Sophia e il discorso sui diritti delle donne nel “lungo Settecento” inglese

This preface situates Sophia’s Woman Not Inferior to Man (1739) within the development of women’s-rights discourse in the English “long eighteenth century.” It presents the pamphlet as one of the earliest English works to employ the language of women’s natural rights in a systematic and politically significant way. Although Sophia’s identity remains uncertain, the text’s intellectual genealogy can be traced to François Poullain de La Barre, whose Cartesian argument for the ontological equality of the sexes is transformed through a Lockean critique of tyranny and usurpation. The preface distinguishes between an older model of female advancement, centred on moral virtue, education, and specifically feminine duties, and a newer rights-based paradigm demanding women’s legal and political equality. Sophia’s originality lies in combining rational equality with claims to education, public office, professional activity, dignity, and social recognition. The preface also explores possible continuities between Sophia, Catharine Macaulay, and Mary Wollstonecraft, as well as the pamphlet’s later and often indirect circulation in Europe and the Americas. It ultimately identifies Sophia’s work as a crucial, though long underestimated, step in the genealogy of feminist legal and political thought.