Voltaire

Voltaire appears in Simone de Beauvoir’s account of eighteenth-century debates about women as a critic of the injustice of their condition. His intervention belongs to a wider democratic and individualist current that treats women as human beings equal to men, even as other influential voices seek to confine them to dependence, marriage, and motherhood.

An Eighteenth-Century Debate

The century is divided. Some writers defend women’s equality, while others present women as naturally subordinate or useful chiefly to men. Against that restrictive view, Voltaire denounces the injustice of women’s lot. Simone de Beauvoir situates his position within a broader philosophical climate favorable to women’s recognition as equals, while emphasizing that agreement on human equality did not end the period’s contradictory arguments about women’s proper place.

Place in the Argument

Voltaire’s brief appearance contributes to a historical account of how women’s inferiority was contested rather than simply accepted. Nearby, Diderot attributes much of that inferiority to social arrangements, and Condorcet argues that differences in women’s conduct arise from education and social existence, not nature. Voltaire’s significance here is his public condemnation of women’s unjust condition: a concise challenge to the assumptions that sustained it, set against the persistence of limits on women’s education, work, and political participation.