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A strident secularist and the last great French philosophe, Condorcet authored arguably the earliest direct call for women’s political rights. He championed women’s political rights in not only the public sphere, but also in the private sphere. Before his death he penned a letter to his young daughter urging her to be self-sufficient and to live a fulfilling life. Condorcet also valued his wife Sophie as a dear friend, partner, and philosophical kindred spirit. His feminism stands in stark contrast to the surprising reality that the most iconoclastic, anti-ecclesiastical Enlightenment thinkers, including Diderot, Holbach, and even Thomas Paine, maintained a surprisingly conservative if not outright misogynistic perception of women. For all of their exhortations of reason, empiricism, and free-thinking, nearly all elite male thinkers of the Enlightenment failed to escape the Promethean bondage of sexism, leaving them chained to the that irrational bolder of prejudice and monument to hypocrisy. Condorcet’s ability to see beyond this sexist made him the Hercules among the philosophes, freeing the Enlightenment from its imprisoning hypocrisy, slaughtering the prejudice pecking at the cornerstone of the Age of Reason. Even today, Condorcet has much to teach us. He shows us that men and women are not from different planets and that our potential for happiness is greatly increased when we realize we are not so unlike one another. Condorcet’s model is a beckon for men who are increasingly uncomfortable with contemporary male stereotypes depicting man as a grunting, beer-drinking, strip-club-going simpleton. He stands out as irrefutable proof that a man can love as ardently as he can think rationally; that a man can feel and care as much as woman, if only he allows himself to be freed of gender stereotypes, of the cultural pressures and prejudice that plague both sexes. Condorcet shows us that education, not sex, is the fundamental difference between men and women.
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