| This dissertation explores the quarrels over women and debates over female nature in the literary salons, chapbooks, novels and plays, and the periodical press of early eighteenth-century France. Though the querelle des femmes was rooted in the Renaissance, the debate changed in significant ways during this period. In the early eighteenth century, these quarrels expanded into an array of print venues, some of which grew more prominent during this period. Periodicals, printed theater plays, and novels proliferated, and the eighteenth century was the heyday of the chapbook. In these different arenas of print activity, writers increasingly emphasized a complementary ideal for men and women and moved away from seventeenth-century models that understood female nature as either exemplary or depraved.;The eighteenth-century quarrels were enmeshed in other cultural phenomena, such as the Quarrel over Homer, the developing role of the salonniere , chapbook debates about the nature of marriage, and interest in the historical Amazon. In salons, participants argued over the role of the female intellectual and the cultivation of feminine talents. In periodicals, questions about women were intertwined with anxieties about the nature and health of the literary public. In chapbooks, older portrayals of women's malice persisted, suggesting that the development toward a complementary gender ideal was conflicted and uneven.;The early eighteenth-century quarrels over women tried to assess women's abilities relative to men's and to gauge where women should be ideally placed, in the conversational circle, in the public world of print, and in marriage. Defenders of women, especially the women who participated in literary culture, argued for the cultivation of feminine knowledge and advanced the notion that women were better suited to certain types of intellectual activity. Early eighteenth-century quarrel writers were not yet positioning women as the ultimate moral sex, but they made a case about women's delicacy and refinement that would play into later Enlightenment conceptions of female nature. |
