All Men and Both Sexes : : Gender, Politics, and the False Universal in England, 1640–1832 / / Hilda L. Smith.

• VerfasserIn: Smith, Hilda L.,
• Place / Publishing House: University Park, PA : : Penn State University Press, , [2002]; ©2002
• Year of Publication: 2002
• Language: English
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (248 p.)

All Men and Both Sexes explores the use of such universal terms as "people," "man," or "human" in early modern England, from the civil war through the Enlightenment. Such language falsely implies inclusion of both men and women when actually it excludes women. Recent scholarship has focused on the Rights of Man doctrine from the Enlightenment and the French Revolution as explanation for women’s exclusion from citizenship. According to Hilda Smith we need to go back further, to the English Revolution and the more grounded (but equally restricted) values tied to the "free born Englishman." Citing educational treatises, advice literature to young people, guild records, popular periodicals, and parliamentary debates, she demonstrates how the "male maturation process" came to define the qualities attached to citizenship and responsible adulthood, which in turn became the basis for modern individualism and liberalism. By the eighteenth century a new discourse of sensibility was describing women as dependent beings outside the state, in a separate sphere and in need of protection. This excluded women from reform debates, forcing them to seek not an extension of a democratic franchise but a specific women’s suffrage focused on gender difference.

Table of Contents

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Preface and Acknowledgments -- Introduction: The Concept of the False Universal -- 1 "Only of free Persons": Male Maturation and the False Universal -- 2 "Citizens of the same City ... Brethren and Sisters": Gender and Early Modern English Guilds -- 3 ''Acting His Own Part": Gender, the Freeborn Englishman, and the Execution of Charles I -- 4 "Interests of the Softer Sex": Commercialism, Politics, and Gender in the Eighteenth Century -- Epilogue: "Masculine Gender ... Taken to Include Females": Gender, Radical Politics, and the Reform Bill of 1832 -- Conclusion -- Bibliography -- Index