In the shadow of the letter: madame Dupin, Rousseau, and the invisibility of women's voices in the 18th century

Authors

Barbara Rodrigues Barbosa Universidade Federal do Maranhão (UFMA)

Keywords:

Louise Dupin, Rousseau, Enlightenment, Gender, Inequality

Abstract

This article examines the unfinished work of Louise-Marie-Madeleine Dupin (1706-1799), known as the Ouvrage sur les femmes (Work on Women), and the conditions of its invisibility in the history of philosophy. Through the analysis of the inventory prepared by Anicet Sénéchal (1963), the role of Jean-Jacques Rousseau as her secretary, and contemporary critical reception (Marty, 2021; Hunter, 2009; Lastičová, 2023), it is argued that the reception of the manuscripts was marked by a gender bias that privileged the masculine letter as the criterion for authority. The metaphor of the construction of inequality, present in Dupin's writings, and her critique of Montesquieu, reveal a philosophy that anticipates central debates of political modernity while simultaneously being silenced by the canon. It is concluded that rediscovering Dupin is to interrogate not only her philosophy but the very historical mechanisms of exclusion in the constitution of modern philosophy.

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Author Biography

Barbara Rodrigues Barbosa , Universidade Federal do Maranhão (UFMA)

Pós-doutoranda em Cultura e Sociedade, UFMA (bolsista FAPEMA)

References

DUPIN, Louise-Marie-Madeleine. Des femmes: observations du préjugé commun sur la différence des sexes. Edição crítica estabelecida por Frédéric Marty. Paris: Classiques Garnier, 2022. (Bibliothèque du XVIIIe siècle, 58). 546 p. ISBN 978-2-406-13184-7.

HUNTER, Angela. The Unfinished Work on Louise Marie-Madeleine Dupin's Unfinished Ouvrage sur les femmes. Eighteenth-Century Studies, v. 43, n. 1, p. 95-111, Fall 2009. DOI: 10.1353/ecs.0.0092.

HUNTER, Angela; WILKIN, Rebecca. Louise Dupin: Defending Women, 1750. Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 2023.

LA VOPA, Anthony J. The labor of the mind: intellect and gender in Enlightenment cultures. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017.

POULAIN DE LA BARRE, François. De l’égalité des deux sexes. De l’éducation des dames. De l’excellence des hommes. Édition présentée et annotée par Marie-Frédérique Pellegrin. Paris: Vrin, 2011.

POULAIN DE LA BARRE, François. Da igualdade entre os dois sexos, discurso físico e moral. In: ROVERE, Maxime (org.). Arqueofeminismo. Mulheres filósofas e filósofos feministas. Séculos XVII–XVIII. Tradução de Yasmin Haddad. São Paulo: n-1 edições, 2019.

ROUSSEAU, Jean-Jacques. Confessions. In: Œuvres complètes. Paris: Gallimard, 1959. v. I.

ROUSSEAU, Jean-Jacques. Discours sur l’origine et les fondements de l’inégalité parmi les hommes. In: Œuvres complètes. Paris: Gallimard, 1964. v. III.

ROUSSEAU, Jean-Jacques. Émile ou de l’éducation. In: Œuvres complètes. Paris: Gallimard, 1969. v. IV.

SÉNÉCHAL, Anicet. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, secrétaire de Madame Dupin: inventaire des papiers de Madame Dupin conservés à la Bibliothèque de Neuchâtel. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1963.

WILKIN, Rebecca. ‘Réformez vos contrats!’: From the Marriage Contract to the Social Contract in Louise Dupin and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Early Modern French Studies, v. 43, n. 1, p. 88-105, 2021. DOI: 10.1080/20563035.2021.1924010.

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Published

2025-12-08

How to Cite

Rodrigues Barbosa , B. (2025). In the shadow of the letter: madame Dupin, Rousseau, and the invisibility of women’s voices in the 18th century. Revista Interdisciplinar Em Cultura E Sociedade, 26–36. Retrieved from https://periodicoseletronicos.ufma.br/index.php/ricultsociedade/article/view/28285