ABSTRACT

This chapter argues that a network of people and ideas stretched to include the Atlantic empires of Britain, France, and Spain by the early eighteenth century. It also argues that it had a singular impact on women's lives by eventually increasing access to education and employment during the eighteenth century. Work followed education as the most important civil right for egalitarian thinkers, who decried the poverty resulting from extreme restrictions placed on women's labour. As a result, the Radical Enlightenment could be understood to have laid the philosophical cornerstone of 'equality feminism' as it developed in eighteenth-century Europe and the Americas. By the end of the Enlightenment, thinkers across the political spectrum had accepted the radical principle of women's equal potential, resulting in expanded access to education and normalizing the notion that women should have a choice in their marital partners.