Louise Dupin's Work on Women: Selections (OXFORD NEW HISTORIES PHILOSOPHY SERIES) 0190090103, 9780190090104

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Louise Dupin’s Work on Women

OX F O R D N EW H I S T O R I E S O F P H I L O S O P H Y Series Editors Christia Mercer, Melvin Rogers, and Eileen O’Neill (1953–​2017) * Advisory Board Lawrie Balfour, Jacqueline Broad, Marguerite Deslauriers, Karen Detlefsen, Bachir Diagne, Don Garrett, Robert Gooding-​Williams, Andrew Janiak, Marcy Lascano, Lisa Shapiro, Tommie Shelby * Oxford New Histories of Philosophy provides essential resources for those aiming to diversify the content of their philosophy courses, revisit traditional narratives about the history of philosophy, or better understand the richness of philosophy’s past. Examining previously neglected or understudied philosophical figures, movements, and traditions, the series includes both innovative new scholarship and new primary sources. * Published in the series Mexican Philosophy in the 20th Century: Essential Readings Edited by Carlos Alberto Sánchez and Robert Eli Sanchez, Jr. Sophie de Grouchy’s Letters on Sympathy: A Critical Engagement with Adam Smith’s The Theory of Moral Sentiments Translated by Sandrine Bergès. Edited by Sandrine Bergès and Eric Schliesser Margaret Cavendish: Essential Writings Edited by David Cunning Women Philosophers of Seventeenth-​Century England: Selected Correspondence Edited by Jacqueline Broad The Correspondence of Catharine Macaulay Edited by Karen Green Mary Shepherd’s Essays on the Perception of an External Universe Edited by Antonia Lolordo Women Philosophers of Eighteenth-​Century England: Selected Correspondence Edited by Jacqueline Broad Frances Power Cobbe: Essential Writings of a Nineteenth-​Century Feminist Philosopher Edited by Alison Stone Korean Women Philosophers and the Ideal of a Female Sage: Essential Writings of Im Yungjidang and Gang Jeongildang Edited and Translated by Philip J. Ivanhoe and Hwa Yeong Wang Louise Dupin’s Work on Women: Selections Edited and Translated by Angela Hunter and Rebecca Wilkin

Louise Dupin’s Work on Women Selections Edited and Translated by

ANGELA HUNTER AND REBECCA WILKIN

Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and certain other countries. Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America. © Oxford University Press 2023 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by license, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reproduction rights organization. Inquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above. You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer. Library of Congress Control Number: 2023938971 ISBN 978–​0–​19–​009010–​4 (pbk.) ISBN 978–​0–​19–​009009–​8 (hbk.) DOI: 10.1093/​oso/​9780190090098.001.0001 Paperback printed by Marquis Book Printing, Canada Hardback printed by Bridgeport National Bindery, Inc., United States of America

Contents Series Editors’ Foreword  Acknowledgments  Notes on Selection and Translation  Reader’s Orientation  Chronology: Timeline of Dupin’s Life 

Introduction to the Volume 

vii ix xiii xv xvii

1

Part I:  Science 

27



40 53 64 75 86



 rticle 1. Observations on the Equality of the Sexes and on Their A   Difference  Article 2. On Generation  Article 3. On Temperament  Article 4. On Strength  Article 5. Animal and Plant Analogies 

Part II:  History and Religion 

 rticle 12. Foreword on History  A Article 13. On Ancient History  Article 18. On Turkey and Persia  Article 20. Other Countries  Article 21. On the History of France  Article 8. On the Discipline of the Church  Article 10. On the State of Monastic Orders since   the Council of Trent 

Part III:  Law 

 rticle 27. Foreword on Laws  A Article 28. On Salic Law, Considered as a Law  Article 29. On Different Forms of Roman Marriage, on the Property   Rights That Married Women Enjoyed, and on Marriage Today  Article 30. On the Power of Husbands; On the Prerogatives   That the Law Grants—​and Could Grant—​to Married Women  Article 32. On Adultery and Its Punishment  Article 36. On Tutorships and Testimony  Chapter 37. On Rape 

97

108 111 114 120 130 140 151

162 180 184 191 199 207 211 219

vi CONTENTS

Part IV:  Education and Mores 

221

Appendices  Appendix A. Work on Women Articles and Manuscript Pieces  Appendix B. Anicet Sénéchal’s Inventory and Ordering of Manuscript  Bibliography of Selected Secondary Sources  Index 

277 277 281 283 287



[ Article 22]. Foreword on Mores  Article 23. On Education  Article 39. The Effects of Education on Morals  Article 40. Further Reflections on Education  Article 42. Education in Marriage  Article 45. On the Spirit of General Conversation  Article 46. Observations on the Spirit of Theater 

