societies it is describing and to develop a thesis based on rather ambivalent feelings towards the civilising process considered in its entirety. Millar, however, did not dissent from the view generally held within this debate, that the coming of the pastoral age was a blessing for women. As life became less precarious, as mankind no longer needed to spend all its waking hours hunting and gathering, more effort and time could be diverted away from these tasks towards those of making living conditions more agreeable. 'A shepherd is more regularly supplied with food', Miller argued, 'he is led to the pursuit of those objects which may render his situation more easy and comfortable and among these the enjoyments derived from the intercourse of the sexes claim a principal share, and become an object of attention.'25 This point can be found in French and Scottish authors alike. Women are less unhappy amongst pastoral peoples, in Diderot's view, for the greater ease such peoples have in securing the means of subsistence entails that they also have greater leisure and this, in turn, makes for the conditions in which beauty arises. In such societies women and men can, in Diderot's words 'make some choice as to the object of their desire and add the idea of a nobler sentiment to that of physical pleasure'.26 Nor did the logic of the argument cease here. It was extended to welcome the beginnings of agriculture. Thus Diderot argued that the relations between the sexes were further improved as soon as land began to be cultivated.27 While Alexander noted that though pasturages, agriculture, and every thing that brings mankind into society, is generally in favour of women; yet the first efforts of a people in agriculture, commonly lay an additional load of labour on the shoulders of that sex; so that they lose, in the beginning, by an institution, which afterwards turns greatly to their advantage.28 Nor did women benefit any the less from the growth of commercial society. Turning to Diderot again we find him arguing that women acquire a new
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importance with the advent of the arts and of commerce as men grow increasingly dependent on women in the daily running of their business an activity at which women excel.29 Not even luxury, in Diderot's view, puts an end to the progress of women, for when labour is scorned and wealth increases, mankind has only one obsessive concern: 'In such times, women are eagerly sought after, both on account of the attributes which they owe to nature and of those they acquire by education'. 30 Each step towards the full development of commercial society could thus be happily undertaken by women. Now, this is by no means as obvious as it might first appear. In order to come to appreciate that this argument about the absolute gain which women made out of the growth of civilisation isn't simply a special case within a wider brief for the rise of commercial society, we must first turn back to the descriptions given within this discourse of the beginnings of society. We must in particular note the extent to which something like a master-slave dialectic is pervasive in such accounts of the early stages of the natural history. Here Thomas' Essai offers us what is possibly the best point of departure: If one surveys the course of nations through the ages, one will see almost everywhere women both adored and oppressed. Man, who has never missed an opportunity to abuse his power in rendering homage to beauty, has everywhere taken advantage of their weakness. He has been their tyrant and their slave.31 This conceptualisation of the condition of women as one of slavery is so frequent as to be almost a common-place in the Enlightenment. Condorcet's (1743-94) Esquisse d'un Tableau Historique des Progres de L'Esprit Humain (Sketch of a Historical Table of the Progress of the Human Mind) told of the slow development from a state in which 'women were condemned to a kind of slavery'.32 Much earlier in the century, even Rousseau (1712-78), in his collaboration with Mme Dupin (as their secretary, Rousseau collaborated with both Mme and M. Dupin, during the period from 1745-49), on her projected history of women, urged us to conceive of the matter in these very terms. Men had first deprived women of their liberty, according to him. Masters of all things they had grounded their tyranny in a theory of natural right which had no foundation other than their superior might. Had it not been for this original enslavement, women would have surpassed men in every act of virtue and courage. In fact, they often had. But men were careful to suppress any mention of it. And as they most often wrote the histories of the race, this censorship was almost entirely successful in its aim.33 These are startling terms indeed for someone so often thought of as the arch-misogynist and arch-sexist of the Enlightenment period. But what has been said above, is not intended to absolve him of any such charges. We will have further occasion to discuss Rousseau's views of the relationship
