“Man, Secluded from the Company of Women, Is… a Dangerous Animal to Society”: The History of Women in Scotland’s Enlightenment

Abstract

This chapter focuses on a new genre of history-writing that began to take shape in eighteenth-century Europe: the history of women. By concentrating on Scotland’s Enlightenment, it examines how women’s history emerged as an important but ambiguous chapter of the history of civilisation, while also being embedded in natural history. The relationship between natural history and the history of civilisation is central to understanding the new focus on women, both as bearers of the species and as agents of culture. Female reproductive labour, enabling population growth, was considered indispensable to the development of human societies, while the improvement of women’s status was deemed a key barometer of social progress. Scottish historians sketched a differentiated and unequal geography of civilisation on a global scale and within Europe, measured by the condition of women: according to this logic, they placed Spain on the margins of European development. Yet the most “civilised” regions were also regarded as unstable and insecure—largely due to women’s influence. Natural feminine characteristics which had allowed the whole of humanity to progress could also lead to the collapse of advanced societies. The revaluation of women had its downside in the Scottish Enlightenment, ultimately setting the limits of civilisation.

Introduction

For many years now, scholars have acknowledged the historiographical revolution that occurred during the Enlightenment, while also emphasising the plural character of this movement. Many different forms of history developed in the eighteenth century, expanding far beyond the boundaries of traditional narratives and addressing the interests of a larger readership, which also included cultivated women. Manners, customs, modes of subsistence, laws, commerce, daily life, family, passions, thoughts and sentiments became objects of historical enquiry (Phillips 2000, for the British context). Excluded from archetypal accounts, largely centred on the (male) political arena, women entered history. The history of the “female sex” (in the language of the eighteenth century) developed as a new historical genre, placing women centre stage in various and contradictory ways. Some women also became historians in their own right (Knott and Taylor 2005; O’Brien 2009). My interest here, however, lies in the historiographical focus on women in Scottish Enlightenment thought.

This chapter examines how the history of women emerged in 1770s Scotland as a crucial but ambiguous chapter of the history of civilisation. I shall concentrate on the writings of a small group of male philosophers who were at the heart of what is now known as “the Scottish Enlightenment”.¹ Seminal thinkers such as Adam Smith, Lord Kames (Henry Home), William Robertson or John Millar, to name but a few, wrote progressive histories mapping out the steps of humanity’s social and economic development from primitive “savagery” to “civil society”. This historical process, shaped by the new concept of “civilisation”,² was characterised by the expansion of commerce and the softening of manners, in which women were deemed to have played a fundamental role. In the same move, women were described as improving their status and treated as a key barometer of social improvement.

Similar views were widespread far beyond Scotland, advanced by writers such as the Frenchman Antoine-Léonard Thomas, German Georg Forster, Spaniard Gaspar Melchor de Jovellanos and Italian Pietro Verri, among many others.³ What is distinctive in Scotland’s Enlightenment is the elaboration of an influential theory of stadial progress, in which modernity was labelled, for better or for worse, as feminine. In an insightful article charting Enlightenment “uses of women”, historian Barbara Taylor shows how two competing discourses intertwined with one another, “depicting Woman both as the extreme of acquisitive hedonism and as a paragon of self-sacrificial benevolence”. If “this simultaneous degradation and exaltation of women” was neither new nor distinctive to Britain, it acquired a specific meaning in the context of the Scottish Enlightenment, which—in Taylor’s words—“sponsored one of the most far-reaching and innovative enquiries into womanhood in western history”, laying the foundations for what today we call “gender history” (Taylor 2012, 80, 83).

My claim is that the new focus on women’s history went hand in hand with a new emphasis on women’s nature, bodies and sexuality, raising the question of population increase—a specifically female type of production—as a social, political and economic issue. The discourse on the “female sex” became deeply entangled with the reflection on economic growth and political economy. Looking at women from this perspective leads us to reassess the intrinsic relationship between natural history and the history of civilisation, all too often treated by historiography as two separate domains. Yet in Scotland’s Enlightenment, these were not seen as mutually incompatible approaches. On the contrary, most philosophers followed in the wake of the French naturalist Buffon in considering the human species as belonging to natural history along with other animals (albeit in a higher position). At the same time, they regarded civilisation as the “natural” outcome of human nature, to the extent that their approach might be defined as a “natural history of civilisation” (Sebastiani 2023a). Accordingly, the distinction between the sexes appeared to them both natural and historical, being embedded in the order of nature while changing over time.

