Debating Women's Nature in the Enlightenment

If reason is universal, do women share it equally? Enlightenment writers gave sharply different answers; in 1673 François Poullain de la Barre, applying Descartes's method, argued that 'the mind has no sex' and that women's apparent inferiority came from lack of education. Some philosophes, including Condorcet, followed this line.

Others insisted on natural differences: Rousseau's Émile argued that women were made to please men and should be educated for domestic roles, and many medical writers described women's bodies as making them emotional rather than rational. Diderot's essay On Women (1772) expressed sympathy for women's legal subjection while still describing them as ruled by their nervous constitution.

Women writers such as Louise d'Épinay and Madame de Graffigny joined the debate; the question mattered because claims about 'nature' were used to justify excluding women from citizenship, property rights and education. Historians see this debate as a key test of whether Enlightenment universalism applied to everyone.