235 237 248 256 260 268 273

Series Editors’ Foreword Oxford New Histories of Philosophy speaks to a new climate in philosophy. There is a growing awareness that philosophy’s past is richer and more diverse than previously understood. It has become clear that canonical figures are best studied in a broad context. More exciting still is the recognition that our philosophical heritage contains long-​forgotten innovative ideas, movements, and thinkers. Sometimes these thinkers warrant serious study in their own right; sometimes their importance resides in the conversations they helped reframe or problems they devised; often their philosophical proposals force us to rethink long-​held assumptions about a period or genre; and frequently they cast well-​known philosophical discussions in a fresh light. There is also a mounting sense among philosophers that our discipline benefits from a diversity of perspectives and a commitment to inclusiveness. In a time when questions about justice, inequality, dignity, education, discrimination, and climate (to name a few) are especially vivid, it is appropriate to mine historical texts for insights that can shift conversations and reframe solutions. Given that philosophy’s very long history contains astute discussions of a vast array of topics, the time is right to cast a broad historical net. Lastly, there is increasing interest among philosophy instructors in speaking to the diversity and concerns of their students. Although historical discussions and texts can serve as a powerful means of doing so, finding the necessary time and tools to excavate long-​buried historical materials is challenging. Oxford New Histories of Philosophy is designed to address all these needs. It will contain new editions and translations of significant historical texts. These primary materials will make available, often for the first time, ideas and works by women, people of color, and movements in philosophy’s past that were groundbreaking in their day, but left out of traditional accounts. Informative introductions will help instructors and students navigate the new material. Alongside its primary texts, ONHP will also publish monographs and collections of essays that offer philosophically subtle

viii  Series Editors’ Foreword analyses of understudied topics, movements, and figures. In combining primary materials and astute philosophical analyses, ONHP will make it easier for philosophers, historians, and instructors to include in their courses and research exciting new materials drawn from philosophy’s past. ONHP’s range will be wide, both historically and culturally. The series plans to include, for example, the writings of African American philosophers, twentieth-​century Mexican philosophers, early modern and late medieval women, Islamic and Jewish authors, and non-​western thinkers. It will excavate and analyze problems and ideas that were prominent in their day but forgotten by later historians. And it will serve as a significant aid to philosophers in teaching and researching this material. As we expand the range of philosophical voices, it is important to acknowledge one voice responsible for this series. Eileen O’Neill was a series editor until her death, December 1, 2017. She was instrumental in motivating and conceptualizing ONHP. Her brilliant scholarship, advocacy, and generosity made all the difference to the efforts that this series is meant to represent. She will be deeply missed, as a scholar and a friend. We are proud to contribute to philosophy’s present and to a richer understanding of its past. Series Editors Christia Mercer and Melvin Rogers

Acknowledgments This book was a tremendous task to complete, and we wouldn’t have been able to do it without many kinds of support, for which we are extremely grateful. We acknowledge the financial support that made it possible for us to begin and to complete this project. We received a National Endowment for the Humanities Scholarly Editions and Translations grant (October 2021–​ June 2022). Wilkin received a National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Stipend (2019); a Harry Ransom Center Research Fellowship in the Humanities (2019–​2020), supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Research Fellowship Endowment; and from Pacific Lutheran University, a Karen Hille Phillips Regency Advancement Award (2014–​2015); a Kelmer Roe Student Faculty Collaborative Research Grant with Sonja Ruud (2011–​ 2012); and two sabbaticals (2014–​2015 and Spring 2022). Hunter received an ASECS Women’s Caucus Editing and Translation Fellowship (2019–​2020); an American Society for Eighteenth-​Century Studies fellowship at the Harry Ransom Center Research Fellowship, supported by the Mellon Foundation (2008); and from University of Arkansas-​Little Rock, Off-​Campus Duty Assignment, Spring 2021; and summer research fellowships in 2009 and 2017. We thank the many people without whose support this book would not be: For welcoming Louise Dupin to the New Histories of Philosophy series at Oxford University Press and for their guidance, Peter Ohlin, Christia Mercer, Melvin Rogers; and for their assistance, Preetham Raj and Anne Sanow. For sharing expertise that helped us track down sources: Ann Blair, Michael Johnson, Julia Lewandoska, Eric MacPhail, Steven Nadler, Sasha Pfau, Jason Schroeder, and Troy Storfjell. For expertise on salon attendees, Melanie Conroy. For helping us decipher Latin, Marco Dorfsman, Michael Johnson, and Molly Lindberg. For her advice on Catholic terminology, Daniella Kostroun.

