How Did The Enlightenment Thinkers Construct The Subjugation Of Women?

In today’s world, people often paint the Enlightenment as an era where reason finally triumphed over blind faith and antiquated viewpoints. However, not every view espoused by the Enlightenment thinkers furthered humanist ideals like universal equality and personal liberty. While the writers of the time did make massive strides toward theorizing a more just society, half of the population was entirely excluded: women. Not only did the Enlightenment thinkers fail to support increased rights of women, they reframed the subjugation of women as something natural and therefore irrefutable. The Encyclopedia of Diderot and D’Alembert exemplifies this idea of reasoning through the gender disparity. Interwoven through the Encyclopedia’s entries, one can trace the way the Enlightenment thinkers constructed the ideal characteristics of a “natural” woman.
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The passage is charged with ideas about the inherent weakness of women; the author refers to women as “the sex destined to defend itself” (Jaucourt, “Modesty”). Again, this implies that women’s inferiority is inevitable based on the way that nature designed women. The author goes as far as to argue that nature created men “to attack” and gifted women with modesty as “self-preservation” (Jaucourt, “Modesty”). Jaucourt claims that “all peoples come together equally in expressing disgust for feminine incontinence; for nature has spoken to all nations” (Jaucourt, “Modesty”). This is a key example of the Enlightenment thinkers using reason to perpetuate damaging and inaccurate ideas about the natural order. Anyone who looked at the state of gender equality in global civilizations in the eighteenth century could recognize that inequality was rampant. Jaucourt used this historical pattern as the basis of his logic that gender discrimination was