The Enlightenment altered the basic attitudes of the Western culture towards reform, faith, and reason. The focus of thought for most philosophers during the Enlightenment focused on humanity and change: both the ability to change as well as the need for people to do so. “The goal of discovering social laws was to remove the inhumanity that existed through ignorance of them.” (734) People understood the need for reform in society. Education was to be reformed: society needed to lead the children down the right path rather than scaring them in that direction. The judicial system and prison system also needed to be reformed. The philosophers taught people that criminals must be rehabilitated and pay their debt to society. Punishment should not be handed out just to create pain, it should be to protect society. Human cruelty was to be overcome by the use of social improvements and government structures.

Western attitudes began to change towards faith as philosophes analyzed the church and discovered its fla

Prior to the Industrial Revolution, women and men worked together in the house and on the farm. All of this changed when the man moved into the world of manufacturing and left woman behind. Men could now earn high wages that would pay for any needs of the family, leaving the woman to care for the children and the home. “Women became to be associated with domestic duties such as housekeeping, food preparation, child rearing and nurturing, and household management” and “the man became associated almost exclusively with breadwinning.” (pg. 730). As the mothers raised their children, the children grew up with the idea that they were set into one certain lifestyle based upon their gender. Girls knew that they would become housewives and mothers like their own mothers, and boys knew that they would go to work like their fathers.

The work of Voltaire embodied the main ideas of the Enlightenment. His ideas as a philosophe concentrated on two areas: empiricism and religious tolerance. Voltaire’s drive for an empirical philosophy that would base all human certainty on empirical verification was a success in becoming the basis for French empirical science. Voltaire’s writings on religious tolerance were aligned with Enlightenment reform ideas about judicial and prison reform. Voltaire believed that the most inhumane crimes were religious-based, and like many Enlightenment attitudes towards the church, Voltaire desired to crush the Catholic Church but maintain a belief in God at the same time. Voltaire’s successful writings in the forms of plays, essays, stories, and letters, gave him the title of literary dictator of Europe during the Enlightenment. His “Letters of the English” openly praised

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