Gender and the Politics of Knowledge

Abstract

Contentious public debates about women's rational and moral capacity circulated during the European Enlightenment at the same time that science was emerging as a dominant mode of inquiry. As historian Karen Offen argues in European Feminisms, these debates preoccupied both men and women intellectuals of the middling and upper classes and represented a pivotal moment in the three-century campaign to rearticulate a politics of knowledge proclaiming women as deserving as men of formal schooling at all levels. Disputes about women's capabilities emerged in the context of efforts to redefine the rights and privileges of men, of male intellectuals to reassert male dominance over and control of females’ access to intellectual participation as well as the craft guilds associated with women's work, and of men and women to consider the meaning and structure of social institutions and social systems. The German poet Philippine Engelhard captured women's frustrations with the limits imposed upon them in comparison to men in the context of the formation of the liberal state, the development of the middle class, and the growth of humanistic and scientific inquiry:How oft with damnationAnd tears of frustrationMy gender I curse!Its ban ever doomsUs girls to our rooms;How freely men move!Even youngster and serf.