This volume deals with philosophical, scientific, and ideological images of women during the French Enlightenment, examining their emergence in the reflections of the philosophes, in Catholic morality, in biological and medical knowledge, in novels, in periodicals, and in the law.

Anna Maria Marchini obtained a degree and a specialization diploma in philosophy, with honors, from the University of Pavia. An experienced teacher of literary subjects in secondary schools, she works on the problem of women's emancipation from historical and theoretical perspectives.

1. The family structure and the spaces of the woman, 2. Images of the feminine and the philosophes, 3. The problem of women's education, 4. The centrality of the moral aspects, 5. The new "feminine" between biology and anatomy and the images of the philosophes, 6. Woman and medicine, 7. The feminine destiny in the novel, 8. Periodicals aimed at a female audience, 9. Legal inferiority, Conclusion