An Edition and Translation of Selections from Louise Dupin's Philosophical Treatise, "The Work on Women"

FAIN: RQ-271249-20

University of Arkansas, Little Rock (Little Rock, AR 72204-1000)
Angela Hunter (Project Director: December 2019 to present)
Rebecca M. Wilkin (Co Project Director: December 2019 to present)

Preparation for publication of a print edition of Louise Dupin’s Work on Women (1745 – 1751). (16 months)

This project is an edition and translation of selections of Louise Dupin's Work on Women, a philosophical treatise written circa 1745–1751. The project will be published as a book with the “New Histories of Philosophy” series at Oxford University Press. The selections will serve as an orientation to Dupin’s total Work, concentrating its most important arguments. It will contain a robust introduction; a selection of over half of the Work on Women; four appendices, a bibliography, and an index. Our selection draws from the Work’s five main thematic sections on natural philosophy, religion, history, law, and education.

Associated Products

“‘L’idée’ salique selon Louise Dupin” (Book Section)
Title: “‘L’idée’ salique selon Louise Dupin”
Author: Rebecca Wilkin
Author: Angela Hunter
Editor: Anne-Lise Rey
Abstract: An edition of two chapters of Dupin’s Ouvrage sur les femmes (in French) for a collection devoted to women philosophers.
Year: 2022
Access Model: print book
Publisher: Classiques Garnier
Book Title: Philosophies: Féminin pluriel. Anthologie des femmes philosophes

“‘Réformez vos contrats!’: From the marriage contract to the social contract in Louise Dupin and Jean-Jacques Rousseau” (Article)
Title: “‘Réformez vos contrats!’: From the marriage contract to the social contract in Louise Dupin and Jean-Jacques Rousseau”
Author: Rebecca Wilkin
Abstract: I trace key arguments of Jean–Jacques Rousseau’s political philosophy to Louise Dupin’s Ouvrage sur les femmes to reveal that early modern feminist thought contributed directly to social contract theory. Rousseau applied Dupin’s mockery of the marriage contract to dismiss as fraudulent the politi- cal contract that previous natural law philosophers had imagined between subjects and sovereign. He then made mutually exclusive property the foundation of the republican social contract, just as Dupin had stipulated separately owned property as the condition of equality in marriage. Yet Rousseau rejected the feminist content of Dupin’s arguments, despite incorporating her strategies. Paradoxically, while Dupin, a monarchist, construed marriage along the egalitarian lines of a friendship based on ‘la douceur du commerce’, the republican Rousseau invested men with the douceur of the absolute sovereign, masking the contractual character of marriage by positing women’s subordination to men as a matter of passionate attachment.
Year: 2021
Primary URL: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/20563035.2021.1924010
Format: Journal
Periodical Title: Early Modern French Studies

“‘The spirit of laws is not the spirit of justice’: Louise Dupin and Networks of Critique” (Conference Paper/Presentation)
Title: “‘The spirit of laws is not the spirit of justice’: Louise Dupin and Networks of Critique”
Author: Angela Hunter
Abstract: A presentation on Louise Dupin's participation in a critique of Montesquieu's "On the Spirit of the Laws," jointly authored with her husband and several others. The paper analyzes the way that Enlightenment knowledge networks included and excluded women's participation, considering salons as a locus for study and arguing that Dupin's major work -- the Ouvrage sur les femmes -- was a knowledge network in its own right.
Date: 4/29/2021
Conference Name: American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies

Impact, Influence, Importance : How to « Measure » the Contribution of Women to the History of Philosophy? (Article)
Title: Impact, Influence, Importance : How to « Measure » the Contribution of Women to the History of Philosophy?
Author: Rebecca Wilkin
Abstract: This article identifies one of the causes of the exclusion of women from the history of philosophy: the privileging of causal influence as its narrative principle. Influence is often misunderstood to result from a work’s inherent power, when in fact it results from the reader’s acquiescence to the ideas expressed therein. Readers approach texts with biases, and influence is therefore the result of those biases. I use the works of Gabrielle Suchon and Louise Dupin to reveal the way the criterion of influence reinforces the systematic disenfranchisement of women as people and as philosophers.
Year: 2022
Access Model: subscription only
Format: Journal
Periodical Title: Revue XVIIe siècle

