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Gender And The Politics Of Knowledge, Mary Ann Dzuback

Women, Gender & Sexuality Studies Research

Contentious public debates about women's rational and moral capacity circulated during the European Enlightenment at the same time that science was emerging as a dominant mode of inquiry. As historian Karen Offen argues in European Feminisms, these debates preoccupied both men and women intellectuals of the middling and upper classes and represented a pivotal moment in the three-century campaign to rearticulate a politics of knowledge proclaiming women as deserving as men of formal schooling at all levels. Disputes about women's capabilities emerged in the context of efforts to redefine the rights and privileges of men, of male intellectuals to reassert …