They came from opposite sides of the eighteenth-century world. She was a princess in St. Petersburg, Russia. He was a printer-patriot from colonial Philadelphia. She believed in a limited monarchy; he came to denounce monarchies. Yet both Ekaterina Dashkova and Benjamin Franklin overcame unusual circumstances to become leaders of the Age of Enlightenment—she as an unconventional woman, he as a self-made man.
Dashkova and Franklin both traveled and lived in Europe, scorned fashionable court attire, and led their countries’ top scientific institutions. They also championed the radical ideals of their age: the use of reason, the principles of liberty and equality, and private and public virtue. Yet neither was able to realize fully these ideals. Their similar worldviews and struggles, however, transcended differences of gender, country of origin, and political context.
Today, the challenges faced by these two Enlightenment figures can illuminate our own engagement with the world of the twenty-first century.
Ekaterina Dashkova and Benjamin Franklin met only once, in 1781. Later, Dashkova would become the first female member of the American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia. Franklin, in turn, would become the first American member of Russia’s Imperial Academy of Sciences and Arts, which Dashkova directed under Catherine II.