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between women and men taken in their historical context. For the moment, it suffices to note that even Rousseau was no exception to this discourse of the history of the power relations between woman and men. Eighteenth century histories of women thus began with their loss of liberty. They continued with an account of how and to what extent the master-slave or tyrant-slave relation was redressed, if not reversed. Power and freedom were the central categories through which the relation between the sexes were analysed. The history of women therefore was the history of their conflict with men, of the conflict between the sexes, to borrow a phrase. Montesquieu's (1689-1755) L'Esprit des Lois (The Spirit of the Laws) (1748) provides the classical statement of this vision of the relation between men and women. The concept of liberty and its appendant register of captivity, servitude and enslavement lie at the heart of his treatment of what he calls 'le gouvernement domestique' (domestic rule), no less than they do that of his analysis of any other form of government. In his view, in fact, the two, political and domestic, were indissolubly intertwined:: Everything is closely related: the despotism of the prince is naturally conjoined to the servitude of women; just as the liberty of women is tied to the spirit of the monarch.35 The language of liberty and servitude, the interconnection between the status of women and the spirit prevailing in a nation was not restricted to these two forms of government, despotism and monarchy. Montesquieu's description of republics exhibited no less of an awareness of the consequences which the near equality of citizens had on the condition of women - it provided a check to the tyranny of men.36 Free under the law, women in republics were restrained by its mores: as luxury was banned, corruption could not find its nest.37 The conflict between men and women was therefore neutralised. The laws protected women against the tyranny of men, while men were themselves assured that they would not fall prey to the ensnarement of women through what we might call commodity fetishism. The condition then of all citizens was therefore genuinely equal and free, though men and women retained their gender differences, a fact reflected in the very nature of the laws which governed them. But Montesquieu did not stop there in his use of the tyrant-slave dialectic. He applied his description of the nature of the slavery of women, domestic slavery, to help conceptualise what he called 'real slavery' productive labour.38 True degradation resided in the addition of domestic slavery to the burden of real slavery - such had been the condition of the Helots in Spartan society. The status of women therefore informed Montequieu's theory at all levels. It was part and parcel of his conceptual framework. Reading him, there is no doubt as to how to think of the
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position of women. His use of the extent of their slavery or enfranchisement as the measure of the liberty prevalent in any one form of government can be found in the writings of a very wide range of eighteenth century thinkers, amongst whom Millar is perhaps the most well-known example. Alexander, however, gives the thesis its most succinct form: we shall almost constantly find women among savages condemned to every species of servile, or rather, of slavish drudgery; and shall as constantly find them emerging from this state, in the same proportion as we find the men emerging from ignorance and brutality; the rank, therefore, and condition, in which we find women in any country, mark out to us with the greatest precision, the exact point in the scale of civil society, to which the people of such country have arrived; and were their history entirely silent on every other subject, and only mentioned the manner in which they treated their women, we would, from thence, be enabled to form a tolerable judgement of the barbarity, or culture of their manners.39 Alexander's confidence would have been shared by Diderot, Thomas, Millar and the like, for the idea that women were the barometers on which every aspect of society, its morals, its laws, its customs, its government, was registered had gained much ground since the publication of Montesquieu's De L'Esprit des Lois in the middle of the century. The nature and extent of their subjection or liberty said everything. If such was the conceptual grid used to discuss the relation between men and women, if, that is, the language of liberty and slavery provided the terms in which the relation between the sexes was spoken of, then the notion that their respective judgement of the merit and demerit of the growth of civilisation might not necessarily coincide seems a great deal more plausible. Nor would the project of a conjectural history of women seem wholly unwarranted, much less plainly absurd. Indeed, it is only if we admit such a possibility that we can begin to comprehend how someone like Diderot could entertain such apparently contradictory opinions about life in primitive societies. We saw above how he decried, perhaps more vehemently than anyone else in the period, the condition of women in primitive communities and how he repeatedly emphasised that civilised woman could not but be deemed happier than her Ur-mother. Yet, in one of his contributions to Raynal's (1713-96) Histoire Philosophique et Politique des Deux Indes (Political and Philosophical History of the Two Indies) (1770), a work which inspired such revolutionaries as Toussaint Louverture, his verdict on what he called 'ce grand proces', 'this great trial', of nature versus culture was the very opposite.40 But then again, he wasn't writing about women. In fact, they went unmentioned. The chapter entitled 'Comparaison des Peuples Polices et Sauvages' (Comparison between Civilised and Savage People) is a critique of
115
Z~~
~~K
'
-;i
Ensemble pour la Connaissance ('Together for Knowledge'), David (Private Collection). Marie Anne Paulze (1758-1836) and her husband A.-L. Lavoisier (1743-94), known as one of the greatest French chemists, are shown here both as an instance of domestic bliss and scientific cooperation in research. Science in the eighteenth century was neither thought of as an exclusively male domain, nor was it so in actual fact.
