The Moral Sex

This book deals with a question that currently has a great deal of resonance among historians feminists and literary scholars: How was the nature of women redefined and debated during the French Enlightenment? Instead of treating the Enlightenment in the usual manner as a challenge to orthodox ideas and social conventions Lieselotte Steinbr?gge interprets it as a deviation from a position staked out in the seventeenth century namely the mind has no sex. In breaking with that view the philosophes shifted the debate to categories like morality and sensitivity and took up economic issues as well. They inadvertently backed women into the corner of domesticity where middle-class women remained for some time to come.