The impact of the Renaissance and the Protestant Reformation on women’s lives shows some of the first signs of feminism. This Italian Renaissance includes a “rebirth” of culture, literature, and art in Western Europe. Leading figures of the Renaissance portrayed women as they were represented during the medieval period, either as pure virgins or seductresses. Renaissance thinkers kept up this traditional representation of women using iconic images from Catholicism, the two biggest being the Virgin Mary and Eve. First off, the status and representation of women for most of Western history was oppressive and very restrictive. For thousands of years women had very few rights and were expected to be submissive to their fathers and husbands. Women’s roles as daughters, wives, or mothers were considered their most significant function in society.
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But women were considered to be inferior to men and their role in society continued to be mostly domestic, while the development of ideas like individualism and rationality started to challenge women’s relegated role in society. Therefore, the attitude toward women started to gradually improve, during the Enlightenment women began to take advantage of new trends, such as in books and the salon. A salon is a gathering of people under the roof of an inspiring host, held either to please or to educate. In The Republic of Letters: A Cultural History of the French Enlightenment (1994), Dena Goodman argues that many women played an essential part in the French Enlightenment, because of the role they played as salonnières in Parisian salons. These salons "became the civil working spaces of the project of Enlightenment" and women, as salonnières, were "the legitimate governors of the potentially unruly discourse". These social outlets allowed them to have much more of a public
But women were considered to be inferior to men and their role in society continued to be mostly domestic, while the development of ideas like individualism and rationality started to challenge women’s relegated role in society. Therefore, the attitude toward women started to gradually improve, during the Enlightenment women began to take advantage of new trends, such as in books and the salon. A salon is a gathering of people under the roof of an inspiring host, held either to please or to educate. In The Republic of Letters: A Cultural History of the French Enlightenment (1994), Dena Goodman argues that many women played an essential part in the French Enlightenment, because of the role they played as salonnières in Parisian salons. These salons "became the civil working spaces of the project of Enlightenment" and women, as salonnières, were "the legitimate governors of the potentially unruly discourse". These social outlets allowed them to have much more of a public