Women in the French Enlightenment: From Femme Savante to Mother of the Family

This volume deals with philosophical, scientific, and ideological images of women during the French Enlightenment, examining their emergence in the reflections of the philosophes, in Catholic morality, in biological and medical knowledge, in novels, in periodicals, and in the law.

Alongside the appeals for social and intellectual emancipation advanced by the femmes savantes, typical of the eighteenth-century salons, a new conception pertaining to women’s social role related to the affirmatio...