x Acknowledgments For their research skills and annotation assistance in a few articles, PLU students Kasey Gardner and Anna Nguyen—​through Kelmer Roe Student Faculty Collaborative Research Grants—​ and in the final hour, Molly Lindberg, freelance graduate student extraordinaire. For making initial translations of portions of Article 23, the students of Wilkin’s 2020 French Feminisms class: Anastasia Bidne, Littlepage Green, Holly Knutsen, Jamie Rose McNeil, and Anna Nguyen. For providing key feedback on early versions of our section introductions and chapters: Cynthia Bannon, Peggy Elliott, Julie Candler Hayes, Daniella Kostroun, and Geoffrey Turnovsky. For keeping us updated on Dupin manuscripts for sale: Volker Schröder. We are grateful to staff members of many libraries and archives: Katie Wallis (for all the ILL) at PLU’s Mortvedt Library; Sal Robinson and Roger Wieck from the Pierpont Morgan Library; Chantal Mustel, Robert Thiéry, and Laurine Perreau for their welcome and for information regarding the Dupin collection at the Musée Jean-​Jacques Rousseau, and Laure Quérouil, co-​traveler to Montmorency and unheralded transcriber of Dupin; and Elizabeth Garver of the Harry Ransom Center for years of help (consultations, scans, and more). Merci to our friend in Dupin studies, Frédéric Marty, for sharing his transcriptions of several articles for our comparison, his descriptive list of the contents of the Fonds Dehaynin at the Abbaye de Chaalis, and his thoughts on manuscript ordering. Angela especially thanks him for the warm camaraderie in Montmorency. For their encouragement and steadfast support of our scholarship on Dupin: Julie Hayes, Marie-​Frédérique Pellegrin, Lisa Shapiro, and as ever, Geoffrey Turnovsky. For institutional encouragement, Dean of Humanities Kevin O’Brien (PLU) and Dr. Jeremy Ecke (UALR). For their moral support: Rebecca thanks Cristina Thomas (so many steps), Mei Zhu (so many texts), and Priscilla St. Clair (too few hikes); her parents, David and Betty Wilkin (all the love); and her daughter, Marian Picard (all the laughs). Angela thanks her parents, Roy and Susan Hunter; her steadfast friend, Michael Johnson (who accidentally introduced her to Dupin); and her children, Ayelet and Delphine Benjamin. Sonja Ruud deserves more than thanks can convey for being there from the start with Rebecca on the Dupin journey and for returning to this project

Acknowledgments  xi to provide her scholarly acumen, transcription excellence, and database creation as a Research Associate on the NEH grant. We gratefully recognize Cédric Picard and Marco Hunter Dorfsman for keeping everything running during our long hours of work, and for their love and boundless patience. And, finally, we thank Louise Dupin for bringing us together.

Notes on Selection and Translation Selection Out of the forty-​seven articles that comprised the Work on Women at the time Dupin stopped working on it, eight are missing and four are in fragmentary or very rough form, leaving thirty-​five in a condition we would consider complete or likely near completion. Twenty-​six of those are featured in our edition. In making the selection, we had two main objectives. The first was breadth, to ensure that we had articles from each of the four thematic divisions, and that together, they demonstrate Dupin’s methodology and style as well as the major tenets of her argument. The second was variety, to ensure we showcased the different ways Dupin engages with traditions and contemporaries. In this, we were careful to include pieces that feature her strengths, but we did not hide her shortcomings.

Translation We have worked to preserve the tone and economy of Dupin’s prose and to capture her voice: her hyper-​rational viewpoint, withering wit, and occasional flights of idealism. We strove to transmit her ideas clearly, rearranging clauses and altering sentence boundaries if necessary. The breadth of the Work’s topics means that there are a range of technical terms, from the sciences to the courts. The first five articles (Part I) employ medical and scientific terms both general and specific, which we have rendered using English equivalents from the time period (e.g., “animal spirits”) and explanatory notes. See the introduction to Part I for a description of how we handled the word physique, which is particularly tricky as Dupin uses it frequently and there is no perfectly fitting English substitute. Court proceedings were a facet of everyday life for the wealthy and working-​class alike in eighteenth-​century France, and the language of litigation inflects Dupin’s prose. For most modern readers this legal terminology is arcane, so we have used explanatory notes to balance accuracy and ease.

xiv  Notes on Selection and Translation Dupin was working at times with translations from Latin into French made by her secretary, Rousseau. We chose to translate these passages from the French in order to preserve consistency in style; for the most part we have found Rousseau’s translations to be generally faithful. We used The Roman Law Library as a resource throughout Part IV, the Law section (https://​droi​ trom​ain.univ-​greno​ble-​alpes.fr). Dupin used the Port-​ Royal Bible—​ the French translation most commonly used in the eighteenth century, produced at Port-​Royal under the direction of Louis-​Isaac Lemaistre, sieur de Sacy, from 1657 to 1696. We translated into English from Sacy’s French rather than substituting in a standard English translation.

Reader’s Orientation Manuscripts See Appendix A for the list of articles comprising the Work on Women, including the current location of the manuscripts used; we provide the same information for any draft referenced in introductions and notes.

Abbreviations Some article and draft titles are sentence-​length, so they have been shortened in places; they contain the relevant words to allow the reader to find them in the appendix list. In the first note of each distinct article, we provide the full name of the archive holding the manuscripts used for the translation; otherwise we abbreviate the three major repositories in the following way: the Harry Ransom Center (HRC); the Musée Jean-​Jacques Rousseau (MJJR); and the Bibliothèque de Genève (BGe).

Notes and Sources Dupin provides occasional notes in the manuscript, which we have included in the body of the text {in braces}. All other notes are our own. In the notes for each article, we provided bibliographic information for the sources that Dupin mentions as well as the many additional sources that we located. There are likely places where Dupin used an intermediary source and we reference the primary source instead; we did, however, attempt to locate intermediary sources wherever possible. We often used the best possible edition accessible to us, although we attempted to use the exact one Dupin did whenever this information was known, whether because Dupin provided it (rare), because the information was found by a later scholar (common—​see Sénéchal, Le Bouler and Lafarge, Le Bouler and Thiéry, Marty), or because we were able to determine this information ourselves. Further information

xvi  Reader’s Orientation about intellectual context and interlocutors is found in each of the four section introductions. Our focus has been on locating Dupin’s sources; we did not key Dupin’s citations of Roman laws to modern editions and referencing methods.

