Contro la tirannia del costume e oltre l’educazione. Filosofe in età moderna

If we take a stereotype to be “an ordered, more or less consistent picture of the world”, that we find familiar, as Walter Lippmann (1889-1974) defined it, then the image of women as wives and mothers is one of the strongest stereotypes of the early modern period (broadly understood, from the Renaissance to the early Enlightenment). Despite the deep-rooted prejudice against female intellectual skills, a significant number of women contributes to the philosophical and scientific debates of that time. Nevertheless, standard narratives of the history of philosophy have ignored them. By following an ideal trajectory form Chirstine de Pizan (ca. 1365-1430) to Damarism Masham (1659-1708), this paper aims to show that the early modern defenders of gender equality agree that the social and intellectual disproportion between sexes is not due to a natural difference, but it is the artificial product of a poor education of women and the tyranny of custom. Moreover, after the philosophically pivotal cartesian feminist experience of Poullain de la Barre (1647-1726), numerous attempts of alternative and inclusive educational strategies take form, especially in England, such as Bathsua Makin’s (1600?-1675?) boarding school for gentlewomen and Mary Astell’s (1666-1731) social proposal to the ladies.