Abstract

GUERRERO, Leandro. “None are Tyrants but Cowards”. Análisis e interpretación del panfleto feminista inglés An Essay in Defense of the Female Sex (1696). Tópicos [online]. 2022, n.44, e0014. ISSN 1666-485X.  http://dx.doi.org/https://doi.org/10.14409/topicos.2022.44.e0014.

The article is a detailed study of the pamphlet An Essay in Defense of the Female Sex (1696). It offers a reconstruction of its argumentative structure and an analysis of its rhetorical strategies. The theoretical and methodological framework used is both historical and systematic: we seek to contextualize the work in the intellectual field of British Enlightenment at the dawn of the 18th century, as well as to interpose a contemporary gender perspective for the examination of its arguments, of the rhetorical deployment of its discourse and its more philosophically robust conclusions. In particular, the article defends the emergence of a nature-history dichotomy that allows the author, on the one hand, to unmask a situation of male dominance (that we can today critically recognize as a direct antecedent of contemporary feminist discussions) and, on the other, to offer a rhetorical pathway for the conformation and reconfiguration of a feminine ethos and pathos.

Keywords : Judith Drake; Mary Astell; Nature; History; Feminism.

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