How did educated and cultivated men in early modern France and Britain
perceive and value their own and women's cognitive capacities, and how
did women in their circles challenge those perceptions, if only by
revaluing the kinds of intelligence attributed to them? What was thought
to distinguish the "manly mind" from the feminine mind? How did
awareness of these questions inform various kinds of published and
unpublished texts, including the philosophical treatise, the dialogue,
the polite essay, and the essay in literary criticism?
The Labor of the Mind plumbs the social and cultural logic of the
Enlightenment's trope of the manly mind; offers new readings of the
textual representations of it; and examines the ways in which the trope
was subverted or at least subtly questioned. With close readings of the
writings of well-known and less familiar men and women, including
Poullain de la Barre, The Third Earl of Shaftesbury, Madeleine de
Scudéry, David Hume, Antoine-Léonard Thomas, Suzanne Curchod Necker,
Denis Diderot, and Louise d'Epinay, and tracing their social networks
and friendships, Anthony J. La Vopa explores the problematic opposition
between mental labor as concentrated and sustained work, a labor of
abstraction and judgment for which only men had the strength, and an
aesthetic of effortless and tasteful play in polite conversation in
which women were thought to excel. Covering nearly a century and a half
of cultural and intellectual life from France to England and Scotland
and then back again, La Vopa locates, beneath the tenacity of assumed
natural differences, a lexicon imbued with ambivalence, ambiguity, and
argument. The Labor of the Mind reveals the legacy for modernity of a
fraught gendering of intellectual labor.
