ABSTRACT
This chapter includes a discussion of the work of notable women intellectuals. Many readers of intellectual history familiar with Thomas Laqueur and his work on the way in which, in the eighteenth century, biological gender differences were given a new theoretical meaning. Making of the bourgeois, post-Enlightenment self has attracted the attention of numerous writers other than Habermas as well as an extensive literature on the links between fiction and gender. The enlargement and the re-writing of the social roles of women and men is part of the map of Europe which has been re-made since the end of the Second World War. De Beauvoir has to be defended and claimed to be at least as important as a man, Sartre has to be shown to be dependent upon the creativity of a woman. The woman writer who most fiercely resisted the idea that the route to female intellectual emancipation lay in the replication of male patterns was Virginia Woolf.
