Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
All Men and Both Sexes: Gender, Politics, and the False Universal in England, 1640-1832

All Men and Both Sexes: Gender, Politics, and the False Universal in England, 1640-1832

Smith, Hilda L.

Paperback

General Gender StudiesGeneral World HistoryBritish History

ISBN10: 0271021829
ISBN13: 9780271021829
Publisher: Penn St Univ Pr
Published: Apr 15 2003
Pages: 248
Weight: 0.82
Height: 0.76 Width: 8.68 Depth: 9.76
Language: English

All Men and Both Sexes explores the use of such universal terms as people, man, or human in early modern England, from the civil war through the Enlightenment. Such language falsely implies inclusion of both men and women when actually it excludes women. Recent scholarship has focused on the Rights of Man doctrine from the Enlightenment and the French Revolution as explanation for women's exclusion from citizenship. According to Hilda Smith we need to go back further, to the English Revolution and the more grounded (but equally restricted) values tied to the free born Englishman. Citing educational treatises, advice literature to young people, guild records, popular periodicals, and parliamentary debates, she demonstrates how the male maturation process came to define the qualities attached to citizenship and responsible adulthood, which in turn became the basis for modern individualism and liberalism. By the eighteenth century a new discourse of sensibility was describing women as dependent beings outside the state, in a separate sphere and in need of protection. This excluded women from reform debates, forcing them to seek not an extension of a democratic franchise but a specific women's suffrage focused on gender difference.

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