Our Sex's Rights Have Seen Such Autocratic Treatment: Hedvig Charlotta Nordenflycht on Women's Rights

Abstract

Abstract This article discusses Hedvig Charlotta Nordenflycht's (1718–63) poem Fruentimrets Försvar, Emot J. J. Rousseau Medborgare i Genève (Nordenflycht 1761) [Defense of the female sex against J. J. Rousseau, citizen of Geneva], written as a response to Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Lettre sur les spectacles (1758; in Rousseau 1968). Heretofore, Nordenflycht's poem has been considered primarily from the perspective of national literary and intellectual history, but here it is maintained that the poem should be related to the context of the European Enlightenment. Specifically, I argue that Nordenflycht uses key political concepts to create an argument for women's rights as a form of natural, human rights. By focusing on Nordenflycht's contentions regarding natural equality and artificial inequality, the tyrannical treatment of women, and women's right to liberty and occupations, this article elucidates how a woman writer from the periphery of the Enlightenment had created and presented, by the 1760s, a sustained argument—in verse—for female liberty in public life, for the benefit not only of women but of all humankind.