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Women and the Enlightenment

Lesson objectives:

Students will be able to learn about women's life in the Enlightenment period

Keywords:

Salons,

Coffeehouses,

Debating societies,

Mary Wollstonecraft

Mary Astell

Debating societies were popular gatherings that included both education and recreation through state and social affairs

Coffeehouses in England brought people together to learn, but they were not associated with any university or institution.

Salons were assembled by a small number of elite women who were concerned with education and promoting philosophies of the Enlightenment.

At the end of 1780, there were four known women-only debating societies:

  • La Belle Assemblee,
  • The Female Parliament,
  • The Carlisle House
  • Debates for Ladies only,
  • the Female Congress

In 1694, the English writer Mary Astell published A Serious Proposal to the Ladies. Her book addressed the lack of educational opportunities for women. She criticized the unequal relationship between men and women in marriage.

If all men are born free,

how is it that all women are born slaves?”

Mary Astell

Women, like men, need education to become virtuous and useful. Wollstonecraft also urged women to enter the male-dominated fields of medicine and politics.

A Vindication of the Rights of

Woman, she disagreed with Rousseau

that women’s education should be secondary to men’s.

Mary Wollstonecraft

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