Women During The Enlightenment

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better wife. This indicates that knowledge for women wasn’t seen as power, but only seen as something to make them more desirable as a partner. The common man during the Enlightenment gained many rights, and liberties while women had to simply fight for respect which they had rightfully earned. Enlightenment thinkers like Rousseau did not believe that women should be educated in the same manner as men. Rousseau states that women should be “passive and weak,” and are “made especially to please man”. Although Locke doesn’t give a sense of whether or not women should or shouldn’t be educated; however, Rousseau makes it apparent that girls are not to learn the same things that boys do. His ideas, those that other Enlightenment thinkers agree with, …show more content…
Women who carried themselves as men were frowned upon. Women could not speak her opinion in public or even in a private gathering of men. Enlightenment writers made it so that women didn’t have property and that they were merely educated. Of course, this frustrated women, making them speak out against Enlightenment ideals. Among these people stood Denis Diderot, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Mary Astell, Madame du Chatelet, and Mary Wollstonecraft. All of these women were champions of women’s rights and women’s education. They were out spoken and made their voices heard on the issue of women being mistreated and underappreciated. Mary Wollstonecraft, an advocate of women’s rights, wrote A Vindication of the Rights of Woman in which she makes a claim that women are not naturally inferior to men, but appear to be only because they lack education. She later suggests that both men and women should be treated as rational beings and imagines a social order founded on reason. This helped spark what is considered to be part of the early women’s …show more content…
Although women were perceived as the caretakers of the household, with Enlightenment thinking women began to develop a new intellect. By combining the ideas that were created in the public sector to those more traditional domestic private affairs, women were able to obtain knowledge and gain literary support. Due to gatherings in salons and coffee shops, women were able to think critically, participate and contribute in society in many ways rather than being just caretakers of the households. The Enlightenment era was often viewed as the founder of individualism and rationality. Women at that time challenged Enlightenment thinkers and the social hierarchy ranking of the seventeenth and eighteenth century by questioning their roles in society. Women went from being strictly wives, mothers, and daughters to being individuals who contribute greatly to society, and history as well. Women helped pave the way for natural rights and equality for women in society during the Enlightenment era. The Enlightenment era helped women come to develop themselves by understanding how important their roles were outside of the homes. The social circumstances and Enlightenment concepts were reformed greatly thanks to women advocates who fought for change, and equality. The Enlightenment was a time period of great change for individuals, and with the help of woman advocates and social reforms,

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