Woman became a specific subject of historical enquiry once the universality of Man started to be questioned. When (Scottish) Enlightenment philosophers spoke about Man, the “science of man” and the “history of man”, they used the language of universalism, aiming at a general and universal science and history. This science and history also included women. By contrast, they did not use the same universal language to speak about women, but rather the language of particularity and singularity: this singularity could be in tension with, and even work against, universalism. By emphasising the progressive emancipation of the “female sex” from the oppression of the master male, the new genre of the “history of women” made the frictions explicit, showing that women’s function was not only different from that of men: it was also competitive and challenged the leading role of the latter.

My aim is to explore the tensions and ambivalences surrounding gender which I consider structural to Scottish historiography. The main questions I pose to my sources are: what was the part played by women within the universal histories of civilisation? Did women act and change the course of history, independently from men? How did the relationship between the sexes change over time? How did Woman’s nature interplay with Her history? My chapter is construed around three nodes, which reveal different but interlinked aspects of gender tensions:

• 1. First, I shall examine the civilising role assigned to women as agents of culture in the process leading to commercial societies, by also emphasising their crucial role as bearers of the human species. The changing relationship between the sexes over time made both men and women reach their full humanity within the historical process: while women freed themselves from the male yoke, men in turn adopted polite manners and became more humane. As a result, the process of “civilisation” was a process of “feminisation”.

• 2. If potentially universal, this progress was the result of a history which was specific and situated: according to a shared narrative, it had taken place in Europe, or rather in a part of it, one to which Spain remained peripheral. The second section of my chapter will therefore address two interwoven questions: firstly, it will explore how the “progress of the female sex” has been inextricably associated with the peculiar history of European civilisation; secondly, it will demonstrate the different geography of civilisation emerging within Europe. The relationship between the sexes played its part in crystallising the differences between peoples.

• 3. My final section will deal with the other side of this same discourse: the ambiguities and instabilities of civilisation in the modern and commercial societies of Europe. These were expressed in the fear that progress could be reversed, turning civilising femininity into decadent effeminacy. The same natural characteristics of women that had allowed the whole of humanity to progress could lead to the collapse of advanced societies, corrupting manners and causing a decrease in female reproductive capacity. The revaluation of women’s nature and history had its downside in the Scottish Enlightenment, which, in a contradictory move, ultimately set the limits of civilisation.

Civilising Woman

In his lectures on jurisprudence, given at the University of Glasgow in the early 1760s and perhaps earlier, Adam Smith formulated an idea of human progress that was to become a shared historical framework for the Scottish Enlightenment. It outlined the development of humanity from savagery towards civil society, through successive stages of socio-economic development:

There are four distinct states which mankind pass thro: 1st, the Age of Hunters, 2dly, the Age of Shepherds, 3dly, the Age of Agriculture; and 4thly, the Age of Commerce. (Smith 1978, 14)

This process was both natural and historical. It was the result of uniform and perfectible human nature, which evolved by degrees from the simple and rough life of “savages” to complex and polite commercial societies. Smith explained that in the first stage, peoples lived within simple tribes, with no institutions, no laws and no property: they were few in number, because this precarious way of subsistence could not guarantee the survival of the many. The increasing population required a more secure source of subsistence and triggered the progression to the second stage based on pasturage. In the age of shepherds, legislative and political systems started to develop. With agriculture (the third stage), the political body became more complex, and the activities in which peoples were engaged diversified, resulting in the division of labour. This led to the age of commerce, at the apex of which stood Britain. The transition from one mode of subsistence to another depended on population growth in early stages, whereas the shift from farming to commercial society was linked to the division of labour (Smith 1978, 14–16, on which see Meek 1976).

