Walter Benjamin wrote a lot about women, femininity... and what nowadays we would call "gender". We suggest studying systematically the literary sources of the 18th and 19th that he used. Why was Benjamin so interested in the feminine figures of the literature of Goethe, Keller, Stifter or Baudelaire? Why did Kant offer interesting intuitions about the relation between the sexes? In the late 18th Century and during all 19th Century deep cultural, political and social transformations contributed both to women's emancipation as well as to social fetishism. From our point of view, there is a conceptual core, "woman's fetishism", that can be found all along Benjamin's work like an underground stream. This core also symbolized a block point in the philosophical development of the critical theory of the first generation. By analyzing it, our purpose is to contribute to debates about the way in which the specific configuration of gender relations is established in capitalist society.