ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the music for women in these three operas to see whether they are given sufficient distinguishing musical characteristics to warrant talking about a feminine operatic sub-style, one that is sufficiently distinct from that for men. The Enlightenment took pride in its liberal attitude towards women, who played an increasingly important role in the Viennese and Parisian salons. Even as early as the 1690s, Defoe argued that women's intellectual inferiority was merely a result of education, and in the Encyclopedie Diderot went so far as to write of the detrimental effects of male domination generally. Only one writer in the eighteenth century recorded the deep injustice done to the women of the Enlightenment. Mary Wollstonecraft's A Vindication of the Rights of Woman was published in 1792. She opens her broadside against male theoretical and practical repression of women, with nothing short of revolutionary intentions.
