Female Sexuality and Cultural Degradation in Enlightenment France: Medicine and Literature

In her study of the literature and medical treatises of Enlightenment France, McAlpin explores the belief that premature puberty in young urban girls signalled an increasing moral and physical degeneration. Offering physiologically based readings of heroines in novels by, among others, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Denis Diderot and Choderlos de Laclos, McAlpin shows that the Western view of women's sexuality as a mysterious, nebulous force has its secular origins in the mid-eighteenth century.