Roland, Marie-Jeanne - Gita May (essay date 1984)
Gita May (essay date 1984)
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...
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