Agricultural improvements in the 18th century. (Bibi. nationale, Cabinet des Estampes, Paris). This is one of the many illustrations showing women and men at work in what were deemed to be 'progressive' technical and economic developments, be it in agricultural or manufacturing contexts.
Diderot, bust by Anne-Marie Collot, circa 1766 (The Hermitage, Leningrad). She was then nineteen years old and remained a friend and 'protegee' of the philosopher.
The Young Schoolmistress, Chardin (1699-1779). (National Gallery, London). The spread of literacy and culture is here depicted in a domestic setting, emphasising the role played by women in this phenomenon.
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civilisation. It addresses many of the same issues as those which preoccupied Smith's (1723-90) Wealth of Nations (1776); indeed subsequent editions of the Wealth of Nations refer to the Histoire.4' The question according to Diderot came down to this: Was savage man, constantly toiling to secure the means of his survival, better or worse off than civilised man living in comfort and luxury?42 What do men want? Diderot asked, by way of answer. Subsistence, first and foremost. Scarcity was not at issue, at least not as far as this particular text is concerned.43 The only reason why men did not accumulate and store food supplies, Diderot claimed, was because of nature's open-armed generosity: 'If he doesn't store provisions, it is because the earth and the sea are warehouses and reserves always open to his needs'.44 Savage man could not be unhappy: one rarely sees on his brow the imprint of passion and illness which leave so hideous and baneful traces. He neither lacks what he doesn't desire, nor desires what he is ignorant of. Commodities are for the most part remedies for ills which he knows not. . . . His mind is not prey to boredom, as it feels neither privations, nor the need to feel or act, nor this absence created by the prejudices of vanity. In other words, the savage knows only the afflications of nature.45 Diderot clearly did not wish to deny the fact that the problems of survival were much easier to solve with the advent of civilisation. He thought the diet healthier, the clothing softer, the shelter more protecting from the elements. There was no doubt in fact that for those who had traded the cavern for the palace, life was indeed easier, better, possibly happier. What he effectively questioned was the belief which Smith put forward in the Wealthof Nations, that 'the very meanest person in a civilised country', compared, indeed, with the more extravagant luxury of the great, his accommodation must no doubt appear extremely simple and easy; and yet it may be true, perhaps, that the accommodation of an European prince does not always so much exceed that of an industrious and frugal peasant, as the accommodation of the latter exceeds that of many an African king, the absolute master of the lives and liberties of ten thousand naked savages.46 Such was not a claim which would have impressed Diderot, even when placed within a long term perspective. While he was prepared to concede that the division of labour catered for needs, in a way which would have been unimaginable in any preceding stage of society, he never tired of pointing out that these were after all needs which commercial society had itself created and that it was commercial society, not nature, which had introduced scarcity and the problems of mal-distribution. Such a social and
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economic system, based as it had to be on great inequalities, could never in Diderot's view be deemed just. Moreover, what Diderot always came back to, was the means by which needs, real or artificial, were being met. The nature of the labour involved in producing goods was never far from the mind of the man who had visited so many workshops and commissioned so many descriptions of the conditions of work in mines, for instance, for the Encyclopedie. There was no part of the division of labour which Diderot thought simply had to be accepted as a matter of necessity.47 In the countryside, the propertyless toiled painfully hard all year long for only a very tiny portion of the harvest they had sowed. While in the town, the worker and the artisan laboured in workshops for small wages to produce commodities at very high prices, prices which they could not afford. Luxury, the spiralling of needs, yielded the poor no benefit. It was a scene from which no pleasure of the sympathetic kind which Smith had so elegantly described, could be derived. 'The people', in Diderot's view, 'have only the spectacle of luxury of which they are twice the victim; by the wear and toil which it exacts from them; by the temerity of a pomp which humiliates and oppresses them'.48 In looking at the rich, the poor saw only 'the abundance which accounts for their poverty'.49 Such inequality bred neither attachment, nor bond of any kind, much less love. It made only for envy. Try as some might, inequality could never be justified, least of all from the stand-point of those at the bottom of the social and economic scale. Born out of the oppression which reproduced it endlessly, inequality and the loss of independence could never find compensation: the feeling of independence being one of the first instincts in man, he who adds to the enjoyment of this original right the moral certainty of an adequate subsistence is immeasurably happier than the rich man surrounded by laws, masters, prejudices and fashions which remind him at every turn of the loss of his liberty.50 