This schematic description, from which women are apparently absent, raises an issue which has not been sufficiently emphasised by historiography but which, in my view, is crucial if we are to evaluate the role played by the “female sex” within stadial theory, namely that in their reproductive capacity as bearers of the species, women were the cause and the engine of human progress. Indeed, without population growth, the savage stage would have been perpetual—as it supposedly was in the case of the Amerindians. Historical progress that relied upon male productive activities of hunting, herding, farming and trading was enabled by, and so depended upon, the earlier sexual and reproductive labour of women. Despite its significance, this female labour was never fully acknowledged by Smith or other Scottish historians, perhaps because they regarded breeding as a passive act, a mere natural instinct. Yet the issue of population acquired enormous importance in eighteenth-century political economy and was central to the debate on “the wealth of nations”.⁴ The shift of vocabulary from “generation” to “reproduction”—a new concept that Buffon placed at the heart of natural history and used to define the term “species”⁵—was crucial in this context. By understanding procreation as a dynamic process taking place over time (in contrast with any creative act), the focus was on the perpetuation of the species (whether vegetable, animal or human), its control and its improvement.⁶

Smith’s emphasis on the productive labour of man, driven by nature to be active and constantly “better his condition”,⁷ had the consequence of concealing female reproductive labour. His posture changed radically, however, when he dealt with advanced market-dominated societies: women were no longer invisible and passive forces in history, but had become prominent historical subjects owing to their links with luxury and consumption. Their influence was here fully recognised and emphasised. The new commercial rules of modern societies were interpreted as markedly feminine, and women were seen to embody the ethos of transaction and conversation within a single semantic field: the term “commerce”, the essence of the awareness of the modern for Scottish philosophers, meant not just economic exchange, but also social, cultural and sexual intercourse (Pocock 1983).

This was an aspect that David Hume had begun to elaborate in a series of influential essays from the 1740s onwards, and which found its full formulation in the 1750s, outlining the agenda for Scottish historical debate. In “Of Refinement in the Arts” (1752), originally entitled “Of Luxury”, Hume put the relationship between men and women at the foundation of a new ethics, which became paradigmatic of civilisation and modernity as such. He construed a direct parallel between the refinement of the arts and the expansion of human sociability. “The more these refined arts advance”—writes Hume—“the more sociable men become”, developing a new taste and entering the society of conversation, made accessible to them by women. Female company shaped the distinctive features of modern commercial societies, which were driven as much by pleasure and kindness as they were by knowledge and industry:

Both sexes meet in an easy and sociable manner: and the tempers of men, as well as their behaviour, refine apace. So that … they must feel an encrease of humanity, from the very habit of conversing together, and contributing to each other’s pleasure and entertainment. Thus industry, knowledge, and humanity, are linked together by an indissoluble chain…. (Hume 1985, 271, emphasis in the original)

Luxury, associated with the image of women, became a dynamic element of well-being and social mobility, sharply differentiating modern liberty from ancient liberty. In John Pocock’s formulation, Hume, followed by Smith and John Millar, “replaced the polis by politeness, the oikos by the economy. In place of the classical citizen, master of his land, family, and arms, … appeared a fluid, historical and transactional vision of homo faber et mercator, shaping himself through the stages of history” (Pocock 1983, 242–243). The clear distinction between civilisation and barbarism was grounded on the different relationship between the sexes, as Hume had stressed in an earlier essay on the “Rise and Progress of the Arts and Sciences” (1742):

As nature has given man the superiority above woman, by endowing him with greater strength both of mind and body; it is his part to alleviate that superiority, as much as possible, by the generosity of his behaviour, and by a studied deference and complaisance for all her inclinations and opinions. Barbarous nations display this superiority, by reducing their females to the most abject slavery; by confining them, by beating them, by selling them, by killing them. But the male sex, among a polite people, discover their authority in a more generous, though not a less evident manner; by civility, by respect, by complaisance, and, in a word, by gallantry (Hume 1985, 133, emphasis in the original)

The divergence between “barbarous nations” and “polite people” revealed a clear improvement in manners, where women’s influence on men was crucial in producing sympathy and sensibility, so that the new homo economicus was “a better citizen and a better man”. However, Hume was making “a polite plea for greater politeness” in the relationship between the sexes and not “a call for a correction of the fundamental social, political, and legal inequalities that structured relations between men and women in eighteenth-century Britain”—as James Harris has rightly stressed in commenting on Hume’s essay “Of Love and Marriage” (1741) (Harris 2015, 161). Indeed, for Hume, man’s superiority remained rooted in nature.

