Download Women in the Enlightenment

Mary Wollstonecraft (1759 –1797) was an eighteenth-century British writer,
philosopher, and feminist. During her brief career, she wrote novels, treatises, a
travel narrative, a history of the French Revolution, a conduct book, and a
children's book. Wollstonecraft is best known for A Vindication of the Rights of
Woman (1792), in which she argues that women are not naturally inferior to men,
but appear to be only because they lack education. She suggests that both men
and women should be treated as rational beings and imagines a social order
founded on reason.
Olympe de Gouges (1748 –1793),
born Marie Gouze, was a French
playwright and political activist
whose feminist and abolitionist
writings reached a large audience.
As political tension rose in France,
de Gouges became increasingly
politically involved and began
writing political pamphlets. Today
she is perhaps best known as an
early feminist who demanded that
French women be given the same
rights as French men. In her
Declaration of the Rights of
Woman and the Female Citizen
(1791), she challenged the practice of
male authority and the notion of
male-female inequality. She was
executed by guillotine during the
Reign of Terror.
Madame du Chatelet (1706 –1749) was a French mathematician,
physicist, and author during the Age of Enlightenment. Her crowning
achievement is considered to be her translation of Isaac Newton's
monumental work Principia Mathematica, with her own commentary; it
is still considered the standard translation. Voltaire, one of her lovers,
declared in a letter to his friend King Frederick II of Prussia that du
Châtelet was "a great man whose only fault was being a woman".
(dude)
Marquis de Condorcet
(17 September 1743 – 28
March 1794), was a
French philosopher,
mathematician, and
early political scientist.
Unlike many of his
contemporaries, he
advocated equal rights
for women and people of
all races. His ideas and
writings were said to
embody the ideals of the
Age of Enlightenment
and rationalism, and
remain influential to
this day.