With such concerns in mind, there was only one unequivocal answer to Diderot's original question: 'Ask civilised man whether he is happy. Ask the savage whether he is unhappy. If both reply 'No', the dispute is settled'.5 To have asked a woman the same set of questions would have yielded, judging by Diderots own account, both a 'no' and a 'yes'. And this because the laws, the masters, the prejudices and the fashions marked not only, as they did for man, her loss of freedom; they also gave her a taste of liberty. For she discovered in some of these constraints the means of her liberation. What enslaved him, freed her. This truncated version of Diderot's extensive and detailed critique of civilisation does an injustice to the complexity and subtlety of his thought. A wider range of texts would have to be brought to the fore and a greater number of issues would have to be considered together, such as his
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discussions of prices, of luxury, of the division of labour and so forth. Yet it is hoped that this summary will at least have conveyed some sense of Diderot's profound misgivings about the nature of commercial society and the promise of political economy. Having said that, it is essential to note that Diderot was not blind to the mechanisms by which civilisation proceeded, nor of the genuine gains, in human and material terms, it brought in its wake. It was both his genius and his predicament to see all aspects of an issue of debate at once. This feature of his thought is clearly noticeable in the discussion which concerns us here. It becomes all the more impressive when we isolate those factors which made for the slow, but gradual improvement in the condition of woman in the history of civilisation. They correspond to the very factors which tend to make for its critique, when seen from any other - to avoid saying 'male' - point of view. The coming of the pastoral age, we recall, was a positive turn of events in the history of women. The increased security in the means of subsistence and the resulting diminution in the time and effort required to ensure survival meant greater comfort and leisure. What leisure allowed was the cultivation of beauty. It enabled the savage to develop taste, his own taste.52 The more particularised the desire, the more unique the love object, the less women were open to male abuse. What the improvement in the condition of women required in the first instance was a shift away from the randomness of male libido, from their liking of women in general to their liking only very specific ones, if not just one single woman. What was necessary in effect was the beginnings of romantic or chivalric love, if these be apt labels, for it entailed an acute desire in men themselves to be singled out, specifically desired, loved. To be loved, desired, men had to become loveable, desireable. Brutality was unlikely to be attractive in the eyes of women, of the woman they wanted. They had to become civilised. Again Diderot was by no means the only thinker to perceive matters in this light. The idea that the more men are concerned with the opinions women entertain of them, the more they are intent on pleasing them, the better it is for women, is most extensively put forward by Alexander. Once it is spelled out in this way, the point seems rather obvious, to say the least. But if we read the literature on women, be it Diderot's or Alexander's or any one else's, with the kind of critique of culture which Diderot himself, or Rousseau advanced, in mind, then it becomes a great deal more intriguing. Thus, it was in the chance encounters between men and women, depicted in so different a tone by Rousseau in De L'Inegalite parmi les Hommes (Discourse on Inequality) (1755) in that primitive state, having neither houses, nor huts, nor property of any sort, everyone was housed according to circumstances, and often only for one night; males and females would couple quite at random, depending on the encounter, the situation and the desire, without
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speech being a necessary interpreter of the things they had to tell each other: they parted with the same ease."3 - that Alexander saw woman's misery. The savage, he wrote, knew pleasure, if, in savage life, we call that commerce a pleasure, where, entire strangers to every reciprocal affection, and intellectual feeling, men are totally indifferent what sentiments their female partners entertain of them, provided they submit tamely to satisfying their appetites; and where women regard men as lords and masters, whom, in all things, they are obliged implicitly to obey.54 Rousseau would certainly not have disagreed as to the terms of the debate, nor as to the causes and the mechanisms by which the relation between men and women changed. He, no less than Diderot, Alexander and Millar, thought that the distinction between sex and love was crucial at this juncture in the argument. But whereas they spoke of the liberating impact for women of the rise of love, Rousseau, for his part, only recognised the beginning of the enslavement of men in it: Let us begin by drawing a distinction between the moral and the physical in the feeling of love. The physical is this general desire which leads the one sex to unite with the other. The moral is what determines this desire and fixes it on a single object to the exclusion of all others, or at least gives it with respect to this object a greater degree of energy. Now, it is easy to see that the moral in love is a factitious feeling, born out of life in society, and celebrated by women with great cleverness and care in order to