Women's Perspectives between the Eighteenth and the Twentietn Century

This paper aims at outlining the history of the female condition in the western world during the XVIII century, analysing the type of culture that generated separation between the public and private spheres of life, which postulated the silence of women within the latter ambit as a guarantee of the solidity of patriarchal structures as a social basis. The social system, built in the name of an alleged natural order of things assuming the inexorable superiority of males, was marked by representations and perceptions of women as subaltern or antagonists, legitimising the use of psychological and physical violence by men within marriage, a phenomenon which continues even today. Despite the constraints and the dependence imposed by the civil code, several women rebelled against their families, fathers or husbands. Maria Edgeworth, Mary Wollstonecraft, Olympe de Gouges and George Sand, are emblems of a female form of “dissidence” based on what women were forbidden to avail themselves of, that is, their intellect.