Social and family life, generally, and ideas about the sexes were so different in the seventeenth century compared to our own that they should not be overlooked as an important background to the beginnings of modern philosophy. Interestingly, all the well-known seventeenth century philosophers—Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, Hobbes, and Locke—were bachelors their entire lives, as were the great majority of their colleagues in philosophy and the sciences.