About this ebook
Diderot's Sur les femmes (On Women), written in 1772 and circulated in manuscript before its eventual posthumous publication, is a short but deeply revealing text in which he attempts to state a philosophical understanding of womanhood. Framed as a meditation, and at times an essayistic monologue, the piece exemplifies the instability of Enlightenment discourse when applied to gender. While it is often remembered for its rhetorical flourishes and apparent sympathy toward women's suffering. Diderot oscillates between sentimental idealization, naturalistic determinism, and misogynistic generalization which supports (indirectly) infanticide. Originally published in the Correspondance littéraire, a periodical edited by Friedrich Melchior Grimm, the essay responds directly to Antoine Léonard Thomas's Essai sur le caractère, les mœurs et l'esprit des femmes dans les différents siècles (1772), which depicted women as by nature inferior to men. The edition of On Women supplements the text with a new Epilogue by the translator, a glossary of Philosophical Terms used by Diderot, a chronology of his core life and works, and a summary index of all of Diderot's works. This edition translates On Women from Diderot's Enlightenment-era French into contemporary English while retaining its intellectual context. At times, Diderot seems to offer a proto feminist critique of patriarchal oppression, showing the injustices of law, marriage, and custom. Yet these moments are repeatedly undercut by appeals to biology and irrational affect, which he attributes to women as essential characteristics. He writes, for instance, that "woman is a weathercock attached to a nervous system", a statement that strips his subject of stability, dignity, and rational autonomy. In On Women is less an essay than a confession, a record of the Enlightenment's inability to integrate difference without subordinating it. Diderot cannot think woman except through contradiction, because his conceptual apparatus does not permit parity without loss of masculine authority. His naturalism, designed to liberate thought from theology, here functions as a substitute metaphysics: just as rigid, just as exclusionary, and part of a broader amorality leveraged against all groups of people.
Diderot's Sur les femmes (On Women), written in 1772 and circulated in manuscript before its eventual posthumous publication, is a short but deeply revealing text in which he attempts to state a philosophical understanding of womanhood. Framed as a meditation, and at times an essayistic monologue...
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About the author
Denis Diderot (1713 to 1784) was a French writer, philosopher, art critic, and editor. He directed much of the Encyclopédie, wrote fiction and drama, and produced essays on art, religion, natural philosophy, education, politics, and the material basis of mind.
Denis Diderot (1713 to 1784) was a French writer, philosopher, art critic, and editor. He directed much of the Encyclopédie, wrote fiction and drama, and produced essays on art, religion, natural philosophy, education, politics, and the material basis of mind.
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