Gender and Education in the 18th Century: Negotiating Difference According to Sarah Scott

Objectif

Sarah Scott's novel being out of print, the class is going to focus on Mary Wollstonecraft and Jean-Jacques Rousseau.

The aim of this class is to understand the articulation of gender at the dawn of our political modernity between the second half of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the ninenteenth century.
This period corresponds to a key moment in the cultural and political consensus that has shaped inequality between the sexes until it was forcefully and publicly challenged in the twentieth century by a number of feminist movements.

This class is addressing the gender ambiguities of the words "Man" and "Humanity" through two political pamphlets of the 1790s: Wollstonecraft's "Vindication of the Rights of Men" (1790) and "A Vindication of the Rights of Woman" (1792), these being read alongside a key text of the Enlightenment that was profoundly significant for Wollstonecraft and for proressive thinking in general: Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Emile.

Contenu

Presenting Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Mary Wollstonecraft in the context of the Enlightenment.

Better understanding how the terms "humanity", "man", and "woman" were articulated in their own historical context and how they got to be inscribed as subliminally male-centred "universal" concepts shaping modernity in the 19th and 20th centuries .

Students need to read the texts by Rousseau and Wollstonecraft.

Tasks and assignments are going to be indicated on the moodle page of the class.