The First Essay on the Political Rights of Women

Condorcet, Jean-Antoine-Nicolas de Caritat, marquiProject Gutenberg · United StatesDec 2019

Rating 3.9
Word count
24K words
Chapters
3

Tags

English Originals Politics Public HealthHistorical ReappraisalUrban DisasterSocial ObservationHuman NaturePsychological InsightMoral DilemmaHealth SciencePlague AccountDocumentary Narrative

Summary

Project Gutenberg was the first provider of free electronic books, or eBooks. Michael Hart, founder of Project Gutenberg, invented eBooks in 1971 and his memory continues to inspire the creation of eBooks and related technologies today.The First Essay on the Political Rights of Women by CondorcetAuthor: Condorcet, Jean-Antoine-Nicolas de Caritat, marquis de, 1743-1794,Language: English, Class: JF: Political science: Political institutions and public administration, Release Date: Mar 8, 2010

Editor's review

This work is Condorcet's early treatise on women's political rights, a foundational text in the history of political thought and of women's rights thinking. It raises "whether women should enjoy political rights" as a serious philosophical and political question rather than leaving the debate at the level of custom, and readers can see in it the seeds of several basic arguments that later informed discussions of women's suffrage. As a free public-domain e-book from Project Gutenberg, it is easily accessible and well suited as a starting point for thematic reading, as well as for comparison with texts such as Mill's The Subjection of Women. Note that the book is an English text and a historical document whose argumentative context is distant from contemporary rights discourse; it is best read with a history-of-ideas perspective, attending to its problematic and its mode of argument rather than expecting systematic modern gender-studies analysis. It is not long, and lends itself to close reading in sections with notes.

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Reading tips

  1. Read introductory background material first to understand the context of eighteenth-century French political debate before entering the main text.
  2. Mark the author's core arguments as you read and restate the chain of reasoning in your own words.
  3. Read it alongside Mill's discussion of women's rights and compare the differences in emphasis.
  4. For an English text, read a short section each day with a dictionary and notes rather than pressing through in one sitting.

About the publisher

Project Gutenberg United States · Founded in 1971

Project Gutenberg is a digital publishing project focused on public-domain ebooks. Its publishing direction centers on classic literary works whose copyright has expired, covering genres such as poetry, drama, fiction, and epic. Representative books include Lyrical Ballads by Wordsworth and Coleridge, Proust's Du côté de chez Swann, Shakespeare's Macbeth and The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, Homer's The Iliad, Dante's La Divina Comèdia: Purgatòri, Cervantes's The History of Don Quixote, Volume 2, and Grahame's The Wind in the Willows. Its author resources consist mainly of classic Western writers such as Wordsworth, Proust, Shakespeare, Homer, Dante, Cervantes, Grahame, and Tolstoy. Its publishing feature is the provision of freely accessible ebooks in EPUB and Kindle formats; it is not a traditional publisher, and publicly available information is limited.

Contents

  1. 1
  2. 2
  3. 3

FAQ

Is this book in English or Chinese? How difficult is it to read? This is a public-domain English text written in the essayistic style of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, with long sentences and many abstract concepts. Readers with university-level English can complete it with a dictionary, but it is not light reading. It is advisable to skim the table of contents and opening paragraphs first to gauge your comfort level before deciding whether to read closely or selectively.
How does it differ from modern feminist works? It is an early political-philosophical argument that focuses on demonstrating, from reason and natural rights, that women should enjoy political rights, rather than offering modern analyses of gender structures, identity, and power. Readers should understand it within the history of ideas, attending to the questions it raises and its mode of argument, without demanding that it meet contemporary theoretical frameworks.
Is the e-edition suitable for academic citation? Project Gutenberg provides public-domain electronic texts suitable for general reading and study. For formal academic writing, it is advisable to check authoritative editions or print copies and to cite the edition source and page information, rather than citing solely from the layout of an electronic text.

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About the author

Condorcet, Jean-Antoine-Nicolas de Caritat, marqui Author · French · 1743–1794

Condorcet (Jean-Antoine-Nicolas de Caritat, marquis de Condorcet, 1743–1794) was a French Enlightenment thinker and mathematician. Living at the juncture of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution, he wrote with a mathematician's rigor and a philosopher's concern for public affairs. The library holds his The First Essay on the Political Rights of Women, which argues from natural rights and reason that women should enjoy political rights equal to men's; it is an important early text in the history of women's rights. He also wrote the Sketch for a Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Mind, which traces the development of human knowledge through a philosophy of progress. Public information is limited, so biographical details are omitted here; overall, his writing is distinguished by clear reasoning and a demand for universal rights, and it has inspired later discussions of equality and education.