Ekaterina Dashkova and Benjamin Franklin met in Paris for the first and only time on February 3, 1781. No written account of their encounter has been found, but given their vivid personalities, it undoubtedly involved a lively exchange of ideas.

Their meeting had a remarkable outcome. In 1789, Franklin, as founding president of the American Philosophical Society, nominated Dashkova to be its first female member. Dashkova was then director of Russia’s Imperial Academy of Sciences and Arts—an unusual position for a woman. She returned Franklin’s compliment, naming him as the first American member of the Imperial Academy.

Knowledge has been represented as light throughout human history. During the 1700s, ideas about knowledge and learning changed so radically in Western Europe that the whole era became known as the “Age of Enlightenment.” Of special importance was a belief that every person, regardless of social status, had the innate ability to become “enlightened” through the use of reason.

Yet reason did not always prevail. The practices of slavery and serfdom stood in stark contrast to the rational concepts of liberty and equality. And late eighteenth-century wars such as the American War of Independence and the French and Haitian Revolutions—all fought in the name of liberty and equality—entailed acts of irrational violence that also complicated the definition of the Enlightenment as an “Age of Reason.”