Full Description
Spanning six centuries of political thought in European history, this book puts the ideas of thinkers from Christine de Pizan to Simone de Beauvoir in the broader contexts of their time. This intriguing collection of essays shows that feminism is not a varient of modern radical discourse but a mode of analysing the issues of authority, power and virtue that have been at the heart of European political thought from the middle ages.
Contents
1. Introduction: feminism in European history Tjitske Akkerman and Siep Stuurman 2. The languages of late-medieval feminism Miri Rubin 3. A 'learned wave': women of letter and science from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment Brita Rang 4. L'égalité des sexes qui ne se conteste plus en France: feminism in the seventeenth century Siep Stuurman 5. Reclaiming the European Enlightenment for feminism: or prolegomena to any future history of eighteenth-century Europe Karen Offen 6. Culture as a gendered battleground: the patronage of Madame de Pompadour Inge E. Boer 7. A woman's struggle for a language of enlightenment and virtue: Mary Wollstonecraft and Enlightenment 'feminism' Virginia Sapiro 8. French utopians: the word and the act Claire G. Moses 9. Equality and difference: utopian feminism in Britain Ruth Levitas 10. Liberalism and feminism in late nineteenth-century Britain Tjitske Akkerman 11. Feminists and sex: how to find lesbians at the turn of the century Martha Vicinus 12. Beauvoir's philosophy as the hidden paradigm of contemporary feminism Karen Vicinus 13. Contemporary feminism between individualism and community Jet Bussemaker
