THE ORIGINS OF FEMINISM AND THE LIMITS OF ENLIGHTENMENT

Extract

The publication of the collection of essays Women, Gender and Enlightenment (ed. Sarah Knott and Barbara Taylor, Houndsmills: Palgrave MacMillan, 2005) affords an unusual opportunity to confront a myriad of interrelated issues, at once definitional and ideological, that face intellectual historians of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Europe and America. The 768-page work came out of a highly unusual collaborative research project conducted from 1998 to 2001, “Feminism and Enlightenment, 1650–1850: A Comparative History,” a series of colloquia, conferences, and Internet exchanges enlisting the participation of over a hundred historians in Europe, North America, and Australia. The product of this extensive interaction showcases the contributions of thirty-eight authors, not only covering a broad array of topics but, still more remarkable, displaying a large degree of consensus about issues of interpretative concern. While dozens of books and articles have anticipated pieces of the arguments made in this volume, never has so extensive an attempt been made to pull them together into a cohesive whole.