THE EUROPEAN ENLIGHTENMENT had far-reaching ideological effects on the definitions of rationality and feeling, and the social construction of gender. But the ultimate meaning of the cultural revisions of that period is still being debated. That it became intellectually possible, in the course of the seventeenth century, to imagine a radical split between the knowing subject and the object to be known, a dislocation T. S. Eliot has called "the dissociation of sensibility" when describing its effects on English poetry, has implications for the development of our modern science, and for a definition of gender that pivots on this very categorization of thought.' The mind of England changed, Eliot says, such that serious thought was compartmentalized away from the rest of life, purified of contact "with the noise of the typewriter or the smell of cooking." By the middle of the eighteenth century, poets no longer "felt" their thoughts with the immediacy of "the odour of a rose."2 This apparent separation between cognitive and emotional-sensual functions coincided historically with the development of societies of learning in Europe (the Royal Society in England, the Academie francaise and the Academie royal des Sciences in France, and the K'oniglich Preussischen Akademie der Wissenschaften in