Explain what both Dorine (in Tartuffe) and Sor Juana reveal about the status of women during the Enlightenment.

Dorine, in Moliere's play, Tartuffe,
and Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz both shed light on the status of women during the
Enlightenment.

Dorine is a lady's made to Orgon's daughter,
Mariane. When Orgon, on a whim, decides his engaged daughter should now marry Tartuffe,
a conman who has endeared himself with Orgon with the pretense of a pious nature, Dorine
stands up to the master of the house to tell him he is wrong. She also promises Mariane
that if a plan must be created to circumvent her father's plans so that Mariane can
still marry as she pleases, Dorine will arrange it.

Sor
Juana, although a cloistered nun, was extremely intelligent and spoke her mind  on a
variety of subjects. She wrote poetry, essays and plays during the 17th Century. Due to
her outspoken nature, and some of the less secular topics she wrote about, she was
censored; at this point, she stopped writing, spending the rest of her life in service
to others.

Literary historians cannot pin the advent of the
Age of Enlightenment to a specific time, but an estimation places it between 1660 and
1685. This would have been during the time Sor Juana was writing in New Spain (Mexico);
Moliere wrote his play, Tartuffe, during Louis XVI reign in France
in the mid-17th Century until the start of the 18th Century. His character of Dorine
would have been influenced as, obviously, was Sor
Juana.

The
term “Enlightenment” refers to the belief by the movement’s contributors that they were
leaving behind the dark ignorance and blind belief that characterized the past. The
freethinking writers of the period sought to evaluate and understand life by way of
scientific observation and critical reasoning rather than through uncritically accepted
religion, tradition, and social
conventions.

Therefore, we
can see why this movement would have changed the face of Europe. The seat of the
movement was in France, though the effects of this new philosophy spread throughout
Europe and even into the New World. It threatened the power of the Roman Catholic
Church. And although the Church tried to stop the " href="http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/philosophes">philosophes"
with censorship and violent punishment, the philosophes continued
unchecked.

Salons were organized affairs, where though
eating took place:

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"the purpose [of them was] to self-satisfy the
educational needs of the women who started
them."

Women were active in
these events, often hosting them at their homes. They also were the overseers of
conversations—

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Women were able to take this position within the
salons because of their gentle, polite, civil
nature.

And...

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The salons were a forum where elite,
well-educated women might continue their learning in a place of civil conversation while
governing the political discourse, and a place where people of all social orders may
interact.

These meetings
often brought people of a variety of social levels together. Coffee houses also
fulfilled the same purpose.

With the sense that women were,
in fact, taking part in these meetings "to self-satisfy [their] educational needs,"
Moliere presents Dorine as a woman who is intelligent and intuitive; Sor Juana was an
living example of a woman who strenuously pushed, against parents, society and Church,
to become educated and continue to follow her desire to learn. Based on these details,
these women were strongly affected by the Age of Enlightenment.