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By the late 1760s, the reputation of French Academician Antoine Léonard Thomas as a master of the Eloge was well established, yet his Essai sur le caractère, les moeurs et l'esprit des femmes dans les différens siècles, published in January 1772, was immediately ridiculed.1 It vexed his contemporaries on both sides of the "Querelle des Femmes"-the debate over women's status that had been underway since the Middle Ages. Diderot, on the one hand, attacked him on the very terrain upon which Thomas's argument was staged, that of defining sexual difference, calling him a "hermaphrodite" and deploring the text's lack of masculine "verve."2 On the other hand, Louise d'Epinay, the prominent woman of letters and contributor to Friedrich Melchior Grimm's Correspondance littéraire, mocked the Essay as not defending women sufficiently, focusing instead on "are they more this? are they more that? . . . How petty are such details, how common, and unphilosophical." 3 To this day, critics still decry the Essay as primarily rehearsing arguments of the Querelle, and label it an outmoded mouthpiece for the naturalist current that developed over the course of the century.4
Thomas's text, however, had an undisputable impact: printed at least three times in French by the end of the eighteenth century, translated into English several times as well as into Italian, it spurred public responses not just from Diderot and d'Epinay, but also from Grimm, Galiani, and others.5 The sparking of such controversy on both sides of the debate suggests that the Essay articulated contradictory views on women, a complexity made all the more visible by repeated attempts by its multiple translators to smooth them out.6 Thomas's ambivalent account of women comes to the fore when juxtaposed with the two key translations of his Essay into English, the first by the established Scottish historian William Russell, published in 1774, and the second by the little-known Jemima Kindersley in 1781. The case of the Essay demonstrates the changing practice of translation throughout the late Enlightenment and, most of all, the changing framework through which women were perceived during this time. Throughout the second half of the eighteenth century, translation moved from a tradition of reinterpretation and "domestication"- the translator taking on an authorial role-to a more faithful adherence to the...