Querelle: The Debate About Women

Writings discussing debates about women in the West over the course of hundreds of years. This collection of 38 texts by authors both female and male, preceded by contextual introductions, traces the debate about women’s essential nature and moral and intellectual capacity over some 400 years in the Western world: from its origins in the 14th century; to the 15th- and 16th-century defenses of women; to the establishment of the principle of women’s equality to men in the 17th century; to the 18th-century call for women’s social and political rights. It thereby traces the debate that laid the foundations for modern feminism.