The Second Sex (23 page)

This license is also the main freedom found in the following centuries for women whose rank or fortune liberates them from common morality; in general, it remains as strict as in the Middle Ages. As for positive accomplishments, they are possible only for a very few. Queens are always privileged: Catherine de Medici, Elizabeth of England, and Isabella the Catholic are great sovereigns. A few great saintly figures are also worshipped. The astonishing destiny of Saint Teresa of Avila is explained approximately in the same way as Saint Catherine’s: her self-confidence is inspired by her confidence in God; by carrying the virtues connected with her status to the highest, she garners the support of her confessors and the Christian world: she is able to emerge beyond a nun’s ordinary condition; she founds and runs monasteries, she travels, takes initiatives, and perseveres with a man’s adventurous courage; society does not thwart her; even writing is not effrontery: her confessors order her to do it. She brilliantly shows that a woman can raise herself as high as a man when, by an astonishing chance, a man’s possibilities are granted to her.

But in reality such possibilities are very unequal; in the sixteenth century, women are still poorly educated. Anne of Brittany summons many women to the court, where previously only men had been seen; she strives to form a retinue of girls of honor: but she is more interested in their upbringing than in their culture. Among women who a little later distinguish themselves by their minds, intellectual influence, and writings, most are noblewomen: the duchess of Retz, Mme de Lignerolles, the Duchess of Rohan and her daughter Anne; the most famous were princesses: Queen Margot and Margaret of Navarre. Pernette Du Guillet seems to have been
a bourgeois; but Louise Labé is undoubtedly a courtesan: in any case, she felt free to behave unconventionally.

Women in the seventeenth century will continue to distinguish themselves essentially in intellectual spheres; social life and culture are spreading; women play a considerable role in salons; by the very fact they are not involved in the construction of the world, they have the leisure to indulge in conversation, the arts, and literature; they are not formally educated, but through discussions, readings, and instruction by private preceptors or public lectures they succeed in acquiring greater knowledge than their husbands: Mlle de Gournay, Mme de Rambouillet, Mlle de Scudéry, Mme de La Fayette, and Mme de Sévigné enjoy great reputations in France; and outside France similar renown is associated with the names of Princess Elisabeth, Queen Christine, and Mlle de Schurman, who corresponded with the whole scholarly world. Thanks to this culture and the ensuing prestige, women manage to encroach on the masculine universe; from literature and amorous casuistry many ambitious women slide toward political intrigue. In 1623 the papal nuncio wrote: “In France all the major events, all the important plots, most often depend on women.” The princesse de Condé foments the “women’s conspiracy”; Anne of Austria readily takes the advice of the women surrounding her; Richelieu lends an indulgent ear to the duchesse d’Aiguillon; the roles played by Mme de Montbazon, the duchesse de Chevreuse, Mlle de Montpensier, the duchess de Longueville, Anne de Gonzague, and many others in the Fronde are well-known. Lastly, Mme de Maintenon is a brilliant example of the influence a skillful woman adviser could wield on state affairs. Organizers, advisers, and schemers, women assure themselves of a highly effective role by oblique means: the princesse des Ursins in Spain governs with more authority but her career is brief. Alongside these great noblewomen, a few personalities assert themselves in a world that escapes bourgeois constraints; a hitherto unknown species appears: the actress. The presence of a woman onstage is noted for the first time in 1545; in 1592 there is still only one; at the beginning of the seventeenth century most of them are actors’ wives; they then become more and more independent both onstage and in their private lives. As far as the courtesan is concerned, after being Phryne or Imperia, she finds her highest incarnation in Ninon de Lenclos: from capitalizing on her femininity, she surpasses it; from living among men, she takes on virile qualities; her independent moral behavior disposes her to independent thinking: Ninon de Lenclos brought freedom to the highest point a woman could at that time.

