The attitude to women in the eighteenth century was determined by their social position. Women possessed no other rights and duties but keeping house, brining up children and serving as an element of decoration. The society of the eighteenth century was patriarchal and male-dominated, leaving very little opportunity for female self-realization. Women were treated as children – dependent, capricious and lack of wit. Even prominent educated people of that century underestimated women's mental abilities. J. J. Rousseau, great humanist the developer of educational theory stated, for example, that “little girls dislike learning to read and write but they are always ready to learn to sew” (Rousseau, 97). The majority of men shared his point of view. They also considered, that women had no other natural appropriation, as softening men's roughness. Charles II to his friend's boasting about his wife's mental abilities asked “Can she make pudding? That is enough learning for your wife”. Charles's answer characterizes very precisely not only his attitude, but the general attitude as one of the characteristics of the epoch. Treated as elements of decor, women had to keep beautiful facade to please the men's sight. As no other function was let to them, they had to be beautiful by any means.

Jonathan Swift, one of few prominent figures of the 18 th century tries to uncrown romantic ideal of femininity, peculiar to that epoch. Along with scornful attitude to women's mental abilities and their limited social roles, women beauty and femininity was romanticized and idealized in the 18 th century. Woman beauty was idealized and women itself were treated like goddesses. Such an attitude was based only on their appearance, and, having no other opportunities to realize themselves, women spent inconceivable time and efforts to look beautiful by any means. In his novels and poems, Swift centers on natural, physiological aspects of human life and depicts women like ordinary human creatures, made of flash and blood, with their merits and demerits. Sometimes, his naturalism is hyperbolized and exaggerated to absurd, which made his contemporaries shocked. In his scatological parodies, for example, he satirically depicts the difference between appearance and inner filling.

“The Lady's Dressing Room” one of the most famous Swift's scatological poems, which reflects his attitude to women. In this poem Strephon, admiring his beloved women Celia can not stand the meeting with reality, when he gets to her dressing room. Strephon becomes more and more disgusted with every find, which destroys a goddess-like ideal of Celia. Swift describes in detail all manifestations of Celia's physical part. Dirt and sweat smock becomes the first shock for Strephon, when he enters the room. His inner creature revolts, not able to admit that this smock can belong to his beloved Celia. This is only beginning, and things he finds later, such as combs “filled up with dirt”, “a forehead cloth with oil upon't”, “filthy basin” and “alum flower to stop the steams/Exhaled from sour unsavoury streams” step by step destroy his romantic ideal and make him disgusted not only of Celia, but of all females in general (Swift, p. 448). Strephon is shocked by the difference of ideal image, Celia creates on public and dirt and stench in her dressing room. All the details are intentionally exaggerated in order to underline the contrast between reality and beautiful ideal, glorified by the poets. Swift destroys romantic myth of femininity but he doesn't aim to humiliate women. His main goal is to uncover the contradiction between ideal image created mainly by the men and reality.

Same attitude to women we find in other works of Swift. In the second book of “Gullover's Travels” we find the following description of women. “These Maids of Honour ... would strip themselves to the Skin, and put on their Smocks in my Presence, while I was placed on their Toylet directly before their naked Bodies; which, I am sure, to me was very far from being a tempting Sight, or from giving me any other Motions than those of Horror and Disgust. Their Skins appeared so coarse and uneven, so variously colored when I saw them near, with a Mole here and there as broad as a Trencher, and hairs hanging from it thicker than Pack-threads; to say nothing further concerning the rest of their Persons” (Swift, Gulliver's Travels, p129) . With these lines, he tries to destroy the admiring attitude to the beauty of English women. Later he states, that women may seem attractive to men only because they can not see all their vices and demerits. He states that only one look from the position of Gulliver in the country of Brobdingnag could destroy all charm and beauty, if to look at the enlarged bodies. Through his character, Swift underlines that “appear so beautiful to us, only because they are of our own size, and their defects not to be seen but through a magnifying glass, where we find by experiment that the smoothest and whitest skins look rough and coarse, and ill colored”(Swift, p.130). The main effect of this chapter in his book and also all his depictions of women is to shed light to the hypocrisy and unnaturalness of beauty. Being one of the best political and social satirist of the Eighteenth Century, Swift blames society in lies and hypocrisy, women have to use in order to correspond to the ideals of femininity and beauty, created by men.

Swift's main goal was not to vulgarize the ideal of feminine beauty. Like all great artistes, his vision and perception was different from those of ordinary people. He saw and appreciated all aspects of human life, and all parts of female body and its natural manifestations. He shed light to the aspects of human life, rejected and hidden in the top-drawer. He didn't make exact gender distinctions, but still, he was more fascinated and attracted by female body. He did his best to break the stereotype of goddess, by depicting women as usual human beings possessing same biological functions as men, making same blunders. With his scatological poems, Swift wanted to delete the abyss between the beauty ideal and reality, making women of his epoch living creatures in comparison with the pictures of stone idols.

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