Raising the Woman Question

Many of the letters exchanged in Persian Letters focused on women because Montesquieu considered the position of women a sure indicator of the nature of government and morality. Although Montesquieu was not a feminist, his depiction of Roxana, the favorite wife in Usbek’s harem, struck a chord with many women. Roxana revolts against the authority of Usbek’s eunuchs and writes a final letter to her husband announcing her impending suicide: “I may have lived in servitude, but I have always been free, I have amended your laws according to the laws of nature, and my mind has always remained independent.” Women writers used the same language of tyranny and freedom to argue for concrete changes in their status. Feminist ideas were not entirely new, but they were presented systematically for the first time during the Enlightenment and represented a fundamental challenge to the ways of traditional societies.

The most systematic and successful of these women writers was the English author Mary Astell (1666–1731). In 1694, she published A Serious Proposal to the Ladies, in which she advocated founding a private women’s college to remedy women’s lack of education. Addressing women, she asked, “How can you be content to be in the World like Tulips in a Garden, to make a fine shew [show] and be good for nothing?” In later works such as Reflections upon Marriage (1706), Astell criticized the relationship between the sexes within marriage: “If absolute sovereignty be not necessary in a state, how comes it to be so in a family? . . . If all men are born free, how is it that all women are born slaves?”

Most male writers held that women were less capable of reasoning than men and therefore did not need systematic education. Such opinions often rested on biological suppositions. The long-dominant Aristotelian view of reproduction held that only the male seed carried spirit and individuality. At the beginning of the eighteenth century, however, scientists began to undermine this belief. Physicians and surgeons began to champion the doctrine of ovism—that the female egg was essential in making new humans. During the decades that followed, male Enlightenment writers would continue to debate women’s nature and appropriate social roles.