In the eighteenth century, woman’s freedom and independence continue
to grow. Customs remained strict in principle: girls receive no more than a cursory education; they are married off or sent to a convent without being consulted. The bourgeoisie, the rising class that is being consolidated, imposes a strict morality on the wife. But on the other hand, with the nobility breaking up, the greatest freedom of behavior is possible for women of the world, and even the
haute bourgeoisie
is contaminated by these examples; neither convent nor conjugal home can contain the woman. Once again, for the majority of women, this freedom remains negative and abstract: they limit themselves to the pursuit of pleasure. But those who are intelligent and ambitious create avenues for action for themselves. Salon life once again blossoms: The roles played by Mme Geoffrin, Mme du Deffand, Mlle de Lespinasse, Mme d’Epinay, and Mme de Tencin are well-known; protectors and inspiration, women make up the writer’s favorite audience; they are personally interested in literature, philosophy, and sciences: like Mme Du Châtelet, for example, they have their own physics workshops or chemistry laboratory; they experiment; they dissect; they intervene more actively than ever before in political life: one after the other, Mme de Prie, Mme de Mailly, Mme de Châteauneuf, Mme de Pompadour, and Mme du Barry govern Louis XV; there is barely a minister without his Egeria, to such a point that Montesquieu thinks that in France everything is done by women; they constitute, he says, “a new state within the state”; and Collé writes on the eve of 1789: “They have so taken over Frenchmen, they have subjugated them so greatly that they think about and feel only for themselves.” Alongside society women there are also actresses and prostitutes who enjoy great fame: Sophie Arnould, Julie Talma, and Adrienne Lecouvreur.

Throughout the ancien régime the cultural domain is the most accessible to women who try to assert themselves. Yet none reached the summits of a Dante or a Shakespeare; this can be explained by the general mediocrity of their condition. Culture has never been the privilege of any but the feminine elite, never of the masses; and masculine geniuses often come from the masses; even privileged women encountered obstacles that barred their access to the heights. Nothing stopped the ascent of a Saint Teresa, a Catherine of Russia, but a thousand circumstances conspired against the woman writer. In her small book
A Room of One’s Own
, Virginia Woolf enjoyed inventing the destiny of Shakespeare’s supposed sister; while he learned a little Latin, grammar, and logic in school, she was closed up at home in total ignorance; while he poached, ran around in the countryside, and slept with local women, she was mending kitchen towels under her parents’ watchful eyes; if, like him, she bravely left to seek her fortune in
London, she could not become an actress earning her living freely: either she would be brought back to her family and married off by force; or seduced, abandoned, and dishonored, she would commit suicide out of despair. She could also be imagined as a happy prostitute, a Moll Flanders, as Daniel Defoe portrayed her: but she would never have run a theater and written plays. In England, Virginia Woolf notes, women writers always engender hostility. Dr. Johnson compared them to “a dog’s walking on his hinder legs. It is not done well; but you are surprised to find it done at all.” Artists care about what people think more than anyone else; women narrowly depend on it: it is easy to imagine how much strength it takes for a woman artist simply to dare to carry on regardless; she often succumbs in the fight. At the end of the seventeenth century, Lady Winchilsea, a childless noblewoman, attempts the feat of writing; some passages of her work show she had a sensitive and poetic nature; but she was consumed by hatred, anger, and fear:

Almost all her work is filled with indignation about woman’s condition. The Duchess of Newcastle’s case is similar; also a noblewoman, she creates a scandal by writing. “Women live like cockroaches or owls, they die like worms,” she furiously writes. Insulted and ridiculed, she had to shut herself up in her domain; and in spite of a generous temperament and going half-mad, she produced nothing more than wild imaginings. It is not until the eighteenth century that a bourgeois widow, Mrs. Aphra Behn,
^†
lived by her pen like a man; others followed her example, but even in the nineteenth century they were often obliged to hide; they did not even have a “room of their own”; that is, they did not enjoy material independence, one of the essential conditions for inner freedom.