establish their empire, and make for the dominance of the sex which ought to obey. This feeling, based as it is on certain notions of merit and beauty, which a savage is in no position to make, must be almost non-existent for him: for as his mind has not yet been able to fashion such abstract ideas as those of regularity and proportion, his heart is not yet susceptible to feelings of admiration and love either . . . any woman is good enough for him.55 All parties were thus agreed. In the state of nature or in primitive societies mankind did not discern each other as individuals. There was no basis for such discernment. For those who wrote the history of women, the beginnings of this selective gaze were wholly welcomed. Rousseau, on the other hand, had begun the body of his Discourse with, 'C'est de l'homme que j'ai a parler', 'Man is my concern'. In his writings 'Sur Les Femmes' (On Women) he had urged his would-be readers to think of the relation between men and women in terms of men's tyranny over women. In view of the sharp contrast between those reflections and the Discourse, there seems to be some good reason to take his opening statement literally.
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The relation between man and woman was one of power for Rousseau. His work was partly devoted to tracing the history and nature of this power relation. With some exceptions, as when he wrote fragments of Mme Dupin's history of women, Rousseau essentially wrote with men in mind. What he described to them was the impact of the growing ascendency of a feminine culture. What he told them was to resist it. The extent of the convergence between critiques of civilisation and the history of women does not stop with the realisation that it is in the rise of individualism - for want of a better phrase - that the table between men and women is turned. In fact, apart from the general sense of approbation Alexander conferred on each stage towards commercial society, there is little in his History of Women with which Rousseau would have quibbled. Diderot and Alexander were each perfectly aware that the growth of distinguishing features amongst people, the increasing difference between them, was directly related to the institution of private property. Indeed, property and the inequalities which arose out of its uneven distribution were highlighted as key factors in the gradual improvement of the condition of women. We have seen that Diderot thought the relation between the sexes improved with the development of agriculture. But he added: Property, which didn't exist amongst savages, which was only of small importance amongst pastoral nations, begins to gain importance among agricultural people. Inequality of wealth soon sets in and causes property to be valued. At this point the bonds of marriage are no longer made at random. One wants them to be good matches. To be accepted, one must please, and this necessity brings with it greater consideration for women and gives them a kind of dignity.56 Nor was the growth of politeness and manners, so deplored by Rousseau, absent from the account. According to Alexander, it was the mark of civilised societies that its strong members did not tyrannise the weaker ones, that they behaved kindly, humanely and politely towards them. Politeness and manners thus signalled the end of the enslavement of women.53 But they were also themselves the product of the growing liberty of women. For manners were woman's contribution to civilisation: We have already seen what a rude and barbarous people the Greeks were, during the heroic ages: when we trace them downward to those periods in which they become famous for their knowledge of the arts and sciences, we find this rudeness and barbarity softened only a few degrees; it is not therefore arts, sciences, and learning, but the company of the other sex, that forms the manners and that renders the man agreeable. But the company and conversation of that sex, was among the Greeks shamefully neglected and particularly among the Lace-
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damonions, who by that neglect were the most rude and uncivilised of all their neighbours.58 Women in this account not only benefited from culture. They were its agents. They brought it about, kindled it and nurtured its advancement: It is to the social intercourse with women, that the men are indebted for all the efforts they make to please and be agreeable; and it is to the ambition of pleasing they owe all their elegance of manners, and perhaps all their acquisitions of mind.59 Here again, Alexander seemed to have expressed an Enlightenment consensus. Millar similarly commented on the Greeks for their want of manners, politeness and civility. It was the absence of conversation with women which in his opinion, as in Alexander's, accounted for this barbarism. The same thesis can be found in Diderot and Thomas. Within this tradition therefore women were anything but the passive recipients of culture. Unlike the thesis which links woman to nature, the one we have been examining does not leave women hidden from history. Far from it. She makes it. There is hence a history of women to be written. That history may well be the history of civilisation and manners. To pursue this theme would lead us to examine the essential place she occupies within discourses about the nature and consequence of luxury, about the origins of language and development of literature, about religion, ritual and medicine; and finally, it would require an analysis of the advent of the Kantian notion of perpetual peace and its relation to the concept of femininity and effeminacy. Most of these topics