The Enlightenment and Women
The Gustavian Era
This article describes and analyses the ongoing discourse on woman in Sweden ca. 1770-1810. The true place of woman in society and culture was then, as now, a much debated topic. The writers of the day (almost all of them men) seldom failed to comment on the 'fair' sex (which they often entitled such diverse epithets as 'vain', 'moral', 'unsteady', 'hypocritical'). Biographical dictionaries, novels, books of sermons, manuals of etiquette, treatises on education, not to mention the press, all do they give ample proof of this preoccupation. Indeed, as Fredric Mozelius wrote in a treatise on education, 1780 awarded by the Royal Academy of Literature: "The sex has always, but even more in our enlightened age, occupied the pens of the most distinguished men of belles-lettres".
What then, was the debate all about? What fears and hopes did the writers express? In what way was the question of woman's nature and her place in society a concern of the Enlightenment? And finally, what changes, or signs of continuity, are to be discerned in the ideal woman constructed in Gustavian times?
It is evident that emancipation was of no great concern. Independent women were as well as vain coquettes a frequent target for lampoons. The ideal of learned woman was scorned by many male writers, In this they found support not only in Rousseau but more important in a scientifically impressive medical literature. The women's bodies were physiologically speaking more sensitive than men's. This made them slaves under perceptions and passions. Abstract thought was therefore the domain of men.
To no avail had e. g. Hedvig Charlotta Nordenflycht protested against such reasoning. Likewise was the very thought of women participating in the social process of labour seldom expressed and even more seldom embraced. The Gustavian Era saw a domestic ideal capture the scene. Woman's vocation was to devote her energies on husband, household and children.
Writers otherwise disposed to condemn women's superstitiousness, their superficiality, their reading habits etc., were in this case ready to make the women participants in that grand movement called Enlightenment. Indeed, they were by the very same writers described as pillars of private morality and their noble mission to foster good citizens.
The spread of this admittedly bourgeois ideal can be studied in a vast range of literature. This article treats in some depth the role of novels in this process. In spite of their bad reputation, novels in the 18th-century were as a rule more likely to point a moral than seduce innocent women. Some of them did so expressly in the name of Enlightenment. As is shown in this article this sort of Enlightenment was not limited to the educated classes. By way of crudely didactic novels of rustic life were also peasant women its' recipients.
Finally it may be noted that the ideal woman the Romantics adored in many ways was a heritage left from the of Enlightenment. The bipolarization of Gender, the exclusion of women from the social process of labour, the subordination of women under men in intellectual matters, their role as mothers and mates in command of the household: all these aspects were often emphatically embraced by the writers of the late 18th century.
