The moral sex

How was the nature of women redefined and debated during the French Enlightenment? Instead of treating the Enlightenment in the usual manner, as a challenge to orthodox ideas and social conventions, Lieselotte Steinbrugge interprets it as a deviation from a position staked out in the seventeenth century, namely, "the mind has no sex.".

The division of the human being into two unequal sexes was by no means the work of the counter-Enlightenment, argues Steinbrugge. Rather, it occurred with genuinely Enlightenment arguments. The very concept of nature upon which equality was supposed to rest was used to legitimate the notion that women were less capable than men of rational thought and action.

This study shows that the emphasis on women's closeness to nature, and its contrast to enlightened masculine rationality, was associated with the social function of reason and the accompanying moral philosophical definition of sentiment. Because of their supposedly greater emotionality, women seemed predestined to represent pure human compassion. They became the moral sex.