Bibliography Bibliographic information for all primary sources is in a note at the first use in each section; thereafter, a shortened reference is used. A brief selected secondary source bibliography is present in the back matter; due to space constraints, this bibliography simply touches on the major issues represented in our work. For sources found in the bibliography, shortened bibliographic information is used in notes throughout. All other secondary sources have full bibliographical information in notes.

Chronology: Timeline of Dupin’s Life The table below includes important events in Dupin’s life (drawn from Jean Buon’s Madame Dupin) alongside key dates in French history and relevant works published. The publications include other feminist works and important texts by/​about women, works by authors in Dupin’s circle, and influential works. *Asterisk denotes an attendee of Dupin’s salon, according to Buon.

1720–​1729

1701: War of the Spanish Succession begins

Historical Context

1710: Louis XV is born 1713: Treaty of Utrecht 1714: War of the Spanish Succession ends 1715: Louis XIV dies, Louis XV becomes king at age 5 1715: Regency of Philippe II, duc d’Orlé ans, begins 1717: Voltaire imprisoned in the Bastille 1720: Claude Dupin’s first wife dies 1721: Louis XV Louis betrothed by 1722: Louise marries Claude Dupin Philippe II to the infanta Mariana, 1722: Louise’s father gives her mother funds daughter of King Philip V of Spain to buy the Château de Passy 1723: Louis XV reaches his legal 1726: Claude Dupin becomes fermier-​général majority and Regency of Philippe II 1727: Louise and Claude’s son, Jacques-​ ends Armand, is born 1723: Philippe II dies, Louis XV 1728: Claude Dupin purchases title of appoints Louis-​Henri, duc de Secrétaire de la Chambre et du Cabinet du Bourbon-​Condé as his first minister Roi, which confers first degree nobility 1725: Louis XV’s marries Marie Leszczyńska, daughter of King Stanisław I of Poland

1702: Louise’s mother, Armande Carton-​ Dancourt, marries Guillaume de Fontaine 1705: Louise’s eldest sister, Marie Thérèse, is born 1706: Louise-​Marie-​Madeleine-​Guillaume is born to Samuel Bernard and Armande Carton-​Dancourt 1709: Louise’s brother, Jules Armand, is born 1710: Louise’s sister, Marie-​Louise, is born 1712: Louise’s sister, Françoise-​Thérèse, is born 1714: Louise’s future husband, Claude Dupin, marries Marie-​Jeanne Bouilat 1715: Claude and Marie-​Jeanne’s son, Louis-​Claude-​Charles, is born 1716: Dupin’s father’s first wife, Anne-​ Madeleine Clergeau, dies

1700–​1709

1710–​1719

Louise Dupin’s life

Years

Table R.1  Timeline of Dupin’s Life

1721: Lettres Persanes by Montesquieu* 1727: Réflexions nouvelles sur les femmes by Anne Thérèse (Marquise) de Lambert

1713: Projet pour rendre la paix perpétuelle en Europe by Charles-​Irénée Castel de Saint-​Pierre* 1716: Examen pacifique de la querelle de Mme Dacier et de M. de La Motte sur Homère by Étienne Fourmont* 1719: Discours sur la polysynodie ou pluralité des Conseils by Castel de Saint-​Pierre*

1700: Du célibat volontaire, ou La vie sans engagement by Gabrielle Suchon

Relevant Publications

Louise Dupin’s life

1732: The Dupins buy the Hôtel Lambert 1732: Louise opens her salon 1733: The Dupins purchase Château de Chenonceau 1734: Voltaire sends Louise plans for a work in progress, Alzire 1739: Louise’s father, Samuel Bernard, dies 1739: The Dupins sell the Hôtel Lambert

1743: Father Castel introduces Rousseau to Louise; Rousseau develops a friendship with Louise and her step-​son 1743: Rousseau works as a private tutor to Jacques-​Armand Dupin de Chenonceaux for about 8–​10 days 1743: Castel de Saint Pierre, friend and important influence for Louise, dies 1745: Louise’s mother dies 1745: Rousseau begins working as a secretary for both Louise and her stepson. During this time, Rousseau accompanies the Dupins to Chenonceau several times 1749: Jacques-​Armand Dupin de Chenonceaux marries Julie de Rochechouart-​Pontville

Years

1730–​1739

1740–​1749 1740: War of the Austrian Succession begins 1748: War of the Austrian Succession ends

1733: War of the Polish Succession begins 1738: War of the Polish Succession ends

Historical Context

(continued)

