5 The Philosophical Foundations of Women’s Rights: Nobility and Dignity

This chapter investigates the historical-philosophical foundations of women’s rights from the Renaissance to the early modern period in Europe. We argue that Enlightenment calls for women’s rights do not emerge as radically new developments but rather as continuations of a recurring logic in earlier defenses of women’s nobility and dignity. To defend this claim, we trace the cognate notions of nobility and dignity in the works of Dante and the pro-woman treatises of Lucrezia Marinella and Marie de Gournay, through to the arguments of Cartesian feminists in the seventeenth century, namely Mary Astell. We demonstrate that these cognate concepts provided the conceptual tools to make normative demands on others for the equal treatment of women.