On Women’s Nature and Capabilities

Abstract

Abstract This concluding chapter examines the topic of “women’s nature” that has been at the heart of all the previous chapters. The chapter looks first at the role played by theories of politeness and honnêteté in defining women’s nature, then to the evolution of biologically centered accounts and their relationship to theories of equality and inequality. The chapter gives extended close readings of Jeanne-Michelle de Pringy’s Les Différents caractères des femmes du siècle (1694), which traces women’s faults to social causes and proposes a method for enabling women to improve themselves. Anne-Thérèse de Lambert and Marie-Geneviève-Charlotte Thiroux d’Arconville similarly find social norms at the heart of women’s presumed failings. The chapter concludes with the emergence of the “woman author” as a distinct conceptual category and the intense debates it occasioned during the post-Revolutionary decade, including a close look at texts by Germaine de Staël, Félicité de Genlis, and Pauline Guizot.