were treated by the authors we have been examining. Some of these themes have also been explored since the Enlightenment. In the present century, Werner Sombart's Luxury and Capitalism (1913) boldly argues that capitalism is the product of luxury consumption, and luxury, that of seduction.60 Lewis Mumford, for his part, did preface his study of The City in History (1961) with his own gendered conjectural history and argued that woman contributed neolithic culture to man's palaeolithic culture.61 At the level of the real, there have been many exceedingly valuable contributions to the history of women in the last few decades. But the history of the family or of individual great women which such histories have tended to consist in does not exhaust the history of woman's role in making the world we live in. In the histories we have been considering societies and stages of society were characterised in terms of the degree to which women were subjected to or free from the tyranny of men. But the degree to which they were recognised as enslaved or possessed of liberty was always measured by the extent to which they took part in the political, social and cultural life of their communities. To deny them such agency and responsibility was true slavery. Let us not do so posthumously.
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In the discoursewe have been contemplating,it is man who is nature, if one must insist on seeing the matter in this light, and woman culture. History,in this view, is the historyof feminisation,of effeminacy, as the battle of the sexes seems to be won by the weaker sex. That is how Smith
considered it in The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759; enlarged 6th.
edition 1790). Rousseaufearedit as the gauge of the subjectionof men by women. But there was no reason to think of it in any other terms than those of Adam Ferguson(1723-1816)- not as the degeneracyof the body, but as the improvementof the mind: 'That weakness and effeminacyof whichpolishednationsare sometimesaccused,has its placeprobablyin the mind alone'.62Ferguson'sability to see the process so calmly, however, may well be related to his general impatience with the nature-culture polarity. In the absenceof canonicaltexts, movementssuchas feminismhave had to probe availablediscoursesand make what might transpireto be only temporaryalliances. To return to our very first reflections and take up againSallyAlexander'ssummaryof the aims of feminismas the assertion of both equality and sexual difference, feminism can be seen to have gravitatedtowardssocialismin as much as women have sought to tackle the issue of equality. Psychoanalysishas been attractivefor the light it mightshed on genderdifferenceand in particular,for its attentionto the feminineidentity.There have been many attemptsto bringthe individual two discourses,psychoanalytic socialist,togetherwith a widerfeminist and perspective.This process is, of course, still ongoing. And other voices, those of ecologists,for instance,are joiningin. This makesthe prospectof if orchestration, I may pursuethe metaphor,more exciting,to be sure, but also a great deal more daunting. In the face of this challengeand also becauseof a constantawarenessof the 'sex' of the discourseswe are borrowing from, feministsmay well have to explore what such over-archingconceptualtandemsas that of nature and culturehave to offer us; lest we continueto feed on movementswhich are very much founded by men, indeed by the patriarchical figure par excellence, the FoundingFather, be it Marxor Freud, and which consist essentiallyin interpreting foundingText. The one that we, women, do the not have. If feminismis to retainits position as one of the more effective and successful critiques of culture of our times while building its own theoreticalconstructout of our culture'ssharedassumptions, then it seems to me it can only stand to gain by meticulously avoiding all oversimplicationsand casting its net as far as possible and facing all that is thoughtby and of women.
A versionof thispaper was first presentedto the Political TheoryWorkshop,1-3 July 1984:The Identityof PoliticalEconomy:Between Utopia and the Critiqueof Civilisation, King'sCollege, Cambridge. Subsequent versions thepaperwereread of to The Social History Seminar, King's College, Cambridge and to The Political
123
of TheorySeminarand the Facultyof Economicsand Social Studies, University I I Manchester. wantto expressmy thanksto all theparticipants. am also gratefulto in for Journal theirencouragements gettingthe the editorsof the HistoryWorkshop piece in its final shape and to George St Andrewsfor his help with the text. As indebtedto Roy Porter. always,I am particularly
NOTES
1 History Workshop Journal, 17, Spring 1984, p.126. 2 For an accountof the four-stages theoryas 'a, if not the, materialist conceptionof history',see, R.L. Meek, 'Smith,Turgot,and the "fourstages"theory',in Smith,Marxand afterLondon 1980. This view is criticisedin A.S. Skinnerand M. Howard,(eds.) Classical and Marxian of politicaleconomyLondon, 1982. For a summary this debate, see the useful discussionby Paul Bowles in 'JohnMillar,the four-stagestheory, and women'spositionin
society', History of Political Economy, 16:4, 1984, pp.619-638.
3 I am obviouslynot the firstto challengethis dichotomy.The mostrecentendeavour in this directionis Jeah Bethke Elshtain's'Symmetry Soporifics: Critiqueof Feminist A and Accountsof GenderDevelopment'in BarryRichards and (ed) Capitalism Infancy:Essayson
Psychoanalysis and Politics London, 1984, pp.55-91. 4 Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology and the Scientific
Revolution New York, 1980;London, 1982, p.xv.

