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Angela Hunter and Rebecca Wilkin, introduced by Christia Mercer
In the 1740s, Louise Dupin embarked on a project that would never see the light of day. Her “work on women,” as an heir later labeled it, would be the French Enlightenment's most important, and most neglected, feminist analysis of inequality. On the one hand, Dupin analyzes the mechanisms of men’s dominance. "Masculine vanity," she claims, aggrandizes men, diminishes women, and distorts all realms of knowledge, such that modern scientists incorporate old notions of women's weakness into new understandings of the body; historians denigrate female rulers or erase them altogether; legal scholars disenfranchise women through self-serving interpretations of Roman law; boys learn entitlement in school and men assert superiority in conversation. On the other hand, Dupin endeavored to bring to light evidence of women’s natural equality to men, of power exercised by queens and regents the world over, of self-determination once enjoyed by whole communities of French nuns, and of property rights once held by married women.
Dupin’s research assistant for this project was none other than Jean-Jacques Rousseau. His hand covers hundreds of pages of drafts and notes, and was the draw for the dozen or more archives and collectors across the United States and Europe who acquired parcels of Dupin’s papers at auction in the 1950s–the last time Dupin’s thousands of papers would be in one pile. Angela Hunter and Rebecca Wilkin reconstructed Louise Dupin’s Work on Women through extensive archival research. Their edition of translated selections, annotated and contextualized for general and specialist audiences, was published in the New Histories of Philosophy series of Oxford University Press (2023).
Angela Hunter is Professor of English at the University of Arkansas - Little Rock.
Rebecca Wilkin is Professor of French at Pacific Lutheran University.
This event is co-sponsored by the Maison Francaise and Department of Philosophy.