 Condorcet’s most extensive arguments on women’s rights appear in two essays. The first was authored in 1787, prior to the Revolution; the second, published in 1790 in the Journal of the Society of 1789, was composed in the context of a debate over the appropriate constitutional arrangements for the new French nation. In addition, commitment to women’s rights informs his Testament to his daughter, and is not forgotten in the section of the Esquisse known as the Fragment sur l’Atlantide [Fragment on the New Atlantis], where he restates his objection to using allegations about physical or intellectual inferiority to justify political exclusion (see Fricheau, 1989). In his 1791 Memoirs on Public Instruction, he demands that public education be open to women and men, and that women not be excluded from any curriculum, including science (see Condorcet 1791 web resource; Kintzler 1984; and Didier 1989 on the strong links between Condorcet’s views on education and on women’s equality and rights). Whereas the eighteenth century has been famously characterized as “the age of woman”—owing, in large measure, to its depiction during the nineteenth century by the Goncourt  brothers[15]—for  the most part, neither the philosophes nor their most intellectually distinguished female contemporaries (in France, Madame de Lambert, Madame du Châtelet, Madame de Graffigny, Madame Riccoboni, Madame de Lambert, Julie de Lespinasse, and Madame de Genlis; in Italy, the University of Bologna professor of mathematics, Françoise Agnesi and professor of anatomy Laura Bassi) addressed the question of women’s rights with the same clarity, directness or force as Condorcet. Moreover, enlightened claims about natural human equality were tempered by entrenched assumptions about complementary male and female sex-specific attributes, which provided ammunition for the delayed expansion of women’ civil and political rights in modern times. As Steinbrügge (1995, 4) proposes, the eighteenth-century “is the age that saw the emergence of an image of female nature that allowed precisely these exclusions to be considered ‘natural’”. Thus, the defenders of women’s rights during the “Age of Enlightenment” were faced with the problem that the denial of women’s equality was couched in secular not religious considerations and buttressed by pseudo-scientific claims.