Hume’s remarks found a fundamental place in the diachronic model of stadial histories. John Millar, a former student of Smith and later professor of Law at Glasgow, opened his Origin of the Distinction of Ranks (1771) with a chapter on “Rank and condition of women in different ages”. The Judge of the Court of Session, Henry Home, Lord Kames, devoted one of his Sketches of the History of Man (1774) to the “Progress of the female sex”. The Edinburgh physician William Alexander published, in two volumes, the first work in Scotland entirely dedicated to the History of Women (1779), encompassing all nations, times and spaces, “from the Earliest Antiquity, to the Present Time”. John Gregory, also a physician, gave the “female sex” a pivotal role in his Comparative View of the State and Faculties of Man with those of the Animal World (1765), and authored one of the most influential eighteenth-century conduct books, A Father’s Legacy to His Daughters (1774). Many other Scottish literati dealt directly or indirectly with the progress of women through history, in multiple and often contradictory ways.⁸

In the picture emerging from stadial histories, women were condemned to a state of misery among “savages”, who lived in hostile environments, coupled promiscuously and disregarded family. Millar defined this as a “mortifying picture” (Millar 2006 [I ed. 1771], 114). Being naturally inferior in physical strength and courage (as presumed by many Scottish historians), women were treated as slaves or helots by the opposite sex. However, the stadial model promised their emancipation from the very beginning, in connection with the gradual development of human societies. As William Robertson summarised in his highly influential History of America (1777), while dealing with “savage” Amerindians:

That women are indebted to the refinements of polished manners for a happy change in their state, is a point which can admit of no doubt. To despise and degrade the female sex, is the characteristic of the savage state in every part of the globe. (Robertson 1788, book IV, vol. 2: 103)

With the historical process, the feminine values of sociability, kindness and conversation gradually gained ground and the relationship between the sexes was moralised, thereby bettering women’s position. The entire social body benefited from this improvement: female company alone was deemed capable of engendering “civil manners”, “high feelings” and “fine arts”, so that no society could ever rise if women were excluded. As noted by Alexander in the passage from which I have borrowed the title of this chapter:

Man, secluded from the company of women, is not only a rough and uncultivated, but a dangerous, animal to society. (Alexander 1782, vol. I: 492)

The process of civilisation was so dependent on the status of women that the latter became the parameter used to measure the degree of civilisation attained by a society. Alexander expressed this question in the clearest and most unambiguous terms. It is worth recalling his entire passage:

As strength and courage are in savage life the only means of attaining to power and distinction, so weakness and timidity are the certain paths to slavery and oppression. On this account, we shall almost constantly find women among savages condemned to every species of servile, or rather, of slavish drudgery; and shall as constantly find them emerging from this state, in the same proportion as we find the men emerging from ignorance and brutality; the rank, therefore, and condition, in which we find women in any country, mark out to us with the greatest precision, the exact point in the scale of civil society, to which the people of such country have arrived; and were their history entirely silent on every other subject, and only mentioned the manner in which they treated their women, we would, from thence, be enabled to form a tolerable judgement for the barbarity, or culture of their manners. (Alexander 1782, vol. I: 151)

In a pioneering essay that questioned the overly simplistic association between women and nature, Sylvana Tomaselli suggested that for Alexander, as well as for a number of Enlightenment historians, the process of civilisation corresponded to a process of “feminisation”. Society became “civil”, when it abandoned its masculine features of war and violence for the feminine values of commerce, conversation and sympathy.⁹

Rather than being assimilated into nature, women were placed at the heart of the historical progress: not only did they benefit from culture, “they were its agents” (Tomaselli 1985 121). Modernity was thus distinctly feminine.

Geography of Civilisation

The process of civilisation/feminisation was, however, far from universal. Firstly, the “emancipated” Woman who had been placed at the pinnacle of historical progress and at the heart of commercial society belonged to a specific rank, namely “the middle condition”—never to the labouring classes, rarely to the aristocracy.¹⁰ Secondly, She was a distinctive feature of a small portion of the world, corresponding to Europe, and more precisely to its north-western corner. She was conceived as both the historical product and the historical cause of Europe’s modernity. At the same time, She divided the European space, as not all the regions of Europe were deemed to have reached the same degree of civilisation, and so not everywhere was the “female sex” free from the patriarchal yoke. National characters were also affected by the relationship between the sexes. Through the image of modern Woman, Enlightenment philosophical history built conflicting identities and hierarchies.

