The notion of a “natural” maternal instinct in women originated around this time, advocated for and legitimized by prominent thinkers such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau. “The true mother,” he wrote, “far from being a woman of the world is as much a recluse in her home as the nun in her cloister.”[8] This idea continued to reduce women to feeling, instinctual beings, confined—newly—to the home, in opposition to rational man, who belonged in the public sphere.
