SOURCE: May, Gita. “Rousseau's ‘Antifeminism’ Reconsidered.” In French Women and the Age of Enlightenment, edited by Samia I. Spencer, pp. 309-17. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984.

In this essay, May considers how women authors such as Roland could be inspired by the ideas of Rousseau despite his consistent depiction of women as inferior to men.

As most of us have come to realize, feminist revisionist criticism has demonstrated impressive vitality in the last decade and at least as much validity as a mode of inquiry as structuralism, marxism, and psychoanalysis.

When one approaches the eighteenth century, one encounters the two main vexing problems facing the condition of womanhood: the angel-devil images and stereotypes already described in Simone de Beauvoir's Second Sex and the entrapment of woman within prison-like spaces (the home, marriage, the convent).

The all-too-rosy picture the Goncourt brothers painted of the eighteenth century as one that consecrated...