Debating Gender in Eighteenth-Century France: Contesting the ‘Letter to d’Alembert’

In the ‘Letter to d’Alembert’ (1758), Jean-Jacques Rousseau elaborates an extremely narrow ideal for women’s behaviour. What was the effect, if any, on his contemporaries’ thoughts about gender? This survey of the books, articles, and reviews responding to Rousseau’s ‘Letter’ finds that commentators, while generally sympathetic with many of Rousseau’s aims, nevertheless perceived his views of women to be radical and wrong. The ensuing backlash sparked a moment of intellectual transition when paeans to women’s grace and charm gave way to a discourse, republican in tone, that critiqued the arbitrary tyranny of patriarchal institutions.