Becoming a Woman in the Age of Enlightenment: French Art from the Horvitz Collection' is primarily an exhibition of drawings but will include pastels, paintings, and sculptures selected from one of the world?s best private collections of French drawings. The exhibition will feature nearly 120 works by many of the most prominent artists of the eighteenth century, including Antoine Watteau, Nicolas Lancret, François Boucher, Jean-Honoré Fragonard, as well as lesser-known artists both male and female, such as Anne Vallayer-Coster, Gabrielle Capet, François-André Vincent, Philibert-Louis Debucourt. Ranging from spirited, improvisational sketches and figural studies, to highly finished drawings of exquisite beauty, the works included in the exhibition vary in terms of style, genre, and period.0Becoming a Woman will be organized into thematic sections that address some of the most important and defining questions of women?s lives in the eighteenth century. These include: how the stages of a woman?s life were measured; what cultural attitudes and conditions in France shaped how women were defined; what significant relations women formed with men; what social and familial rituals gave order to their lives; what pleasures they pursued; and what work they accomplished. The aim is to bring new insights to the questions of what it meant to be a woman in this period, by offering the first exhibition to focus specifically on representations of women of a broad range of ages and conditions.00Exhibition: Harn Museum of Art, University of Florida, Gainesville, USA (06.10.-31.12.2017).

In 18th century France, letter writing became extremely fashionable, particularly amongst women. In this work, Dena Goodman opens up the world of these women though the letters which they wrote. Concentrating on the letters of four women from different social backgrounds, she shows how they came to womanhood through their writing.

"The collection is more than the sum of its parts and it will be difficult even for men to look at the French Enlightenment and the French Revolution in quite the same way again." —London Review of Books " . . . a significant contribution to the general history of women. . . . an indispensable complement to our understanding of the eighteenth century." —Romance Quarterly

Did women have an Enlightenment? This path-breaking volume of interdisciplinary essays by forty leading scholars provides a detailed picture of the controversial, innovative role played by women and gender issues in the age of light.

Sexual Politics in the Enlightenment constitutes the first book-length feminist study of Rousseau's sexual politics and the reception of his works by women readers. By today's standards, Rousseau's sexual politics appear reactionary, paternalistic, even blatantly misogynist; yet, among his female contemporaries, his works often met with enthusiastic approval and had tremendous impact on their values and behavior. To probe Rousseau's paradoxical appeal to eighteenth-century readers, Mary Trouille examines how seven women authors responded to his writings and sexual politics and traces his influence on their lives and works. The writers include six Frenchwomen (Roland, d'Epinay, Stael, Genlis, Gouges, and an anonymous woman correspondent who called herself Henriette) and the English feminist Mary Wollstonecraft. The book constitutes an important contribution to French literature, women's studies, and eighteenth-century cultural studies. While a great deal has already been written on the individual women whom Trouille treats, what distinguishes this book is that it places multiple female subjects directly opposite Rousseau, and succeeds in showing that the relationship between mentor and student(s) is both multi-layered and fascinatingly complex.

This examination of previously unexplored aspects of women's roles in the European Enlightenment will enhance yur understanding of the culture and the role played by women.

The Enlightenment era saw European thinkers increasingly concerned with what it meant to be human. This collection of essays traces the concept of ‘humanity’ through revolutionary politics, feminist biography, portraiture, explorer narratives, libertine and Orientalist fiction, the philosophy of conversation and musicology.

An original study of how Enlightenment ideas shaped the lives of women and the work of eighteenth-century women writers.

Dr Goldberg argues that Samuel Richardson had expressed a powerful and hitherto unperceived sexual mythology in Clarissa, making it the popular masterpiece it quickly became. There had never before been a work of literature in which the rape of a woman became the moral indictment of an age. Clarissa was a book which changed minds. It is not surprising that Diderot, the French philosophe, drew on Richardson as the inspiration for his own novel, La Religieuse. Richardson's novels had achieved Diderot's declared aim as editor of the great Encyclopédie: to change the way people think. For both writers it had become clear that the boudoir had replaced the Puritan closet and the Catholic confessional as the location for tests of virtue. Dr Goldberg offers an original, comparative reading of the works of these French and English innovators. She leaves us in little doubt that our understanding of what it means to be a woman in our culture owes much to the turbulent world of Richardson and Diderot.

Women seem to be destined solely for our pleasure. When they no longer have that attraction, they have lost everything' (letter from Diderot to Sophie Volland, 1762). How typical was this view of the 'older woman' in the eighteenth century? What was it like for women of intelligence and sensibility to grow old in such a culture? By studying the correspondences of four prominent women (Françoise de Graffigny, Marie Du Deffand, Marie Riccoboni and Isabelle de Charrière) during their middle and late years, Stewart explores the relation of female aging to respectability, sexuality and power. The author's focus lies in the physical, emotional and professional well-being of middle-aged and elderly women during a time when all the available dignity of age seemed to belong to men. The 'repulsiveness' of growing old was patently a female issue. One of the most emblematic aspects of these correspondences is the often unrequited love of older women for younger men during a period when the common wisdom denied women the right to any feelings except piety. Stewart juxtaposes their letters with representations of aging women in the period's fictional and medical literature. She takes up several canonical, mostly male-authored, texts that purvey this common wisdom, and re-reads them with originality and grace. Through The Enlightenment of age - at once learned, highly personal and entertaining - Stewart speaks to us about the secret lives of older women, and about the ethos of an era.