Final answer:
Enlightenment thinkers held varied views on women's roles, with some like Rousseau advocating for traditional, domestic roles, and others like Mary Wollstonecraft promoting education and equality. However, despite the progress in thought, women continued to face societal restrictions based on gender.
Step-by-step explanation:
During the Enlightenment, a great intellectual movement of the 18th century, many thinkers held different views towards the role of women. Some, like Jean-Jacques Rousseau, believed that women were naturally subordinate to men and should therefore be confined primarily to domestic roles. Rousseau's view was rooted in the idea that women were not as rational or strong as men. Despite this, women like Émilie du Châtelet and Germaine de Staël made significant intellectual contributions.
Mary Wollstonecraft challenged the notion of women's inherent inferiority, advocating for equal educational opportunities in her pioneering work, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. Her ideas were considered controversial at the time but laid the groundwork for future feminist movements. Contrastingly, more traditionally-minded men in the Enlightenment period kept to the prevailing social norms, which assigned women to the private sphere, while men dominated the public spaces of politics and business.
While the Enlightenment spurred increased liberties for some—usually White, upper and middle-class men—the same freedoms were not extended to women, people of color, and lower-class individuals. These exclusions highlight a significant gap between Enlightenment ideals and practice, with societal conventions and laws still limiting the roles that women could play, well into subsequent eras.