should make clear that my ethical loyalties lie with making the practice of reason as gender-neutral and sex-neutral as it can be, despite the fact that historical contingencies still impinge on it and may always do so. In 1984 Genevieve Lloyd, in a classic work of modern feminist scholarship, demonstrated that in western philosophy women have symbolically represented what is outside the deep symbolic structures of the concept of reason. Women were relegated to the “nether world” that manly reason transcended. Some feminist literary scholars, taking their cue from various strands of postmodernism and postcolonialism, have abused this insight in applying it to the period of the supposed formation of the modern world, the eighteenth century in western Europe, and have described the ascent of a “logocentric” Enlightenment (with the privileging of Logos, or reason, camouflaging male hegemony). As an Enlightenment historian, I find this view woefully ignorant. When it takes cognizance of the wide variety of texts that constitute the Enlightenment, it simply lumps them together, despite the many objections in them to a rigid privileging of the authority of Reason that turned it into a desiccated, coercive, and dehumanizing power. I agree with Lloyd, who herself took pains to avoid the conclusion that the concept of reason inherently relegates women to a nether world.
The distance between the discipline I entered and the one I now practice can seem unbridgeable. When I was a graduate student, in the late 1960s and early 1970s, social history began its heady ascendancy. The middle years of my career witnessed the passages from social to cultural history and to the linguistic turn. More recently I have taken part in the renewal of intellectual history, and have become increasingly interested in literary hermeneutics. I say this not to advertise my versatility, but to explain why the book cannot be easily categorized within a disciplinary subfield. Looking back, I do not see myself migrating from approach to approach, method to method. The evolution of my work is better described as a gluing together of pieces, and sometimes I have wondered whether the glue has been anything more than a rather vague determination to limit what I take on board to what will advance historical understanding. In this book, however, I want to demonstrate that border crossings among the pieces are possible and worth the effort. Like Samuel Moyn, I am interested in the integration of representations with social structures and practices, though there will be less attention here to the role of concepts in constituting societal structures than to the terms of exchange in structured social practices.15 Within that theoretical agenda, I want to demonstrate that literary hermeneutics—what I am calling a rhetorical approach—are essential to the recovery of social meaning.
The labor/aisance dichotomy requires us to bring the social and the cultural into a working partnership. The dichotomy had an internal logic, by which I mean that, however arbitrary its point of departure in the underlying assumptions of gender difference, its apparently indisputable appeals to the work of “nature”—to the ways in which nature connected things causally and made sense of social difference—provided authoritative justification for the assignment of unequal intelligence to men and women. I want to give explanatory and interpretive bite to a truism often acknowledged in theory but more rarely found in practice: that the logic in question fused gender norms with status norms, the hierarchical norms of “honor” in early modern societies. If feminism seeks the emancipation of women, then advocacy of the emancipation of women’s minds, however tentative from our standpoint, certainly merits, by itself, the name feminist. But feminist scholarship that has largely ignored the logic of the imperatives of honor is seriously flawed; it has given us presentist oversimplifications of early modern articulations of feminism, which are as striking for their self-imposed constrictions as for their emancipatory impulses. In the social and cultural processes in which perceived differences in male and female minds partook of the authority of “nature,” gender norms and status norms reinforced each other. Our modern controversies about intelligence began not in the heads of enlightened philosophers, but in the networks of le monde, the Parisian milieus where the precious qualities of politeness (honnêteté), gallantry (galanterie) and worldliness (mondanité) were the currency of social distinction. In their putatively natural being, manifested in the aisance of their thought and speech, women were the exemplars of the unique honor claimed by le monde. Men had to perform their manliness in leisured conversation with aristocratic women. There was an inherent tension between this performance and the ethos of what I will call the manly mind, a certain sort of ideal intelligence formed by intense, disciplined labor in the Stoic tradition of askesis, in philosophical reasoning, and in the acquisition of learning.
We speak of a process of feminization that extended into the eighteenth century. Polite status required men to emulate their female counterparts in manners and above all in conversational sociability. But not to emulate them too much; the specter of “effeminacy,” already a presence in the seventeenth century, stalked Shaftesbury’s thought and became something of an obsession, the trope for a drumbeat of anxiety, in the eighteenth century, especially in Britain but also in France. In a persistent stereotype, the “fop” betrayed his effeminacy in his excessive delicacy, his overly demonstrative expression of feeling, and his preoccupation with the latest fashions (especially French). A widespread adaptation of civic humanism made effeminacy emblematic of the softening effect of excessive luxury in a rapidly commercializing civilization of speculation and consumerism.16 Within a discursive tradition that descried the vitiation of “character,” understood as the social representation of the inner autonomy of “virtue,” our focus will be on strength of mind as the critical ground of character. Manly integrity was acceding to womanish dissembling, the corrupting art of presenting a false self; manly courage to cowardice; manly rigor and energy to vanity and indolence. Men of excessive sensibility had an “effeminacy of mind,” the ever vigilant moralist Vicesimus Knox wrote in 1782, as seen in their flight from “vigorous pursuits and manly exertion.”17
One of my aims is to contribute to changing an originally troubled relationship between intellectual history and feminist history into one of mutual support. Until quite recently intellectual history was not a pathbreaker in denaturalizing gender categories. Its practitioners either entirely ignored male-centeredness or accepted it on its own terms. But we have begun to recognize that, in the effort to make sense of processes and meanings of gender differentiation, the two fields need each other. My aim, I should stress, is not to add a “gender” dimension to what we already understand about the thought of a particular historical figure, but to follow, as far as it will take me, an angle of approach that gives us a new understanding of the central concerns of her thought.18 This kind of re-reading can fairly be called “cultural,” but without a thoroughgoing practice of intellectual history it cannot be accomplished. We need to understand how gender differentiation at once infused and was infused by a wide range of currents of thought in early modern European intellectual life. The most important of them will be familiar to students of the era: Malebranche’s Augustinianism and Cartesianism; Mme de Lambert’s classical ideal of virtue and friendship; Shaftesbury’s Stoicism and English republicanism; David Hume’s mitigated philosophical skepticism, as well as his reliance on the notions of sympathy and sensibility; Mme Necker’s blending of sentiment and enlightened Calvinism; Diderot’s shift, via a kind of Stoicism, from sensibility to vitalist materialism; Mme d’Épinay’s Stoic logic for female emancipation. There was something protean about the Stoic tradition. If Stoicism typically guided men, and only men, though a rigorous askesis, a solitary exercise in rational reflectivity, it could also be a grounding for women’s as well as men’s moral autonomy. It will be a thread running through the book.
I also want to add to our growing awareness that, however clearly drawn gender differences were in the early modern era, they did not imprint one unvarying template on individual subjectivities. It is important to distinguish between how in “underlying normative structures” gender differences were conceived as binary opposites, and what they could be taken to imply, or how they could be normatively reconfigured, in discursive practice. If the question educated men faced was how to be polite without being stigmatized as effeminate, the corresponding question for women was how to display their intellectual abilities without seeming to be man-like and hence unnatural
