During the French Revolution, women effectively contributed in every aspect, but their input constantly started controversies. Their roles in society, family, and politics had long been a matter of arguments. Writers of the Enlightenment mostly took a stand on gender debates – as they saw women generally different from men. Women were meant to play domestic roles instead of political roles in society, they believed. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, one of the Enlightenment writers, published a prominent treatise about the matter of women 's role in society named Emile. During the Enlightenment era, Rousseau had certain demands for equality while not seeing women as equal as men – he believed that men and women were naturally unequal and had different roles in society. The two clashing ideas came out to be Rousseau preferring only men in society having greater equality. His works contain the thorough examination of absolutist social order and powerful arguments against the oppression of the rulers. On the other hand, Rousseau upheld the gender …show more content…
For the abandonment of his own children, Rousseau has the reputation of the hypocrite. “Rousseau 's own children, however, suffered the contradictions that characterized his life. By his own admission, he abandoned to a foundling hospital all the children he had by his lower-class common-law wife because he did not think he could support them properly; if their fate was like that of most abandoned children of the day, they met an early death” (Hunt 594). The fault in his reasoning about women confirms it. He uses Enlightenment ideals to support demands for equality only to the extent that satisfies dominant liberating tendency in the French society (Hunt 596). However, in the male-dominant society, these ideals that aim at the liberation of men ignore the problem of women’s rights. Rousseau have proved that the spirit of his society corrupted the original state of man but have not appealed to the gender discrimination