Major shifts
took place in the religious, social and political value systems of Europe and
North America.
Though traditional Christian
values and beliefs maintained a hold on the minds of many, the thinkers and
reformers of the Enlightenment introduced radically new ideas. Freedom,
equality and democratic openness became new norms.
The heroes of the age were
the philospher Voltaire (1694-1778) and the political thinker Montesquieu
(1689-1755). The latter proposed guidelines for fair government, including the
separation of legislative, executive and judicial powers. The American war of
independence (1775-1783) and the French Revolution (1789-1799) signalled the
beginning of adopting such principles in practice.
The Church came under heavy
pressure everywhere. Because of their influence on educating the elite, the
Jesuits were considered a dangerous reactionary force. Between 1759 and 1761
Portugal arrested all the Jesuits in its territories and shipped them to the
papal states. In 1761-3 the Jesuit colleges in France were closed. In 1767
Jesuits were expelled from Spain and its colonies. For a few years Rome
resisted mounting pressure to abolish the Society of Jesus altogether, but
eventually Clement XIV succumbed in 1773. It is only after the Napoleonic wars
that Pius VII reinstated the order in 1814.
Women were still on the
sidelines of the political and social upheavals. Rising levels of education
would change this in time. The German authors Dorothea Christiane Leporin and
Elfriede Walesca Tielsch published books in which they argued that the inferior
status of women was due to the fact that women were denied equal chances of
education.
|
Attacks
on women continued in books, booklets and pamphlets.