appearance of labor in the social aesthetic of play. From the outset the marquise is assured that, though she will have to “[apply] herself a bit,” it will not be necessary to “penetrate” obscure matters “by means of concentrated thought.” She needs only “the same amount of concentration that must be given to The Princess of Clèves in order to follow the plot closely and understand all its beauty.” She understands spontaneously, only “conceiv[ing] of those things of which she can’t help but conceive.”82 Her imagination not only aestheticizes the suns and planets; it makes them dramatic characters she can approve or disapprove of. We have to keep in mind that it is not only the gallant gentleman who worries that these ungallant conversations will be an embarrassment to him. The marquise is no less concerned about her performance, even though it is physically removed from le monde and there is no one but the gentleman to witness it. When he proposes to make an outline of the zodiac in her garden sand, she shrinks back on the grounds of impropriety; “it would give my garden a scholarly air which I don’t want it to have.”83
In his Preface Fontenelle explained that he had tried to find “a middle ground … where it’s neither too dry for men and women of the world nor too playful for scholars”; and that is precisely what he accomplished. He does not fuse the two worlds; he uses his middle ground to dance with such agility from one to the other that one hardly notices that he’s dancing. “I hold her a scholar,” the gentleman writes to his friend in the opening letter, “because of the extreme ease with which she could become one.”84 Left unsaid—but obvious to his audience—is that she could not become one without shedding her entire social identity. Women had to embody the principle of aisance in its full purity by not betraying any sign of labor in their way of thinking and speaking in their own world, detached as it was from occupational life. That was why, despite their intellectual equality and, in some respects, superiority, their presentation of self had to remain distinctly feminine. Scudéry warned the salonnière that she must avoid “speaking with a certain affected simplicity, which smells of the child,” but also that, if she did not wish to appear “bizarre” by playing the man, she must not “[pass] judgment decisively on some difficult question.”85 Scudéry’s point was not that difficult questions were beyond women’s mental capacity, but that women could not appear to have worked through them to a conclusion. The man whose speech betrayed intellectual labor invited ridicule. The woman who committed such a violation of the social aesthetic undermined the group claim to unique status more directly. Her resulting stigmatization as a “learned lady” (femme savante) threatened her with a kind of social death.
The imagined world of honnêteté was a community of frictionless exchange, immune to destabilization because its speech could neither offend nor shock nor stray into argument. In principle, the kind of critique that would make a society and polity self-critical was banned. Women were the keepers of the ban.
Chapter 2
Poullain de la Barre: Feminism, Radical and Polite
From 1673 to 1675 François Poullain de la Barre published three books arguing that women were by nature as intelligent as men.1 From our perspective other early modern feminist thinkers reflect the inhibitions of their times in one way or another, but Poullain seems to crash through his times to offer us nothing less than the full-blown agenda of feminism in our own era.2 And yet, though we now have a better historical understanding of the intellectual chemistry that produced Poullain’s feminism, the compound itself still seems to leap out of its historical context and address contemporary feminism in its own terms, without that quality of strangeness, requiring a strenuous leap of the imagination, with which we expect seventeenth-century thought to confront us.
That Poullain’s historical significance remains less than fully contextualized is not due simply to the fact that he has acquired iconic status. The more serious problem is that, in part because he failed to command the public attention he sought, the historical traces of his life are so meager and scattered.3 What we have is the skeletal narrative of a life: his birth into a Parisian family of the judicial nobility in 1648; theological studies at the Sorbonne from 1663 to 1666, almost certainly in the expectation of pursuing a university career; his disillusionment with Scholasticism and discovery of an alternative source of certainty in Cartesian philosophy; his withdrawal from Paris to village curacies in Picardy from 1680 to 1688; his relocation in December 1688, as a Protestant, to Geneva, where he married, raised a family, taught at the collège, and died on May 4, 1723.4
Despite the paucity of detail, we can push farther in historicizing Poullain’s thought. There are, first, the autobiographical details in the texts, which tell us more about the experiential meaning, and particularly the social meaning, of Poullain’s feminism than has been recognized. This biographical inquiry in turn opens another avenue of approach. To date, the texts have been read largely as exercises in formal argument. But we can also read them as sites for social and cultural representations in seventeenth-century discourses, hence recovering meanings that are more diffuse but also more resonant than formal argumentation. Of the various relevant discursive contexts, the most important for our purposes is the discourse of honnêteté.
On the Equality of the Two Sexes and his second book, On the Education of Ladies for the Behavior of the Mind in the Sciences and in Mores, are two distinct textual moments in a fusion of Cartesian philosophy and the discourse of honnêteté. Together they reveal the affinities that made the fusion possible, and the tensions that made it problematic as a point of departure for modern feminist thought. The second text—the Education—is not, as is generally assumed, a straightforward reiteration and elaboration of Poullain’s basic position that “the mind has no sex,” but a tentative moment in turning a utopian vision of gender equality, offered as a regulative idea, into a strategy for realizing that vision in a specific social milieu.5 When we consider the two texts in sequence, we find Poullain shifting tack. One way—an emphatically historical way—to understand the contextually unique radicalism of Equality is to watch Poullain turning the salon culture’s reconfiguration of gender distinctions in a new and startlingly unconventional direction. Not only did he draw radical implications from the discourse’s devaluation of certain kinds of male intellectual labor; pulling the discourse out beyond the salons’ well-guarded walls of social exclusiveness, he combined it with Cartesianism to project a sweeping transformation of the social organization of labor. As compelling as his argument may have been as an exercise in Cartesian method, however, it was problematic in application to a culture whose norms of exclusiveness rested on the banning of labor, including intellectual labor, from the practice of a thoroughly aestheticized art of leisure. It was one thing to appropriate those norms for the egalitarian vision in Equality, but quite another to come to terms with the issue of labor in Education.
Poullain was even more radical in context than has been assumed, and at the same time more distant from us, less familiar to us, and less detached from the constraints of his contexts than his application of Cartesian rationalism, taken by itself, might suggest.6 This split profile tells us a great deal about the ways in which even the most radical applications of Cartesian doubt were socially refracted, and thereby constrained, as they became instruments of social critique; and about the inescapable entanglements of gender with class and, more important for our purposes, with status in the question of female emancipation in the ancien régime.7
Conversion
Sometime in the late 1660s, when Poullain was twenty or a little older and was pursuing his doctoral studies, he underwent a “conversion” (his term), both in his intellectual orientation and in his social persona. The intellectual turn is described in the fifth (and final) “conversation” of Education. Poullain came to realize that, outside the narrow academic career track he had entered at age nine, “everything” he knew was “of no use to the world,” since “cultivated people (les honnestes gens) cannot endure our way of reasoning.” Finding himself in “no little anguish,” and listening to the advice of “certain