As has already been seen, because of the development of social life and its close link to intellectual life, French women’s situation is a little more favorable. Nevertheless, people are largely hostile to the bluestockings. During the Renaissance, noblewomen and intellectuals inspire a movement
in favor of their sex; Platonic doctrines imported from Italy spiritualize love and woman. Many well-read men strive to defend her.
La nef des dames vertueuses
(The Ship of Virtuous Ladies),
Le chevalier des dames
(The Ladies’ Chevalier), and so on were published. Erasmus in
Le petit sénat
(The Little Senate) gives the floor to Cornelia, who unabashedly details the grievances of her sex. “Men are tyrants … They treat us like toys … they make us their launderers and cooks.” Erasmus demands that women be allowed to have an education. Cornelius Agrippa, in a very famous work,
Déclamation de la noblesse et de l’excellence du sexe féminin (Declamation on the Nobility and Preeminence of the Female Sex
), devotes himself to showing feminine superiority. He takes up the old cabbalistic arguments: Eve means Life and Adam Earth. Created after man, woman is more finished then he. She is born in paradise, he outside. When she falls into the water, she floats; man sinks. She is made from Adam’s rib and not from earth. Her monthly cycles cure all illnesses. Eve merely wandered in her ignorance, whereas Adam sinned, which is why God made himself a man; moreover, after his resurrection he appeared to women. Then Agrippa declares that women are more virtuous than men. He lists “virtuous women” that the sex can take pride in, which is also a commonplace of these praises. Lastly, he mounts an indictment of male tyranny: “Acting against divine right and violating natural law with impunity, the tyranny of men has deprived women of the freedom they receive at birth.” Yet she engenders children; she is as intelligent and even subtler than man; it is scandalous that her activities are limited, “undoubtedly done not by God’s order, nor by necessity or reason, but by the force of usage, by education, work and principally by violence and oppression.” He does not, of course, demand sexual equality, but wants woman to be treated with respect. The work was immensely successful; there is also
Le fort inexpugnable (The Impregnable Fort
), another praise of woman; and
La parfaite amye (The Perfect Friend
) by Héroët, imbued with Platonic mysticism. In a curious book introducing Saint-Simonian doctrine, Postel announces the coming of a new Eve, the regenerating mother of humankind: he thinks he has even met her; she is dead, and she is perhaps reincarnated in him. With more moderation, Marguerite de Valois, in her
Docte et subtil discours (Learned and Subtle Discourse
) proclaims that there is something divine in woman. But the writer who best served the cause of her sex was Margaret of Navarre, who proposed an ideal of sentimental mysticism and chastity without prudery to counter licentiousness, attempting to reconcile marriage and love for women’s honor with happiness. Women’s opponents do not, of course, give up. Among others,
Les controverses des sexes masculine
et féminin
(Controversies over the Masculine and Feminine Sexes), in response to Agrippa, puts forward the old medieval arguments. Rabelais has a good time in
The Third Book
satirizing marriage in the tradition of Matthew and Deschamps: however, it is women who lay down the law in the privileged abbey of Thélème. Antifeminism becomes virulent once again in 1617, with the
Alphabet de l’imperfection et malice des femmes (A Discourse of Women, Shewing Their Imperfections Alphabetically
), by Jacques Olivier; the cover pictures an engraving of a woman with a harpy’s hands, covered with the feathers of lust and perched on her feet, because, like a hen, she is a bad housewife: under every letter of the alphabet is one of her defects. Once more it was a man of the Church who rekindled the old quarrel; Mlle de Gournay answered back with
Egalité des hommes et des femmes (Equality of Men and Women
). This is followed by a quantity of libertine literature, including
Parnasse et cabinets satyriques
(Parnassus and Satyrical Cabinets),
^*
that attacks women’s moral behavior, while the holier-than-thous quoting Paul, the Church Fathers, and Ecclesiastes drag them down. Woman provided an inexhaustible theme for the satires of Mathurin Régnier and his friends. In the other camp, the apologists outdo themselves in taking up and commenting on Agrippa’s arguments. Father du Boscq in
L’honneste femme (The Compleat Woman
) calls for women to be allowed to be educated. The
Astrée
and a great quantity of courtly literature praise their merits in rondeaux, sonnets, elegies, and such.

Even the successes women achieved were cause for new attacks;
Les précieuses ridicules
(
The Pretentious Young Ladies
) set public opinion against them; and a bit later
Les femmes savants
(
The Learned Ladies
) are applauded. Molière is not, however, woman’s enemy: he vigorously attacks arranged marriages, he demands freedom for young girls in their love lives and respect and independence for the wife. On the other hand, Bossuet does not spare them in his sermons. The first woman, he preaches, is “only a part of Adam and a kind of diminutive. Her mind is about the same size.” Boileau’s satire against women is not much more than an exercise in rhetoric, but it raises an outcry: Pradon, Regnard, and Perrault counterattack violently. La Bruyère and Saint-Evremond take the part of women. The period’s most determined feminist is Poulain de la Barre who in 1673 publishes a Cartesian-inspired work,
De l’égalité des deux sexes (The Equality of the Two Sexes
). He thinks that since men are stronger, they favor their sex and women accept this dependence out of custom. They never had their
chances: in either freedom or education. Thus they cannot be judged by what they did in the past. Nothing indicates their inferiority to men. Anatomy reveals differences, but none of them constitutes a privilege for the male. And Poulain de la Barre concludes with a demand for a solid education for women. Fontenelle writes
Entretiens sur la pluralité des mondes (Conversations on the Plurality of Worlds
) for women. And while Fénelon, following Mme de Maintenon and Abbot Fleury, puts forward a very limited educational program, the Jansenist academic Rollin wants women to undertake serious studies.