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AT THE END of the eighteenth century a furious debate raged in Europe-its subject was the woman question. Advocates and adversaries of the female sex argued passionately over the nature of women, the place they should occupy in society, and what political rights, if any, they should enjoy. Feminists, including Olympe de Gouges, Mary Wollstonecraft, and Theodore de Hippel, announced in their writings that the sexes were equal, demanding educational opportunities and even the franchise for women.' Opponents, scandalized by such claims, retaliated with traditional arguments chosen to demonstrate the innate inferiority of the female sex, and enlisted in their cause the prominent German philosophers, Johann Fichte and Georg Hegel.2 While the French Revolution was the immediate precipitator of this feminist and antifeminist outburst, the controversy had been building for over a century. From the 1690s on, philosophers had risen to challenge traditional views regarding the inferiority of the female sex along with the laws and social customs which marked that inferiority.3
Katherine B. Clinton (1975) studied this question.