Des femmes by Louise Dupin, which had remained in manuscript form since 1751, is finally published here in a first edition. In this major feminist work of the Enlightenment, the author defends the absolute equality of the sexes encyclopedically. She proposes a grand overhaul of society.

A contemporary of Olympe de Gouges, invisible to her husband and remaining in the shadow of the three thinkers she encountered: Montesquieu, Rousseau, and Voltaire, Louise Dupin (1706-1799) nevertheless held one of the most famous literary and philosophical salons of her time in Paris. She denounced violence against women, campaigned for professional equality and women's access to politics, for divorce, for the transmission of the mother's name to children, and criticized the lack of consideration for women in the writings of the greatest authors since Antiquity. Rousseau fell in love with her, Louise Dupin rejected him, and then hired him as her secretary. Together, in Paris and at the Château de Chenonceau, which she owned, they worked on a major feminist book. The result was thousands of pages that would end up scattered throughout Europe and America in the 20th century. While tracking them down and collecting them, Frédéric Marty found a manuscript that forms a sort of long introduction to his great work, in which Louise Dupin's ideas on the equality of the sexes are formulated; it is this completely unpublished text that we are publishing.

Frédéric Marty’s broad-ranging portrait of Louise Dupin introduces her life, her social milieu, and, most importantly, her philosophical projects. Marty brings much-deserved attention to Dupin’s little-known work, maintaining throughout an appropriate balance between overview and detailed description. The book is divided into three parts, the first devoted to familial and social relations (notably Dupin’s salon and her secretary Jean-Jacques Rousseau), and the second and third devoted to Dupin’s major projects — the Ouvrage sur les femmes and a refutation of Montesquieu’s Esprit des lois — with the guiding threads being Dupin’s feminist intervention (treating law, science, history, education, mores) and her political thought. In Part One, Marty traces Dupin’s various relations, explaining, for example, how a bourgeoise married to a tax farmer had so many connections within the high nobility. He also gathers together information about Dupin’s bureau d’esprit and her correspondents (the Abbé de Saint-Pierre, Bernard de Fontenelle, Pierre de Marivaux, and Voltaire…). He briefly explores how rivals such as the Marquise Du Deffand and Claudine-Alexandrine Guérin de Tencin viewed Dupin, as well as the various Dupin family members’ relationships with Rousseau. Marty focuses in Part Two on a global understanding of Dupin’s major work, the unfinished Ouvrage sur les femmes. The presentation of its structure is a great synthesis based on the manuscripts we have available, which the author has exhaustively studied. Marty provides a valuable view into Dupin’s thought for those who may not realize how significant and wide-ranging it is. He uses a related text — the ‘Discours préliminaire’ — as a guiding frame. The section on the sources of Dupin’s thought addresses the influential Cartesian François Poulain de La Barre as well as Marie Gournay and the Marquise de Lambert, the latter being the least essential. However, Marty makes a case for enriching our understanding through this comparison in regard to Dupin’s moral writings. As he rightly emphasizes, Dupin is a political theorist, and Part Three of the book deals with her critique of Montesquieu and participation in the group-authored Réflexions sur un livre intitulé de l’Esprit des loix (Paris: Benjamin Serpentin, 1749). Marty focuses on her preparatory manuscripts for that project, which he accurately describes as substantial yet not organized in a way to make this easily visible. Particularly impressive here is Marty’s careful thinking about Dupin’s monarchism and the tensions in her political thought between her radical feminist arguments and her less radical views of social stratification. The work is supplemented by a summative conclusion, bibliography, and two appendices, one a list of the forty-seven articles of the Ouvrage. It would have been wonderful if this had further elaborated on what is and is not known about the organization of the Ouvrage. Since the scope of Marty's book is not exhaustive in any one aspect, Marty leaves us looking forward to his forthcoming edition of the Ouvrage. Marty’s thoughtful exposition here makes clear that Dupin’s work will reward those interested in engaging with it more deeply. He has crafted an organized, wide-ranging, and insightful view into Dupin. Readers will find new interdisciplinary connections to explore in the presentation of this Enlightenment thinker. -Angela Hunter

The eighteenth-century text Work on Women by Louise Dupin (also known as Madame Dupin, 1706-1799) is the French Enlightenment's most in-depth feminist analysis of inequality--and its most neglected one. Angela Hunter and Rebecca Wilkin here offer the first-ever edition of selected translations of Dupin's massive project, developed from manuscript drafts. Hunter and Wilkin provide helpful introductions to the four sections of Work on Women (Science, History and Religion, Law, and Education and Mores) which contextualize Dupin's arguments and explain the work's construction--including the role of her secretary, Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Dupin's central claim in Work on Women is that French jurists have gradually disenfranchised women through reductive interpretations of Roman law. As a result, modern marriage is founded on an abusive, illegitimate contract that enriches one party and impoverishes the other. This manifest injustice is enabled by the "masculine vanity" that aggrandizes men, diminishes women, and distorts all realms of knowledge. Dupin shows how the most reputable scientists incorporate old notions of women's weakness into new understandings of the body, while historians denigrate female rulers or erase them altogether. Even in everyday conversation, men assert their entitlement to social dominance through casual misogyny. Thus, although Dupin advocates for meaningful education for girls, she insists that the upbringing of boys must also be reformed. This volume fills an important gap in the history of feminist thought and will appeal to readers eager to hear new voices that challenge established narratives of intellectual history.