Salon de Madame Geoffrin

Salon de Madame Geoffrin

This painting depicts a group of people listening to a reading of Voltaire’s L’Orphelin de la Chine, a play published in 1755. This gathering is a meeting of a salon, a private group of individuals who would meet to read and discuss various works. The topics would be chosen by the salonnière, the woman who hosted the meeting in her own home (Wiesner-Hanks 369-70). The salonnière held the power to select which guests would be invited, but she held no formal position or power in French society. Despite their role in the public sphere of intellectual discourse, “no woman was elected to the Académie Française until 1979” (Wiesner-Hanks 370). As we can see from Wollstonecraft’s work, women and men were not being educated equally, but how exactly were women viewed during the Enlightenment? In her article “Enlightenment and the Uses of Women,” Barbara Taylor identifies several historians whose views on the subject of women in the Enlightenment she opposes. Catherine Belsey’s view seems to be a good summary. She argues that the Enlightenment attempted to “legitimize the subordination of […] women” (Taylor 80). Belsey and historians that share her views cite various works of Enlightenment thinkers that associate women with the vice of luxury, which appears to have been a popular claim at the time. While it is undoubtedly true that there were many sexist sentiments written during the Enlightenment, it is important to recognize that comments of that sort were circulating in various works in times before and after the Enlightenment as well. Taylor does not argue that such claims do not exist, but rather that alongside them emerge during the Enlightenment works that highlight the virtues of women, as their authors saw them. This often included their ability to make men gentler and less barbaric, and several authors argued that giving women more license in society is what separated civilized nations from the barbaric ones (Taylor 83-84). While those views are clearly Eurocentric, and still wholly concerned with how women can benefit men, the sentiment of advocating for women’s rights remains. Women were surely not considered equal to men, even by proponents of women’s rights at the time, but each sex had their own separate virtues and vices. As Wollstonecraft alluded in her text discussed above, each sex needed the other for European society to function as it existed.

Anicet Charles Gabriel Lemonnier

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Salon_de_Madame_Geoffrin.jpg

1812

Benjamin Wightman