“Article 23 (‘On Education’) of Louise Dupin’s Work on Women: Snapshot of a Mobile Manuscript” (Conference Paper/Presentation)
Title: “Article 23 (‘On Education’) of Louise Dupin’s Work on Women: Snapshot of a Mobile Manuscript”
Author: Rebecca Wilkin
Abstract: Taking chapter 23 ("On Education") of Louise Dupin's Work on Women as an example, I focus on manuscript features that disappear in printed books: the play of hands that inform us about the process of collaboration from note-taking to final draft; the modular organization of the work-in-progress through a system of loose-leaf folios that could be moved among folders; and the evolving overall architecture of the work as evidenced by the reordering of articles. These observations beg the question of what we are doing when we study the manuscripts of neglected, unpublished, and therefore unknown texts. If the manuscript to a printed text is the backstory to the story, what is a manuscript that never made it to print (the final form of so much writing by early modern women)—particularly a manuscript like Dupin’s, of which no part was circulated?
Date: 3/31/2022
Conference Name: American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies

“Feminist Recovery Work Meets White Feminism: Louise Dupin’s Work on Women” (Conference Paper/Presentation)
Title: “Feminist Recovery Work Meets White Feminism: Louise Dupin’s Work on Women”
Author: Rebecca Wilkin
Abstract: Through her survey of women’s freedom and authority around the world, and of the labor they share with men, Dupin was perhaps the first to engage in feminist recovery work on a global scale. She condemns slavery and looks for examples of ordinary women's agency in Africa, Asia, and the Americas. Yet we know that Dupin's personal wealth was built in part on investments in the slave trade made by her father and husband, and she conveniently ignores that the labor she praises in women "in the colonies" is coerced. This paper considers Dupin as an example of the "White Feminism" that Rafia Zakaria traces to the Enlightenment, before reflecting on the sterility of canceling a woman who chose not to publish her work in anticipation of being the target of the misogyny she observes in social settings.
Date: 04/22/2022
Conference Name: “Method and the History of Philosophy: Extending New Narratives”

Louise Dupin's Work on Women: Selections (Book)
Title: Louise Dupin's Work on Women: Selections
Author: Rebecca Wilkin
Author: Angela Hunter
Abstract: The eighteenth-century text Work on Women by Louise Dupin (also known as Madame Dupin, 1706-1799) is the French Enlightenment's most in-depth feminist analysis of inequality--and its most neglected one. Angela Hunter and Rebecca Wilkin here offer the first-ever edition of selected translations of Dupin's massive project, developed from manuscript drafts. Hunter and Wilkin provide helpful introductions to the four sections of Work on Women (Science, History and Religion, Law, and Education and Mores) which contextualize Dupin's arguments and explain the work's construction--including the role of her secretary, Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Dupin's central claim in Work on Women is that French jurists have gradually disenfranchised women through reductive interpretations of Roman law. As a result, modern marriage is founded on an abusive, illegitimate contract that enriches one party and impoverishes the other. This manifest injustice is enabled by the "masculine vanity" that aggrandizes men, diminishes women, and distorts all realms of knowledge. Dupin shows how the most reputable scientists incorporate old notions of women's weakness into new understandings of the body, while historians denigrate female rulers or erase them altogether. Even in everyday conversation, men assert their entitlement to social dominance through casual misogyny. Thus, although Dupin advocates for meaningful education for girls, she insists that the upbringing of boys must also be reformed. This volume fills an important gap in the history of feminist thought and will appeal to readers eager to hear new voices that challenge established narratives of intellectual history.
Year: 2023
Primary URL: https://global.oup.com/academic/product/louise-dupins-work-on-women-9780190090104?lang=en&cc=us#
Primary URL Description: Link to Oxford University Press website
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Type: Translation
Type: Scholarly Edition
ISBN: 9780190090104
Translator: Rebecca Wilkin
Translator: Angela Hunter
Copy sent to NEH?: No

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