Philosophical Foundations of Women's Rights 1600-1750
Professor Jacqueline Broad
About the project
I am lead investigator on the project The Philosophical Foundations of Women’s Rights: A New History, 1600–1750, funded by the Australian Research Council’s Discovery Project scheme. My co-investigators include Professor Deborah Brown (UQ) and Professor Marguerite Deslauriers (McGill).
This project aims to show that the history of women’s rights is much longer and richer than previously thought. There is a common perception that the notion of women’s rights first emerged in the late eighteenth century. This project expects to generate a new understanding of feminist history by investigating several texts calling for the recognition of women’s dignity, worth, nobility, and excellence (cognate concepts to rights) in England and Europe from 1600 to 1750, against the backdrop of the rise of Cartesianism.
Toward these goals, I recently edited a special journal issue of the Australasian Philosophical Review on “Women, Revolution, and Republicanism in the Eighteenth Century”, published in 2020.
Our other publications include:
Marguerite Deslauriers, Lucrezia Marinella, Elements on Women in the History of Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2024).
Deborah J. Brown and Jacqueline Broad, ‘Petticoat Power? Mary Astell’s Appropriation of Heroic Virtue for Women’, Journal of the American Philosophical Association 9, no. 2 (2023): 214-233. DOI: 10.1017/apa.2022.6.
Jacqueline Broad, ‘Recent Work in Early Modern Women’s Philosophy: Some Implications for the Canon’, Mind 132, no. 528(2023): 1126-1141. DOI: 10.1093/mind/fzab057
Jacqueline Broad, ‘Mary Astell (1666-1731)’, in The Routledge Handbook of Women and Early Modern European Philosophy, edited by Karen Detlefsen and Lisa Shapiro (New York and London: Routledge, 2023), pp. 493-505; DOI: 10.4324/9781315450001-43
Marguerite Deslauriers, ‘La Querelle des Femmes et l’histoire de la philosophie féministe’, in XVIIe Siècle, numéro thématique, Historiographies des corpus modernes: évolutions et méthodes 296 (2022/3): 451-68. DOI : 10.3917/dss.223.0451
Deborah J. Brown and Jacqueline Broad, ‘The Social Dimension of Generosity in Descartes and Astell’, Journal of the History of Philosophy 60, no. 3 (2022): 409–27. DOI: 10.1353/hph.2022.0037
Jacqueline Broad, ‘From Nobility and Excellence to Generosity and Rights: Sophia’s Defenses of Women (1739–40)’, Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy 37, no. 1 (2022): 43–59; published online 29 November 2021, DOI: 10.1017/hyp.2021.71.
Marguerite Deslauriers, “Why Eve Matters in the History of Feminist Arguments” in Women’s Perspectives on Ancient and Medieval Philosophy, eds. I. Chouinard, Z. McConaughey, A. Medeiros Ramos, R. Noël (Dordrecht: Springer, 2021), pp. 343-49.
Marguerite Deslauriers, ‘The Superiority of Women in the Seventeenth Century’, Journal of the American Philosophical Association, published online (21 July 2021): 1-17; DOI: 10.1017/apa.2019.24.
Jacqueline Broad and Marguerite Deslauriers, ‘The Philosophical Foundations of Women’s Rights: Nobility and Dignity’, in The Edinburgh Critical History of Early Modern and Enlightenment Philosophy, edited by Stephen Howard and Jack Stetter (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, forthcoming).