1732: Le Triomphe de l’amour, play by Pierre de Marivaux* 1733: Traité physique et historique de l’aurore boréale by Jean-​Jacques Dortous de Mairan* 1734: Lettres philosophiques by Voltaire* 1736: Traité de l’amitié by Anne Thérèse de Lambert 1736: Alzire by Voltaire* 1736: L’Apologie des dames, appuyée sur l’histoire, by Madame de Château-​Thierry Galien [anonymously] 1740: De la douceur by Castel de Saint-​Pierre* 1740: Institutions de physique by Émilie le Tonnelier de Breteuil, Marquise du Châtelet 1745: Œconomiques by Claude Dupin 1746: Essai sur l’origine des connaissances humaines by Étienne Bonnot de Condillac* 1747: Lettres d’une Péruvienne by Françoise Graffigny 1748: Mémoire sur les bleds by Claude Dupin 1748: De l’esprit des loix by Montesquieu* 1749: Réflexions sur quelques parties d’un livre intitulé “de l’esprit des loix” by Dupins (et al) 1749: 1st volume of Histoire naturelle, générale et particulière by de Buffon* 1749: Traité des systèmes by Condillac* 1749: Conseils à une amie by Madeleine d’Arsant de Puisieux

Relevant Publications

1760–​1769

1751: Rousseau leaves his job as secretary to the Dupins 1751: Jacques-​Armand and Julie’s son, Claude-​Sophie, is born 1755: An alleged illegitimate daughter of Jacques-​Armand, Marie-​Thérèse Adam, is born and Louise raises the child 1758: The Dupins buy the Hôtel de Vins 1758: Louise’s brother, Jules-​Armand de Fontaine, dies

1751: 1st volume of Encyclopédie is published 1754: Louis XVI is born 1755: Montesquieu dies 1756: Seven Years’ War begins

1750: Dissertation sur la question, Lequel de l’homme ou de la femme est plus capable de constance? by Mademoiselle Archambault 1750: Caractères by Madeleine de Puisieux 1750: Discours sur les sciences et les arts by Rousseau 1753: Mémoires sur l’ancienne chevalerie, considérée comme un établissement politique & militaire by Jean-​Baptiste de la Curne de Sainte-​Palaye* 1754: Discours sur l’origine et les fondements de l’inégalité parmi les hommes by Rousseau 1756: Essai sur les moeurs by Voltaire* 1758: De l’esprit by Claude-​Adrien Helvétius* 1758: Lettre à d’Alembert sur les spectacles by Rousseau 1758: Candide by Voltaire* 1762: Claude Dupin retires 1762: Rousseau’s Émile burned on 1761: De l’amitié by Geneviève Thiroux 1763: Louise’s daughter-​in-​law and grandson order of the Parlement of Paris d’Arconville leave the Dupins’ home 1763: Seven Years’ War ends 1761: La Nouvelle Héloïse by Rousseau 1765: Two of Louise’s sisters, Marie-​Louise 1764: Expulsion of Jesuits from France 1762: Du contrat social by Rousseau d’Arty and Françoise-​Thérèse Vallet de 1769: Napoleon Bonaparte is born 1762: Émile ou de l’éducation by Rousseau Villeneuve, die 1763: Entretiens de Phocion sur le rapport 1767: Dupin de Chenonceaux dies of yellow de la morale avec la politique by Gabriel fever, exiled in present-​day Mauritius Bonnot Mably* 1769: Claude Dupin dies 1764 Essai pour servir à l’histoire de la putréfaction by Geneviève Thiroux d’Arconville

Relevant Publications

1750–​1759

Historical Context

Louise Dupin’s life

Years

Table R.1 Continued

1778: Rousseau dies

1786: Louise’s stepson, Dupin de Francueil, dies 1788: Louise’s grandson, Claude-​Sophie, dies, leaving Louise with no direct descendants

1792: Louise abandons Paris for permanent residence at Chenonceau, accompanied by the family of her nephew 1794: Louise’s nephew, Pierre-​Armand de Villeneuve, dies in prison in Paris 1793: Citizen Dupin wins right to keep Chenonceau after a National Convention decree confiscated domain properties (she proved it had always been a private property and was thus exempt) 1799: Louise Dupin dies November 20.

1770–​1779

1780–​1789

1790–​1799

1772: De l’homme by Helvétius* 1774: Les Conversations d’Émilie by Louise d’Épinay* 1774: Vie de Marie de Médicis by Geneviève Thiroux d’ Arconville 1779: De l’éducation physique et morale des femmes by Charlotte Cosson de la Cressonière 1782: Adèle et Théodore by Stéphanie Félicité de Genlis 1785: Les Femmes comme il convient de les voir, ou Aperçu de ce qu’elles ont été et de ce qu’elles sont de de ce qu’elles pourraient être by Madame de Coicy 1791: Constitution created by 1790: Sur l’admission des femmes au droit au National Assembly cité by Nicolas de Condorcet 1791: Revolution begins in Haiti, 1791: Déclaration des droits de la femme et against colonial rule and slavery de la citoyenne by Olympe de Gouges 1792: First Republic of France begins 1791: Discours sur l’état de nullité dans 1793: Reign of Terror begins lequel on tient les femmes, relativement à la 1793: Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette politique by Élisabeth Bonaventure Lafaurie are guillotined 1792: A Vindication of the Rights of Woman 1794: Reign of Terror ends by Mary Wollstonecraft 1795: Constitution of 1795 established 1794: Esquisse d’un tableau historique des 1796: Napoleon named General of the progrès de l’esprit humain by Nicolas de army of Italy Condorcet 1799: Napoleon overthrows the 1797: Épître aux femmes by Constance Salm Directory, becomes First Consul (also known as de Pipelet) 1770: Marie Antoinette marries future King Louis XVI 1771: Paris Parlements are dissolved 1774: Louis XV dies, Louis XVI accedes to the throne 1778: Voltaire dies 1779: Serfdom abolished by comptroller general, Jacques Necker 1783: Treaty of Paris is signed, ending the American Revolutionary War 1789: French Revolution; Fall of the Bastille, Declaration of “Droits de l’homme”: (August 26)

