L'Essai sur les femmes/Essay on Women: an Eighteenth-Century Transatlantic Journey

Abstract

“First published at Edinburgh in 1773, and reprinted at Philadelphia in 1774, William Russell's Essay on Women, a translation of Antoine-Léonard's Essai sur les femmes (Paris, 1772), is now most frequently encountered in the form of a brief excerpt, the “Essay on the Female Sex” that was printed in the Pennsylvania Magazine in 1775 and that has often been misattributed to Thomas Paine and misinterpreted as a revolutionary statement of women's right to political equality. This article revisits the Essai/Essay/“Essay” from the perspective of an Enlightenment debate over the role of women in the progress of society. Of particular interest is the intermediary role played by Russell, the Scottish printer turned historian of women who sought to anglicize Thomas for the benefit of an English female readership. In his “translation” and “improvement” of Thomas’ text, Russell relied upon a distinctively Scottish Enlightenment account of women and civil society to offer a much more positive evaluation of women's social role than is found in the original French essay. As a case study in the international dimensions of eighteenth-century publication for and about women, the travels of this text from Paris to Edinburgh to Philadelphia exemplify a transatlatnic traffic in ideas where the French Enlightenment entered America via Scotland.”

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