The comparative approach on which stadial history was construed made it possible to examine the relationships between the sexes as changing over time and throughout space, with a specific focus on manners and sexuality. Scottish historians looked at Asia as the realm of luxury, while associating polygamy with the barbarism of the early stages, hostile to the “female sex”¹¹: shut up in the seraglio, women were mere instruments for the sexual pleasure of men (Alexander 1782, vol I: 90, 421; Kames 1778, vol. II: 79). Africa was described as dominated by promiscuity and excessive sexuality. Travel writings disseminated the myth that African women gave birth without pain and that their “pendulous breasts” allowed them to nurse children over their shoulders while working in the fields (Morgan 1997). Also endorsed by natural histories, this fiction provided a formidable justification for slavery. By virtue of their sex and body, African women were reduced to the role of female animals and depicted as fit for both productive and reproductive labour, as convincingly demonstrated by Jennifer Morgan (Morgan 2004). Sexuality, savagery and slavery converged in the construction of the economic and political order of the Enlightenment (Curran 2011). The myth of orangutans “carrying off Negro girls” became, unsurprisingly, an important component of the discourse concerning the diversity of Africans and their supposed proximity to apes (Schiebinger 1993, 40–74; Sebastiani 2021). The purportedly inadequate sexuality of Amerindian men constituted the opposite extreme of African excess. With their long hair and beardless faces, they appeared cold, effeminate and “destitute of one sign of manhood and strength”, as Robertson put it.¹² In the materialistic logic of the four stages theory, the most important consequence of the indifference of male Amerindians towards the female sex was the lack of population increase, and then, as previously stressed, the lack of progress itself. To be imprisoned in the savage stage, as Scottish historians understood the Amerindians to be, was a negative fulfilment of history’s promise of human progress.

Europe stood out in contrast to the other three parts of the world and their imperfect and static gender relationships. Not only had the status of women profoundly improved there, but the “progress of the female sex” was at the heart of the new histories of Europe developing at the time (Lilti and Spector 2014). The parallel emergence of the history of women and the history of Europe would merit a chapter of its own. What matters here is that Scottish historiography placed the origin of the modern world at the crossroads between Roman law and the German political systems that arose in the aftermath of the fall of the Roman Empire. The first step in the transition to modernity was identified in the Crusades, which—as Robertson wrote in his influential introduction to the History of the Reign of the Emperor Charles V (1769)—restored the “spirit of commerce” and had in turn “considerable influence in polishing the manners of the European nations” (Robertson 1769, 76). Chivalry, in its close association with Christianity, marked the turning point for the revaluation of women, prompting a revolution in the customs of war and love—according to what became an Enlightenment topos, far beyond Scotland. The combination of commerce, Christianity and chivalry, which occurred in the “Gothic age” (as Millar called it), shaped the specific traits distinguishing modern Europe from the rest of the world, as well as from its own barbaric past: temperate and refined manners; civility; humanity in warfare; respect for the “female sex”; gallantry; justice and honour; chastity and monogamy (see for example Millar 2006, 135–42; Kames 1778, vol II: 90–97; Ferguson 1966, 199–202; Gregory 1774, vol. I: 153–60). All these were considered universal values. The stadial narrative historicised and at the same time legitimised the structure of “monogamous and permanent marriage”, considered a clear improvement for women (La Vopa 2017, 281). The same applied to chastity. The medieval legacy, to which women were primarily indebted, according to these narratives, was historically and geographically situated, and virtually inaccessible to non-European peoples.

The expansion of trade and crafts, and the ensuing multiplication of exchanges and relationships, fostered peaceful inclinations and increased sociability and sensibility, further enhancing the specificity of Europe. However, this also brought up divisions within the European space. For not all European countries had achieved the same progress in trade and taste. Consistent with their stadial view of social development, Scottish historians believed that only in commercial societies could women assume their full functions as wives and mothers, companions and friends of the opposite sex, as well as consumers and stimuli for a modern economy. “In this situation,”—wrote Millar—“the women become, neither the slaves, nor the idols of the other sex, but the friends and companions” (Millar 2006, 143ff, quotation p. 151. See also Kames 1778, vol. II, 90–97). Where this stage had not yet been reached, the process of feminisation remained incomplete, as was true of Catholic southern Europe, which Scottish historians placed on the periphery of the European map of civilisation.¹³ Historical, political and economic motives were adduced to justify this move. Millar explained that the female condition had been improved in all “the different nations of Europe”, but not always to the same degree (Millar 2006, 151). In Spain, “from the defects of administration, or from whatever causes, the arts have for a long time been almost entirely neglected”, which in turn explained why women’s ranks had developed less quickly than elsewhere (Franceespecially). A number of Scottish historians repeated the leitmotif of “women’s confinement and men’s jealousy as constitutive characteristics of Spanish society” and that of Spaniards’ “national character”, as disseminated by travel literature (Bolufer 2016, 459). But—Millar assured his readers—“even in Spain”, women had ultimately been granted “that freedom which they have in the other countries of Europe” (Millar 2006, 151).

