During those moments where Diderot abandoned anatomy for what we might call proto-sociology, he proclaimed that the world’s women were trapped within an unforgiving system that was engineered by men for men, and that produced misery for one-half of the planet’s population. Once a woman was no longer beautiful, he wrote pessimistically in a short 1772 essay entitled “On Women,” she becomes a person who is “neglected by her husband, forgotten by her children, nothing in society, and for whom her only and last resort is religion.”15 This sad state of affairs dovetailed with the overall miserable
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