How enlightened was the Enlightenment if it was not feminist? This is the polemical formulation of a question that can also be articulated in the following way: how enlightened was the European Enlightenment with regard to legal, political, social, religious and cultural postulates of equality for both sexes, the realisation of which could transform an ‘Age of Enlightenment’ into an ‘enlightened age’ in the first place?
The concept of a feminist Enlightenment aims to position the gender question at the centre of the Enlightenment instead of separating it into a sub-category of Enlightenment research. The aim is not to establish a female variant of the Enlightenment or to conduct research on a specific topic to which women have made particular contributions, such as the question of education. Rather, the research programme consists in bringing feminism and the Enlightenment closer together and exploring their systematic interconnection. This also includes a historicisation of what ‘feminist’ could mean in the Enlightenment and how these ideas spread via transnational networks across Europe.