Dating back to the Renaissance querelle des dames, the debate over women’s proper role in society and the nature of gender differences continued to fascinate Enlightenment thinkers. Some philosophes championed greater rights and expanded education for women, claiming that the position and treatment of women were the best indicators of a society’s level of civilization and decency.10 In Persian Letters, Montesquieu used the oppression of women in the harem, described in letters from the wives of Usbek — one of the Persian voyagers — as a potent symbol of the political tyranny he identified with the Persian Empire. At the end of the book, the rebellion of the harem against the cruel eunuchs Usbek left in charge serves to make Montesquieu’s point that despotism must ultimately fail.

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In the 1780s the marquis de Condorcet, a celebrated mathematician and contributor to the Encyclopedia, went so far as to urge that women should share equal rights with men. This was an extremely rare position. Most philosophes accepted that women were inferior to men intellectually as well as physically. They sought moderate reform at best, particularly in the arena of female education, and had no desire to upend men’s traditional dominance over women.

From the first years of the Enlightenment, women writers made crucial contributions both to debates about women’s rights and to the broader Enlightenment discussion. In 1694 Mary Astell published A Serious Proposal to the Ladies, which encouraged women to aspire to the life of the mind and proposed the creation of a women’s college. Astell also harshly criticized the institution of marriage. Echoing arguments made against the absolute authority of kings during the Glorious Revolution (see Chapter 15), she argued that husbands should not exercise absolute control over their wives in marriage. Yet Astell, like most female authors of the period, was careful to acknowledge women’s God-given duties to be good wives and mothers.

The explosion of printed literature over the eighteenth century (see “Urban Culture and Life in the Public Sphere”) brought significant numbers of women writers into print, but they remained a small proportion of published authors. In the second half of the eighteenth century, women produced some 15 percent of published novels, the genre in which they enjoyed the greatest success. They represented a much tinier proportion of nonfiction authors.11

If they remained marginal in the world of publishing, women played a much more active role in the informal dimensions of the Enlightenment: conversation, letter writing, travel, and patronage. A key element of their informal participation was as salon hostesses, or salonnières (sah-lahn-ee-EHRZ). Salons were weekly meetings held in wealthy households, which brought together writers, aristocrats, financiers, and noteworthy foreigners for meals and witty discussions of the latest trends in literature, science, and philosophy. One prominent salonnière was Madame du Deffand, whose weekly Parisian salon included such guests as Montesquieu, d’Alembert, and Benjamin Franklin, then serving as the first U.S. ambassador to France. Invitations to salons were highly coveted; introductions to the rich and powerful could make the career of an ambitious writer, and, in turn, the social elite found amusement and cultural prestige in their ties to up-and-coming artists and men of letters.

Elite women also exercised great influence on artistic taste. Soft pastels, ornate interiors, sentimental portraits, and starry-eyed lovers protected by hovering cupids were all hallmarks of the style they favored. This style, known as rococo (ruh-KOH-koh), was popular throughout Europe in the period from 1720 to 1780. It was particularly associated with the mistress of Louis XV, Madame de Pompadour, who used her position to commission paintings, furniture, and other luxury objects in the rococo style.

Women’s prominent role as society hostesses and patrons of the arts and letters outraged some Enlightenment thinkers. According to Jean-Jacques Rousseau, women and men were radically different by nature and should play diametrically opposed roles in life. Destined by nature to assume the active role in sexual relations, men were naturally suited for the rough-and-tumble of politics and public life. Women’s role was to attract male sexual desire in order to marry and create families and then to care for their homes and children in private. For Rousseau, wealthy Parisian women’s love for attending social gatherings and pulling the strings of power was unnatural and had a corrupting effect on both politics and society. Some women eagerly accepted Rousseau’s idealized view of their domestic role, but others — such as the English writer Mary Wollstonecraft — vigorously rejected his notion of women’s limitations.

Rousseau’s emphasis on the natural laws governing women echoed a wider shift in ideas about gender during this period, as doctors, scientists, and philosophers increasingly agreed that women’s essential characteristics were determined by their sexual organs and reproductive functions. This turn to nature, rather than tradition or scripture, as a means to understand human society had parallels in contemporary views on racial difference. Just as writers like Rousseau used women’s “natural” passivity to argue for their subordinate role in society, so Kant and others used ideas about non-Europeans’ “natural” inferiority to defend slavery and colonial domination. The new powers of science and reason were thus marshaled to imbue traditional stereotypes with the force of natural law. Scholars continue to debate the apparent paradox between Enlightenment thinkers’ ideals of equality, progress, and reason and their acceptance of racial and gender inequality.