While Alexander also acknowledged that the practice of segregating women seemed to have fallen into disuse, he deplored the fact that Spain was “a kingdom whose inhabitants we are less acquainted with, and less able to characterise, than the Hottentots, or the Indians on the banks of the Ganges”—although it was located “almost in our neighbourhood”.¹⁴ The association of Spain with Asia and Africa and its portrayal as an obscure and unknown country were part of a clear strategy to defamiliarise, as well as marginalise the nation. Yet, its status as part of Europe was never questioned. On the contrary, Spain was regarded as integral to the history of modern Europe, born from the fall of the Roman Empire and marked by the ethos of chivalry. Indeed, it was on this basis that Alexander distinguished the national character of the Spaniard from that of any other people: centuries on, “the Spaniard […] retains still a tincture of the spirit of knight-errantry”, so that “the whole [female] sex is to him an object of little less than adoration”.¹⁵ In other words, the Spaniard remained imprisoned in a spirit made obsolete by the dynamism of commercial society: it was his excessive and inappropriate adoration for the “female sex” that prevented him from giving women their due rank and consideration.

Spain’s defeat in the Seven Years’ War (1756–1763) deepened the view of the country as the paradigm of modern decadence—in parallel with the classical parable of ancient Rome. Modern historiography has paid much attention to the development of the leyenda negra (Black Legend) across Europe: while in the fifteenth century Spain’s backwardness was mirrored in the violence and cruelty of the conquistadors of the New World, in the eighteenth century it was first and foremost expressed by the “declassification” of science (García Cárcel 1998; Villaverde Rico and Castilla Urbano 2016; Pimentel and Pardo-Tomás 2017). Knowledge, arts, forms of government and refined manners went together in the history of stadial progress and were faithfully reflected by the status of women.

What arises from this long excursus around the globe is an unequal geography of historical progress, supported by the variegated landscape of the sentimental world: America appeared as the land of defective love; Asia and Africa as the realms of carnal excitement and unbridled sexuality. North-western Europe was portrayed as the location of “true Love”, the historical result of the refinement of passions over either the “dispassionate coldness” or the animal appetite of “savage” and “barbarian” societies. Spain remained somewhere in between: what prevailed was love as possession and excessive devotion. But women had progressed “even in Spain”, confirming that Europe was a, if not the, historical region.

Limits of Feminisation

If “commerce” between the sexes was vital to civil society and to progress tout court, a constant sense of danger and instability accompanied Scottish Enlightenment discourse about civilisation/feminisation. The new status and influence acquired by women in advanced societies induced anxieties in even the most convinced supporters of modernity, including Hume, Smith and Millar. They all worried that the positive process of feminisation could spill over into a frightening effeminacy. Fear about a confusion of gender roles was a leitmotif, one to which Scottish historians responded by invoking the necessity to establish checks and balances to regulate relationships between the sexes, and to safeguard the institution of the family: without such controls, society risked dissolution.

The very logic of Scottish stadial typology can help to explain these profound concerns. The stage theory—as should be clear by now—assigned women a past and a history, which began ineluctably with their enslavement and moved gradually towards their emancipation from male masters. This suggests that the history of women was not only distinct from, but also conflicted with, that of men. Again, Sylvana Tomaselli’s words are apposite here:

The history of the tyranny men had exercised over women and its gradual reversal by women with the advancement of polished society became constitutive of the knowledge about her, or of her as an object of knowledge. (Tomaselli 1991, 196–98)

