Enlightenment as it Pertains to Women

Though man’s attraction to women stems from a timeless animal instinct, Franklin and Swift present a uniquely Enlightenment influenced manifestation of the sex drive. Both authors present a correlation in which intelligence and practicality diminish as youth and beauty is greater. In Franklin’s “Advice to a Young Man on the Choice of a Mistress”, he advocates marriage because it completes the man and places him at his full efficacy, like two blades of a pair of scissors being united. However, even if a man seeks only a mistress, Franklin argues that he should chase the cougars, so to speak, because being older, they will have acquired more knowledge and thus be more useful in other respects. He continues to say that the man’s sex drive will not suffer with older women because in a dark bedroom, it is impossible “to know an old from a young one.” Not sure that I agree with that sentiment, but moving on…

Swift also argues against beauty over intellect/practicality by showing the price paid for young women: Celia takes five hours to get ready! With his intimate perspective of the dressing room, Swift also devalues the beauty associated with youth by pointing out that young women are also subject to certain disgusting processes often attributed to the elderly, such as the chamber pot. Though incredibly childish, these critiques of women have survived to today, especially the one about them taking ages to ready themselves.

Not surprisingly, Swift’s sexist commentary offended women and provoked a reply from Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. In one of my other classes, we read Montagu’s Turkish Embassy Letters. One of the letters describes Montagu’s visit to a Turkish bath house—an area even more hidden from the world of men (by the threat of death) than the dressing room that Swift describes. In the letter, Montagu says the exact opposite as Swift: that the nakedness of women is liberating and most beautiful. Montagu writes a reply to Swift, proclaiming that his views must have resulted from impotence, and thoroughly derails his manhood: “kisses both, and trys -- and trys.” Though in the age of enlightenment, the reply took two years to come about, it was very similar to the manner in which we blog each other today. Such letters accomplished the enlightenment ideal of sharing and contesting ideas. In this case, the enlightenment shaped man’s view to value women for practicality and reason, and women replied with fury at such an objectification.