5 6 Merchant, p.143. Mary Daly, Pure Lust: Elemental Feminist Philosophy London, 1984, see especially Susan Griffin, Woman and Nature: the Roaring Inside Her New York, 1978;
pp.56-7.
7
London, 1984. It is but the culminationof an extensive argumentthe seeds of which can already be recognised in her earlier writings (a selection of which is collected, not
insignificantly, under the title Made from this Earth: Selections from her Writing, 1967-1982 London, 1982, and pursued further in her Pornography and Silence: Culture's Revenge
AgainstNatureNew York, 1981;London, 1982.

8 Woman and Nature, p.xv. 9 Woman and Nature, pp.xv-xvi. 10 Brian Easlea, Science and Sexual Oppression: Patriarchy's Confrontation with Woman and Nature London, 1981.
11 In MichelleS. Simbalist Rosaldoand LouiseLamphere (eds), Women,Culture and SocietyStanford,California,1974. 12 Elshtain,'Symmetry', p.70-71. 13 Eileen Power, MedievalWomen,M.M. Postan(ed), Cambridge,1975. 14 L.J. Jordanova,'Naturalfacts: a historical perspectiveon science and sexuality'in CarolP. MacCormack MarilynStrathern and (eds) Nature,cultureand genderCambridge, 1980,p.42. 15 Catherine Macaulay, Letters on Education, Letter XXII, 'No characteristic Differencein Sex', London, 1790, p.206. 16 Macaulay,pp.206-7.
17 Denis Diderot 'Sur les Femmes', review of Essai sur le caractere . .. par Thomas, written for the Correspondence Litteraire, 1 April, 1772, Oeuvres Compltes, Roger Lewinter
(ed.) Paris, 1971 vol.10, pp.28-53. Hereaftercited as Oeuvres. Passage cited, p.44. All translations my own. are 18 Fenelon'sTraite L'Education FillesParis,1687was the pointof departure de des for most of the writingson the educationof women.
19 William Alexander, The History of Womenfrom the EarliestAntiquity, to the Present Time; giving some Account of almost every interesting Particular concerning that Sex, among
all Nations,Ancientand Modern,3rd. edition2 vols., London1782,vol.1, pp.iv-v. The first editionappearedin Londonin 1779.Unless otherwisestatedI shallbe usingthe 3rd. edition. 20 Cicero, TheRepublic,III.x.17-xi.19. 21 'Femmes'(Droit Nat.) Encyclopedie vols., Paris, 1751-1772, 17 vols. of text, 28 1751-1765and 11 vols., of plates, 1762-1772,Paris, 1756vol.6, p.471.
22 Diderot, Oeuvres, pp.46-7.
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23 Antoine-Leonard Thomas, Essai sur le Caractere, les Moeurs et L'Esprit des Femmes dans les Differens Siecles Paris, 1772, pp.2-3. 24 John Millar, The Origins of the Distinction of Ranks London, 1779, p.42. For a discussion of Millar see Bowles's article cited in n. 2; and Michael Ignatieff's 'John Millar and individualism' in Istvan Hont and Michael Ignatieff eds. Wealth and virtue: The Shaping of Political Economy in the Scottish Enlightenment Cambridge, 1983, pp.317-43. 25 Millar, Ranks, p.70. 26 Diderot, Oeuvres, p.47. 27 Diderot, Oeuvres, p.47. 28 Alexander, History, vol.1, p.283. 29 Diderot, Oeuvres, p.48. 30 Diderot, Oeuvres, p.48. 31 Thomas, Essai, p. 1. 32 Condorcet, Esquisse d'un Tableau Historique des Progres de L'Esprit Humain, Yvon Belaval (ed.) Paris, 1970, p.17. First published in 1795. 33 Rousseau, 'Sur les Femmes', Oeuvres Completes, II, Pleiade edition Paris, 1961, pp.1254-55. 