Orgasm, Generation, and the Politics of Reproductive Biology
Author(s)
Laqueur, Thomas
Abstract
This essay gives an account of the radical eighteenth-century reconstitution of female, and more generally human, sexuality in relation to the equally radical Enlightenment political reconstitution of ‘Man’ – the universalistic claim, stated with starkest clarity by Condorcet, that the rights of men result simply from the fact that they are sentient beings, capable of acquiring moral ideas and of reason concerning these ideas. And that women, having these same qualities, must necessarily possess equal rights.
