Although the philosophical and political conviction that women and men are equal came to be called feminism only in the 1890s, it had begun to be publicly articulated and debated more than a century earlier. The “woman question” came to prominence in Europe during the revolutionary decades at the end of the eighteenth century, but it drew on two older strands of argument: the “querelle des femmes” dating to the Renaissance, and debates over the relationship between the individual and society that marked the Enlightenment. Reflecting the explosive intellectual climate of the era, feminism took shape as a wide-ranging, international critique of traditional gender roles and patriarchal social structures. The place and role of women in society was a central problematic for thinkers grappling with the profound changes resulting from the industrial and political revolutions that inaugurated the “long” nineteenth century and remained contested to its end.