ABSTRACT
The European Enlightenment was a privileged time for debate on the 'woman as the controversy over relations between the sexes only later became known . Enlightenment inquiry was 'feminocentric' in the sense that male writers focussed intensively on 'woman', and subsequent interpre tation has typically focussed on views of women expressed by its leading figures - Voltaire, Diderot, Rousseau, Condorcet, and Kant. If one examines the broader spectrum of Enlightenment debate by decen tring these leading male philosophes, however, it becomes evident that it offered women and their male allies an arena to develop in print an impres sive arsenal of concepts, vocabulary and arguments capable of challenging what some women in 1 789 would call the 'aristocracy of sex' . 2
Enlightenment debate can thus be seen as a spawning ground not simply for positioning 'woman' as some have complained, but for asserting women's equality to men, for criticizing male privilege and domination, for analysing historically the causes and constructions of women's and for devising eloquent arguments for the emancipation of women from male control. These were all defining features of that critical tradition we now call feminism, but which at the time remained a critique that had no name.
