“The male is male only at certain moments; the female is female her whole life… everything constantly recalls her sex to her, and to fulfill its functions, an appropriate physical constitution is necessary to her… she needs a soft sedentary life to suckle her babies. How much care and tenderness does she need to hold her family together!... The rigid strictness of the duties owed by the sexes is not and cannot be the same.” ——Rousseau, Emile As the Enlightenment thinkers started to theorize about humanity in general, gender became an unavoidable topic. As anatomical studies on the human bodies developed, understanding about the foundational physical constitution between men and women had already widely gained recognition. Because of the physiological makeup of the reproductive system of women, there were an “increasing stress on women’s unique fitness for the role of wife and mother” (Outram, 83). In the contrast, the anatomical studies that argued that women had a smaller brain size compared to men “demonstrated their unfitness for intellectual pursuits” (Outram, 82). The difference in biological construct thus further led to the contrast of social identity between women and men, as Rousseau suggests in Emile. The softness of women that came along their nature to bring up children were increasingly being considered as femininity and they were viewed as “social glue” because they were able to “correct that rudeness which passion and pride introduce into the company of men (Taylor, 82). "Their delicate hand smoothes the asperities of life” (Taylor, 82). Women were considered as the civilizer of men and guardian of the society. At the same time, women were also the consumer of the society. The luxury that they acquired “had been depicted as a quintessentially feminine vice, with critics from Cato to Augustine to Montesquieu loud in their denunciations of female extravagance and indulgence” (Taylor, 79). While Voltaire could be considered as a representation of thinkers who agreed with the natural distinction between men and women, there were also radical Enlightenment thinker who “denounced misogyny barbaric and argued that traditional female vice —weakness, silliness, frivolity— were either male inventions or products of oppression” (Taylor, 83). Such radical thinking seemed to reconcile the central paradox in Enlightenment thinking about the inconsistent roles and ability of women. It also showed the rudiment of the modern gender equality thinking.
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. Emile, or On Education, 1762. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:EmileTitle.jpeg.