34 Here I am responding to the London Feminist History group in The Sexual Dynamics of History: Men's power and women's resistance London, 1983 in its call for a history of the dynamics of relations between the sexes, albeit by inverting the power relation that book describes and looking at women's power and men's resistance. A feminist pespective need not require that women never have had any power. 35 Montesquieu, Oeuvres Completes, Daniel Oster (ed.) Paris, 1964, Book XIX, ch. 15, p.644. 36 Montesquieu, Book XVI, ch.9, p.627. 37 Montesquieu, Book VII, ch.9, p.568. 38 Montesquieu, Book XV, ch.10, p.621. 39 Alexander, History, vol.1, p.151. 40 The writing and many revisions of the Histoire overlap with that of 'Sur les Femmes'. There is no question of a change of heart. 41 Adam Smith An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations Oxford, 1976, I.xi.g.pp.226-7. 42 Raynal, Histoire des Deux Indes, introduction and selection of texts by Yves Benot Paris, 1981, p.294. 43 For a very different approach to the issue of political economy, see, for instance, his article 'Representants' or his Apologie de L'Abbe Galiani. For a useful contextualisation of these debates in France and in Scotland see the editors' introduction to Wealth and Virtue, note 24. 44 Raynal, Histoire, p.295. 45 Raynal, Histoire, p.295. 46 Smith, Wealth of Nations, I.i11I., p.24. 47 Raynal, Histoire, p.295. 48 Histoire, p.297. 49 Histoire, p.298. 50 Histoire, p.299. 51 Histoire, p.299. 52 See note 26. 53 Rousseau, De L'Inegalite, in Du Contrat Social et autres Oeuvres Politiques, J. Ehrard (ed.) Paris, 1975, p.52. 54 Alexander, History, vol.1, p.256. My emphasis. 55 Rousseau, De L'Inegalite, pp.61-2. My emphasis. 56 Diderot, Oeuvres, p.48. See also, Millar, Ranks, p.342. 57 Alexander, History, vol.11, p.342. 58 Alexander, History, vol.1, p.440. My emphasis. 59 Alexander, History, vol.1, p.440. 60 Werner Sombart, Luxury and Capitalism with an introduction by Philip Siegelman, translated by W.R. Dittmar, Ann Arbor, Michigan, 1967. 61 Lewis Mumford, The City in History: Its origins, its transformations, and its prospects Harmondsworth, 1975, p.31. 62 Adam Ferguson, An Essay on the History of Civil Society, 6th. edition, London, 1793, p.381.

Enlightment Debate On Women

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The Enlightenment Debate on Women Author(s): Sylvana Tomaselli Reviewed work(s): Source: History Workshop, No.

The Enlightenment Debate on Women by Sylvana Tomaselli

History Workshop Journal

Enlightenment Debate on Women

History Workshop Journal

Enlightenment Debate on Women

History Workshop Journal

Enlightenment Debate on Women

History Workshop Journal

Enlightenment Debate on Women

Enlightenment Debate on Women

History Workshop Journal

Enlightenment Debate on Women

History Workshop Journal

Enlightenment Debate on Women

Enlightenment Debate on Women

History Workshop Journal

Enlightenment Debate on Women

Enlightenment Debate on Women

History Workshop Journal

Enlightenment Debate on Women

Revolution New York, 1980;London, 1982, p.xv.

AgainstNatureNew York, 1981;London, 1982.

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