ABSTRACT
The Royal Society, founded in London in 1660 for the promotion of science, did not have women members, though in the eighteenth century its Transactions occasionally published women's scientific observations. Freemasonry, that quintessentially eighteenth-century institution, played an unusual role in the development of mixed-sex sociability. Sociability in turn inspired a stream of edicts and prosecutions aimed at controlling the mixing of the sexes and of women from different religious communities. The hammams had another trait that Jurgen Habermas and others often fasten upon in relation to eighteenth-century male sociability in Western Europe. The military revolution also created a large class of men and women, who were marginalized, sexually suspect, often homeless, and heavily reliant on charity. Virtuous women were supposed to be charitable, and charity prudently deployed could significantly enhance a woman's power both within and outside her family. Early modern women did occasionally take public note of the fact that they did not have very many political rights.