Introduction to the Volume “It is likely that chance laid the foundations, that ignorance supplied the materials, that the desire to dominate began constructing the edifice, and that the design to get away with the injustice [of that domination] capped it off.”1 Louise Dupin imagines the development of inequality between women and men through a construction metaphor reminiscent of René Descartes’s famous architectural analogy in the Discourse on Method (1637). Descartes’s analogy is epistemological. He compares discarding his opinions to razing the ricketty foundations of a city built by many hands. Dupin’s metaphor is ethical. Through a kind of historical speculation practiced before her by the Cartesian feminist François Poulain de la Barre, she asks how it came to pass that men began to see themselves as superior to women, and how it then happened that women became their legal subordinates, excluded from goods both concrete (property) and abstract (knowledge). Whereas Descartes uses the analogy of compromised foundations to justify letting go “all at one go” of what he thinks he knows,2 Dupin uses the metaphor of shoddy construction to reveal the process by which an injustice develops, takes hold, and comes to appear natural. Throughout a work that she herself did not entitle the Work on Women, Dupin sketched out the origin and foundations of inequality between men and women, just a few years before Jean-​Jacques Rousseau gained everlasting fame for his Discourse on the Origin and Foundations of Inequality among Men. The scope of Dupin’s Work on Women is vast; its philosophical edge, sharp. It is a work of political philosophy that does not just recognize marriage as 1 Louise Dupin, “Discours préliminaire,” cited in Anicet Sénéchal, “Jean-​Jacques Rousseau, secrétaire de Mme Dupin,” 211. Confusingly, there are three drafts by this title, all three in Dupin’s hand. This one appears to be a version of a draft of a “Preliminary Discourse” now at the HRC (a document we call throughout “the short PD”). The third one is a long “Preliminary Discourse” at MJJR (which we call “the long PD”). Unfortunately, since Sénéchal only inventoried pieces in which Rousseau’s hand was apparent, we have no further information about the “Preliminary Discourse” from which he cites. 2 René Descartes, Discourse on the Method of Rightly Conducting One’s Reason and Seeking the Truth in the Sciences, in The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, trans. John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff, Dugald Murdoch (Cambridge University Press, 1985) 1:117.

2  Louise Dupin’s Work on Women the foundation of society (as almost all early modern political philosophy did), but that describes it as a leonine partnership which assigns all profits to one party, all debts to the other, and that would under normal circumstances be null and void. The Work is moreover a work of moral philosophy that shows how masculine vanity—​Dupin’s expression for that particular form of prejudice that we today call sexism—​distorts science, history, and law by aggrandizing men and diminishing women, sometimes to the point of erasing them altogether. And it is a work of feminist philosophy that analyzes the systemic disempowerment of women and attempts to overwhelm the power that subordinates them through a vast program of feminist recovery. Louise Dupin’s Work on Women is, at the same time, a story. It is a story of the interplay of hands and minds in intellectual creation. A story of the benign neglect that envelops women’s writing and leads to their exclusion from the stories told by entire traditions of knowledge. A story of auctions, archives, and painstaking reconstruction. And a story that is hopefully just beginning. In its broadest outlines, the story of the Work on Women is one that has been told before and will be told again by overlooked and undervalued classes of people, who force scholars to confront the injustices of the present, and to revise the narrative of how our uneven skyline emerged. But the characters, the circumstances, and the plot points of this story are absolutely unique. The opening premise of the story of Louise Dupin’s Work on Women is that it is only thanks to Rousseau that any of it still exists. Well, thanks to his handwriting. Jean-​Jacques Rousseau was Louise Dupin’s secretary.

Reappearing Ink “3000 pages of Rousseau dispersed in auctions!” announced Bernard Gagnebin in the April 26, 1958 issue of the Journal de Genève.3 The conservator of manuscripts at Public and University Library of Geneva devoted over half a page of the paper to informing the public of the contents of the Hôtel Drouot’s sale of thousands of pages featuring Rousseau’s handwriting in five auctions in 1951, 1957, and 1958. But the headline was the equivalent of clickbait. Gagnebin’s main worry is that “an unscrupulous or simply ignorant

3 Bernard Gagnebin, “3000 pages de Rousseau dispersés aux enchères!” Journal de Genève (April 26–​27, 1958): 5. Gagnebin coedited, with Marcel Raymond, the Pléiade edition of Rousseau’s complete works.

