This anthology gathers together various texts by and about women, ranging from `conduct' manuals to pamphlets on prostitution, from medical texts to critical definitions of women's writing, from anti-female satires to appeals for female equality. By making this material more widely available, Women in the Eighteenth Century complements the current upsurge in feminist writing on eighteenth-century literary history and offers students the opportunity to make their own rereadings of literary texts and their ideological contexts.