The inherent risk of the process of feminisation had, since the outset, been an inversion of the balance of power between men and women, leading to what the Scots considered a highly problematic consequence of civilisation: competition between the sexes. Rooted as it was in natural history, Scottish historiography found in the complementarity between the sexes the key for a just social balance. It was women’s “natural” difference that established their distinct social roles, and marked the perimeter within which they had to remain, as Rousseau had taught and as both anatomical studies and handbooks of good manners confirmed throughout Europe. Physical fragility, delicacy and sensitivity destined the “female sex” to be confined to the household and family relations: women were first and foremost mothers, who had to be engaged in domestic duties, and be chaste and modest. The entry of women into history was directly linked to the new role of the family, considered as the pertinent framework for thinking about gender relations, while the complementarity between the sexes also corresponded to the rationalisation of the division of labour in the new economic and social order of eighteenth-century European societies.

The analogy between  humans and animals, derived from Buffon’s “Les animaux carnassiers” (1758), confirmed that family was the natural and necessary place for  women—a point reasserted by a large number of Scottish philosophers, including Kames, Robertson and Smith (Kames 1778, book I, vol. 2: 9–11; Robertson 1788, book IV, vol. 2: 101–102; Smith 1978, vol. 1: 141–42). Linnaeus’ observations about female apes confirmed that chastity, modesty and good manners were the “natural” characteristics of the “female sex”: the celebrated case of Madame Chimpanzee, drinking tea like a high-society lady in 1730s London, helped disseminate this image (Schiebinger 1993, 74–114; Sebastiani 2021). The characteristics ascribed to eighteenth-century polite women were thus naturalised.

Even when chastity was not considered a natural attribute, it was nonetheless judged to be a social necessity for women. As Hume explained, the security of lineage and property depended on this very aspect. He justified, then, the sexual double standard by grounding it in a “trivial”, but “structural”, characteristic of human anatomy:

Now if we examine the structure of the human body, we shall find, that this security is very difficult to be attained on our part; and that since, in the copulation of the sexes, the principle of generation goes from the man to the woman, an error may easily take place on the side of the former, though it be utterly impossible with regard to the latter. From this trivial and anatomical observation is derived that vast difference betwixt the education and duties of the two sexes. (Hume, 1985b, 571)

The appreciation of female qualities was constantly accompanied by profound concerns about women’s ascendency, which undermined the potential for their emancipation inherent in the progressive vision. In the Theory of Moral Sentiments, even Smith expressed worries about the emasculating effects of social progress, stating that “the delicate sensibility required in civilised nations sometimes destroys the masculine firmness of the character” (Smith 1984, 209). Alexander highlighted the problem of intellectual competition between the sexes, both perpetuating the prejudice against the femme savante, petulant, pedantic and charmless, and pointing up the confusion of roles (Alexander 1782, vol. 1: 65–66, 87–88; see Barker-Benfield 1992, 104ff). Female culture was designed to benefit the progress of men, to “soften our hearts and polish our manners” in Gregory’s words (Gregory 1774, vol. I: 157, emphasis added). As Alexander put it:

Woman … was not intended solely to propagate and nourish the species, but to form us for society, to give an elegance to our manners, a relish to our pleasures, to soothe our afflictions, and to soften our cares. (Alexander 1782, vol. I: 475, emphasis added)

For Gregory and Kames, as for Alexander, it was women’s duty to render their husbands’ character more humane, by guiding their feelings and polishing their way of life. Power and authority, both in public affairs and in the private domain of the family, should remain in male hands. “The empire of feeling”—as John Dwyer called it—required a more sophisticated justification for men’s dominance, without questioning it (Dwyer 1987, 1998).

In Europe’s civil societies, luxury—which Hume, Smith and Robertson had seen as one of the main factors leading to the collapse of feudalism—had started to affect the crucial issue of women’s capacity for breeding. In contrast with the regular reproduction of female animals, women’s fertility was, according to Smith, inconstant and dependent on many variable factors, such as ways of thinking, passions, fantasies, capriciousness and fear of loss of looks. While labourers’ propagation responded to the laws of the market, like any other commodity, upper-class women escaped the general rule, thus exposing society to major risks:

Poverty, though it no doubt discourages, does not always prevent marriage. It seems to be favourable to generation. A half-starved Highland woman frequently bears more than twenty children, while a pampered fine lady is often incapable of bearing any, and is generally exhausted by two or three. Barrenness, so frequent among women of fashion, is very rare among those of inferior station. Luxury in the fair sex, while it inflames perhaps the passion for enjoyment, seems always to weaken, and frequently to destroy altogether, the powers of generation. (Smith 1976, 96)