Introduction to the Volume  3 bookseller [might try to] pass off as Rousseau’s what is really only Dupin’s!” In the face of a false alarm, the 1958 reader of the Genevan weekly might have let their attention wander to the bottom third of the page, where Marcel Raymond reviews Jean Starobinski’s Jean-​Jacques Rousseau: Transparency and Obstacle (1957).4 That instant classic uplifts Rousseau’s ideal of transparency, his lament of its impossibility, and the motif of the veil throughout his work. One of the secrets Rousseau veils in his autobiography, the Confessions (1782, 1789), was a project that occupied almost six years of his life (1745–​ 1751). He describes his secretarial work for Dupin in a single sentence: “She never used me except to write under her dictation, or in research of pure erudition.”5 Dupin likely requested his discretion; members of her inner circle were aware of her project, and others seem to have had an inkling of it,6 but she had neither published it, nor circulated pieces of it in manuscript form. In any case, Rousseau had no desire to flaunt his participation in a feminist project.7 “To maintain vaguely that the sexes are equal and that their duties are the same,” he declares in Emile, or On Education (1762), “is to lose oneself in vain declaiming.”8 Declamations were rhetorical exercises of praise and blame typical in the Renaissance Querelle des femmes that Dupin aspired to transcend: “Wouldn’t we do better to seek to understand [men and women] equitably without making declamations?”9 We wonder how Dupin responded to her former secretary’s veiled slight that the entire Work on Women was nothing but vain declamation. Rousseau’s silence about his work for Dupin set the stage for the nonreception of her Work for the next two hundred years. Poulain de la Barre imagines that learned women in the past disappeared from historical record because “the demands of etiquette” prevented them from acquiring “any disciples or followers,” so that all of their learning died with them.10 4 Marcel Raymond, “Le Rousseau de Jean Starobinski,” Journal de Genève (April 26–​27, 1958): 5. 5 Jean-​Jacques Rousseau, The Confessions (Book VII), in The Collected Writings of Rousseau, vol. 5, eds. Christopher Kelly, Roger G. Masters, and Peter G. Stillman, trans. Christopher Kelly (University Press of New England: 1995), 287. 6 See below on Morand, Sallier, and Bernis (part of her circle) and Montesquieu (an acquaintance). 7 Early on, Rousseau may have entertained some thoughts about gender equality. Hunt Botting, “The Early Rousseau’s Egalitarian Feminism,” 1–​13. 8 Jean-​Jacques Rousseau, Emile, or On Education, trans. and ed. Allan Bloom (Basic Books, 1979), 362. 9 “Wouldn’t we do better to get to know one another equitably without making declamations?” “Chapter in which we examine the vices and faults given to women by men.” 10 François Poulain de la Barre, A Physical and Moral Discourse Concering the Equality of Both Sexes, in The Equality of the Sexes: Three Feminist Texts of the Seventeenth Century, ed. and trans. Desmond Clarke (Oxford University Press, 2013), 131.

4  Louise Dupin’s Work on Women But the phenomenon of women’s “disappearing ink” required the complicity of subsequent generations, Dupin argues (Art. 12).11 The fate of the Work on Women itself exemplifies the “process of submersion” that “later male gatekeepers” visited on early modern women’s accomplishments.12 In 1884, Gaston de Villeneuve-​ Guibert, Dupin’s great grandnephew published a prized portion of his inheritance: the contents of a “portfolio in red Morocco leather of the time, all stamped with fine gold ornamentation and fastened with a charming closure of chiseled silver.” Villeneuve-​Guibert confirms his great-​great aunt’s wit as a salonnière and affirms her lesser-​ known credentials as a writer: She had conceived the project of defending and avenging her sex in a work on women. To that end, she had assembled countless documents, rummaged through many libraries, consulted all the books dealing with illustrious women; and more: she scrutinized laws and decrees that set out the rights of women from the most distant past. [ . . . ] She approached this gigantic task with great ardor, and Rousseau made himself useful to her.13

But this work existed only in “discontinuous scraps,” and Villeneuve-​Guibert judges them “too disjointed for us to reveal more than the result of her research and the general work plan were we to try to assemble them.” Instead, he publishes Dupin’s “little light writings on several moral subjects” deemed acceptable for women: friendship, happiness, and sentiment.14 On record as a salonnière with a few musings to her name, Dupin is absent from the first histories of feminist thought written two decades later, despite having written the most in-​depth feminist work of eighteenth-​century France.15

11 Eileen O’Neill refers to Dupin in a landmark essay on forgotten women philosophers in European history: “Disappearing Ink,” 30. See also Ruud and Wilkin, “The Real Consequences of Imaginary Things.” Karen Offen cites Dupin’s project as evidence of scholarship on the history of women in a review essay: “French Women’s History: Retrospect (1789–​1940) and Prospect,” French Historical Studies 26, no. 4 (2003): 727–​767, p. 730. 12 Gelbart, Minerva’s French Sisters, 9. 13 Villeneuve-​Guibert, Le Portefeuille de Madame Dupin, 1–​37, 15–​16. Confusingly, Gaston de Villeneuve-​Guibert was related to Dupin in three ways. Gaston’s paternal grandfather René Vallet de Villeneuve was both Louise Dupin’s nephew and step-​grandson because René Vallet de Villeneuve’s mother was Louise’s step-​granddaughter, and his father was Louise’s nephew. Additionally, Gaston’s paternal grandmother (who married René Vallet de Villeneuve) was the great-​granddaughter of Louise’s aunt (her mother’s sister). 14 See Hayes, Women Moralists in Early Modern France. 15 For example, Georges Ascoli, “Essai sur l’histoire des idées féministes en France, du XVIe siècle à la Révolution,” Revue de synthèse historique 13 (1906): 25–​57.

