Cover -- Title -- Copyright -- Contents -- List of illustrations -- Notes on contributors -- Acknowledgments -- 1 Introduction: feminism in European history -- 2 The languages of late-medieval feminism -- 3 A 'learned wave': women of letters and science from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment -- 4 L'égalité des sexes qui ne se conteste plus en France: feminism in the seventeenth century -- 5 Reclaiming the European Enlightenment for feminism: or prologomena to any future history of eighteenth-century Europe -- 6 Culture as a gendered battleground: the patronage of Madame de Pompadour -- 7 A woman's struggle for a language of enlightenment and virtue: Mary Wollstonecraft and Enlightenment 'feminism' -- 8 French utopians: the word and the act -- 9 Equality and difference: utopian feminism in Britain -- 10 Liberalism and feminism in late nineteenth-century Britain -- 11 Feminists and sex: how to find lesbians at the turn of the century -- 12 Beauvoir's philosophy as the hidden paradigm of contemporary feminism -- 13 Contemporary feminism between individualism and community -- Guide to further reading -- Index.