The (Wo)man Question

From our reading selections, several observations about the feminist movement during the enlightenment emerge. Clearly, female writers (or female pseudonyms) made most arguments for gender equality during this time period. In the same realm as it would have seemed unnatural for men to make such arguments, women out of necessity had to preface their arguments with an explanation of why the status quo seemed so natural to the masses, in order to combat an almost universal opinion. Afterward, these writers form their arguments in a highly logical fashion to interest an audience that believed the widespread myth that men were better at logic, then defeat that myth by using strong (or stronger) logic themselves—a sort of foot in the door tactic.

Many arguments dealt with what was ‘natural’, such as: if we are to believe that female achievement and superiority is naturally impossible, then why does the law need to forbid it? Others attacked laws in another way by proclaiming that they hindered nature. For example, in The Speech of Miss Polly Baker, a mother declares that it is a woman’s nature to be motherly, something which the law has hindered her doing to the best of her ability by taxing away most of her money. She takes the argument a step further when she says that she was rightfully obeying her nature to reproduce, and that men imposed her illegal circumstance when they promised marriage but later reneged.

As a modern reader, it’s quite easy to understand and side with the feminist points. However, even if it were not so clear to readers during the enlightenment, we still must ask how a society that held reason in such high regard could believe some of the arguments against gender equality, such as Rousseau’s: “Who can possibly suppose that nature has prescribed the same advances to the one sex as to the other, or that the first to feel desire should be the first to show it? What strange depravity of judgment! The consequences of the act being so different for the two sexes, is it natural that they should enter upon it with equal boldness?” Rousseau believes that men should completely determine the time to conceive a child. Reasonably however, ‘the consequences of the act’ bear much more weight for women, as they carry the child during pregnancy. If we are to believe Rousseau’s point, shouldn’t women logically have the upper hand in this circumstance?