Dena Goodman's notion of the centrality of the salonnières in creating Enlightenment institutions places Madame Geoffrin at the heart of the Enlightenment sociability. She writes, "Under the guidance of Marie-Therese Geoffrin, Julie de Lespinasse and Suzanne Necker, Parisian salons became the civil working spaces of the project of Enlightenment." Goodman uses Geoffrin to argue that salonnières in the eighteenth century represented a re-shaping of an existing form of sociability that would serve the ambitions of the women who ran them. Goodman states, "In using the social gathering and transforming it to meet their own needs, Madame Geoffrin and salonnières like her created a certain kind of social and intellectual space that could be exploited by the expanding group of intellectuals who were beginning to call themselves "philosophers." The historian Denise Yim loosely agrees with Goodman on the idea that salonnières did use their position for a more serious educational purpose. She writes, "It is evident, although they do not say so themselves, that Julie de Lespinasse, Madame Geoffrin and Madame Vigee-Lebrun also improved themselves in their own salons. This representation has been debased by much of the recent literature. Janet Burke and Margaret Jacob write that by placing only, "a handful of selfless salonnières (such as Geoffrin) at the centre of Enlightenment history, Goodman is effectively obliterating a wider version of the Enlightenment cultural practices as well as downgrading "all other seemingly enlightened woman." Antoine Lilti, in countering many of Goodman's arguments, would debase the idea that Madame Geoffrin acted as a participant in the new sociability of Enlightenment society. Instead he claims that the politeness and gift giving would have been unthinkable without the presences of fashionable men of letters, which attracted to her salon the finest representatives of the Parisian and European aristocracy, and which permitted her to appear as a protector of talents and an accomplished socialite." The historian Steven Kale discounts the entire theory that Madame Geoffrin (and salonnières in general) played a significant role in the Enlightenment. Kale examines the differences in the roles of men and women in the public sphere before and after 1789. He states, "There is no reason to contradict the widely held view that the salon was a feminist space insofar as it was more often than not presided over by a woman who gave it tone and structure." However, he states, "But it is one thing to say that the presence of a woman is a distinguishing feature of salons and another to argue that female dominance set them apart from other institutions of elite sociability."