Historicizing the Gender of Emotions: Changing Perceptions in Dutch Enlightenment Thought

This article seeks to historicize the deep-seated notion of "emotional woman" and "rational man" by means of research into the changing perceptions of sexual difference and emotions in the eighteenth century. Texts from Dutch Enlightenment weeklies reveal a change in the gendered meanings of emotionalism. The bad-tempered and imperious woman who causes havoc in sexual relations as well as in the social order in general was gradually replaced by the woman whose sensibility was considered to be a private as well as a social virtue. This late eighteenth-century cult of sensibility was not restricted to women. It also produced the ideal of the man of feeling, a figure who, although part of "bourgeois" anti-aristocratic discourses, was molded after aristocratic examples. Towards the end of the century the rapprochement of gendered notions of emotionalism was undone by the rise of a binary model of sexual difference that relegated the emotions back to the female realm. The author explains these changes as, among other things, a conservative middle-class reaction to egalitarian ideals of sexual relations earlier in the century.