Rousseau, Women and Gender

The objective of this course will be to tease out Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s complex and often contradictory ideas on women and gender difference in nature and society, to examine his own gender construction in his autobiographical writings, and to determine how women writers from the eighteenth to the twenty-first centuries have responded to these aspects of his work. Readings of Rousseau’s works (in French) will include the Discours sur l’inégalité, Émile, the Lettre à d’Alembert and the Confessions. Other authors will include Louise d’Épinay, Isabelle de Charrière, Olympe de Gouges, Germaine de Staël, Mary Wollstonecraft, Marie-Jeanne Roland de la Platière, George Sand and Monique Wittig, along with contemporary feminist criticism on Rousseau. The course will be taught in French with most readings in French, but papers may be written in English for non-majors or graduate students from other departments. This course fulfills the pre-1800 requirement for the French major and the 18th Century requirement for the MA or PhD in the French Department.

By the end of the course students should be conversant in the major arguments, themes and motifs Rousseau develops with respect to women and gender difference in the state of nature and society. They should have gained a nuanced understanding of the ways gender and sexuality are constructed in the Confessions and in the autobiographical works of women authors inspired by it. They should be able to characterize the diverse ways that various women writers, from Rousseau’s time to the present, have responded to his depiction of women and gender. They should have gained the ability to speak with fluency in French about these complex issues, and to develop in their written work, in French or in English, coherent and original arguments about Rousseau, women and gender. Above all, students will be expected to develop their own point of view on a central paradox of Rousseau’s corpus: how is it that a writer often derided in his own time and our own as misogynist has had such an outsized influence on successive generations of women writers?