It is worth noting that the offensive epithet "sentimentalist" has not long been a term of abuse: just two hundred years ago, when Schiller referred … - Robert C. Solomon

Kant's unprecedented attack on sentiment and sentimentalism was at least in part a reaction, perhaps a visceral reaction, not only against the philosophical moral-sentiment theorists (whom he at least admired) but against the flood of popular women writers in Europe and America who were then turning out thousands of widely read pot-boilers and romances which did indeed equate virtue and goodness with gushing sentiment. It is no secret that the charge of sentimentalism has long had sexist implications.

The prejudice against sentimentality, I want to argue, is ill-founded and in fact is an extension of that all-too-familiar contempt for the passions in Western literature and philosophy.

Sentimentality ... is not an escape from reality or responsibility, but, quite to the contrary, provides the precondition for ethical engagement rather than an obstacle to it.