Page "Marie Thérèse Rodet Geoffrin" Paragraph 16

In her relationship to salons, Madame Geoffrin occupies a very contentious space in Enlightenment historiography.

On the broadest level of representation, Madame Geoffrin stands as one of only a handful of women to participate in the Enlightenment.

" The salonnières of the Enlightenment were a small number of women who knew and admired one another, lived lives of regularity rather than dissipation, and were committed both to their own education and the philosophes ' project of Enlightenment.

" 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.