The difference in reproductive capacity between African women—alleged to be particularly prolific, despite the low rate of reproduction in all American enslaved societies (Morgan 2021)—and European women, considered as weak and lacking in fecundity, was therefore echoed in the contrast between the infertile “pampered fine ladies” and fertile poor women of Europe’s advanced societies. If the reproductive powers of women’s bodies had allowed history to avoid being trapped in the savage stage, those same female bodies were also the reason posited for the collapse of historical progress. This happened when sexual enjoyment was disconnected from procreation. “Women of fashion” were responsible for the degeneration of the commercial stage into effeminacy.

Natural history confirmed, once again, the very point that female sexual enjoyment put restrictions on breeding. Buffon made this explicit in the crudest of ways in a discussion about the procreation of asses. The chapter on the ass was central to the argument of the Histoire naturelle, because it was there that Buffon formulated his conception of “species”, defined no longer by visible appearance but by the reproductive capacity of the offspring: the ass and the horse were not of the same species, despite their close resemblance, as they generated the barren mule. By contrast, all human beings, however distinct in physique and habits, belonged to one single species as they could mix together and produce fertile progeny. This is why the article on the ass is one of the most cited and commented on by historians of science. Yet what, to my knowledge, has so far been disregarded is the point I want to make here: the incompatibility of female pleasure with the reproductive task. With an explicit causal link, Buffon stated that “l’ânesse [est…] lascive; c’est par cette raison qu’elle est très-peu féconde” (“the she ass [is…] lustful; this is why she is so lacking in fecundity”).¹⁶ Although she was “capable of perpetually nourishing and engendering”, being in heat again one week after delivery, she produced only one colt; very rarely, two. Buffon’s explanation, and proposed solution, are very disturbing: “elle [l’ânesse] rejette au dehors la liqueur qu’elle vient de recevoir dans l’accouplement, à moins qu’on n’ait soin de lui ôter promptement la sensation du plaisir, en lui donnant des coups pour calmer la suite des convulsions et des mouvemens amoureux, sans cette précaution elle ne retiendroit que très-rarement”.¹⁷ The fear that the “care” taken to repress the sensation of pleasure could be extended to the entire female sex is all the stronger if one considers that the whole article is built on a close parallel with the human species, and that women are also “capable of perpetually nourishing and engendering”… The physical details of female pleasure, recorded by Buffon, were omitted in the sociological and historical analyses of the Scots, while the Scottish translator of the Histoire naturelle into English, William Smellie, abbreviated the explanation of how to prevent the female ass’s enjoyment. Yet the central point remained: procreation was the goal; pleasure threatened to undermine it and had to be limited, if not prevented.¹⁸ The close relationship between natural history and the history of civilisation was central to understanding the new focus on women, both in their role as bearers of the species and as agents of culture. By resorting to the moral authority of nature (Daston and Vidal 2004), the empire of sentiment was naturalised as the new form of male dominion and female servitude.

Conclusion

Scottish Enlightenment historiography contributed to shaping a narrative of modernity which took European civilisation as its model and made European womanhood its essential element. Yet women remained ambivalently placed in relation to civilisation. Their primordial reproductive labour, and then their connection with commerce, taste and politeness meant they were the conditio sine qua non for historical progress; but their excess and ostentation in advanced stages engendered the emasculation of manners and morals, finally leading to the collapse of society itself. Male fear that the refined sensibility of the commercial woman might degenerate into savage passions and sensual pleasures made manifest the potential circularity of historical progress. With the spread of unregulated sexuality, egoism prevailed, and sympathy and feeling disappeared, just as had been the case “in the ages of rudeness and barbarism”—as Millar explained.¹⁹ If man was “a dangerous animal” when deprived of women’s company, he became an endangered species when exposed to excessive female influence and power. Anxieties about depopulation led (Scottish) Enlightenment thinkers to point to the dark side of modernity. By sharing the same methods and sources, natural history and the history of civilisation concurred in shaping the new image of woman, while revealing that “the general interest of society” required female sexuality to be kept under control. While man freed himself from nature through the historical process, woman found that nature placed insurmountable limits on her own history.²⁰