ABSTRACT
THE AGE OF ENLIGHTENMENT, according to Immanuel Kant, meant the access to knowledge and the public exercise of freedom of thought that emancipated humanity from any guardianship and enabled it to come into its majority. Clearly, however, women did not wholly share in this liberation: they remained minors during the Enlightenment. The principle of legal individualism, as affirmed by modern natural law, was instated in the Declaration des Droits de l'Homme et du Citoyen (Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen) of 1789, but this did not lead to an affirmation of equality of the sexes— on the contrary. In Enlightenment thought, one is instead likely to find various justifications for depriving women of their civil rights, excluding them from the exercise of citizenship, and barring them from the most developed forms of knowledge. In his presentation of “Sophie, ou la femme” (“Sophie; or, The Woman”) in book V of Émile ou de l'éducation (1762; Émile: or, On Education), Jean-Jacques Rousseau formally rejects sexual equality, states the beneficial effects of ignorance, and excludes women from politics and even from all autonomy. Women, he asserts, are not made like men but for men; it is their nature to be obedient.