Introduction to the Volume  5 The auctions deplored by Gagnebin dispersed Dupin’s papers to a multitude of libraries, as well as to private collections. Yet if Dupin’s papers were only preserved thanks to Rousseau’s monetizable handwriting, it was only thanks to their sale that they became public knowledge. In preparation for the auctions of 1957 and 1958, Dupin’s heirs commissioned Anicet Sénéchal, a teacher at the Lycée Buffon in Paris, to produce an inventory of the papers to be sold. That remarkable document, published in the annals of the Jean-​Jacques Rousseau Society, provides a complete sketch of Dupin’s work (see Appendix B).16 The biggest portions of papers relating to the Work on Women ended up at the Public and University Library of Geneva; at the Harry Ransom Center in Austin, Texas; and at the Musée Jean-​Jacques Rousseau in Montmorency. Smaller pieces of the Work on Women are in the collections of a half dozen other libraries. As librarians and curators cataloged and organized these manuscripts, fragments became accessible to scholars, who made sense of them, traced their location and chronology, and edited pieces of them.17 In 2022, when this book was in press, Frédéric Marty made the Work on Women available in its entirety in French for the first time.18 Through our own labor of reconstruction, translation, and annotation, we have removed obstacles that hinder access to Louise Dupin’s feminist thought.

16 Sénéchal, “Jean-​Jacques Rousseau, secrétaire de Mme Dupin.” 17 Angela Hunter provides an in-​depth account of this early recovery work in “The Unfinished Work on Louise Marie-​Madeleine’s Unfinished Ouvrage sur les femmes,” Eighteenth Century Studies 43, no. 1 (2009): 95–​111, p. 99. Leland Thielemann, in the 1970s and 1980s organized and transcribed the Dupin archive at HRC, with an eye to a descriptive bibliography or to an edition. Cynthia Manley continued Thielemann’s efforts into the early 2000s. Jean-​Pierre Le Bouler and Catherine Lafarge traced where pieces of Dupin’s work ended up after the auctions in 1950 and analyzed the books Dupin borrowed from the King’s library in “Catalogue topographique partiel des Papiers Dupin-​ Rousseau,” and “Les emprunts de Mme Dupin à la Bibliothèque du roi.” Le Bouler again, with Robert Thiéry, updated Sénéchal’s inventory when the Montgermont cache of Dupin papers came up for auction in 1980 in “Une partie retrouvée de l’Ouvrage sur les femmes.” Le Bouler on his own edited Article 1 of the Work on Women in 1986 and worked out the chronology of Rousseau’s first contact with the Dupin family in “Un chapitre inédit de l’Ouvrage sur les femmes de Mme Dupin”; and “Rousseau et les Dupin en 1743.” Sylvie Dangeville edited “On the Power of Husbands” and “On Rape” (Arts. 30 and 37), held at the University of Illinois in “Deux ‘articles’ inédits de l’Ouvrage sur les femmes de Mme Dupin.” And Frédéric Marty edited “On Generation” (Art. 2) and published a monograph on Dupin with extensive information about the Work on Women in “Rousseau secrétaire de Mme Dupin. L’article 2 de l’Ouvrage sur les femmes”; and Louise Dupin: Défendre l’égalité des sexes en 1750 (2021). 18 Louise Dupin, Des femmes: Observations du préjugé commun sur la différence des sexes.

6  Louise Dupin’s Work on Women

Bookends to a Book That Wasn’t Accomplishing anything in the realm of knowledge requires access, education, and skills, which women in Dupin’s time were systematically denied. Since men were the gatekeepers to institutions and the discourses they produced until the middle of the twentieth century or later, most women who managed to achieve intellectual distinction in France in the eighteenth century did so with the support of men.19 Two men were crucial supporting actors in the story of the Work on Women: Dupin’s mentor, Charles-​Irénée Castel de Saint-​Pierre, known as the Abbé de Saint-​Pierre, and her secretary, Rousseau. Their contributions bookend the story of the book that was not to be. Saint-​Pierre provided a blueprint that Dupin did not follow, and Rousseau provided the labor to support her own plan. Saint-​Pierre found his way to Dupin’s salon by the early 1730s.20 A half-​ century older than Dupin, he had learned the art of politesse in the salons of Madame de Lafayette and the Marquise de Lambert. Passionate about politics and systems, reforms and fairness, he had a plan for any social or political problem. He proposed a Hobbesian social contract between countries for peace in Europe21 and lost his seat in the Académie française for portraying Louis XIV as a despot.22 A devotee of utility, Saint-​Pierre strove to be useful to Dupin. Familiar with her “complaints against the injustice” of men, he penned an essay on women for her. He calls it a “canvas, that you are infinitely more capable of filling out than me with historical facts.”23 Saint-​ Pierre follows up ancient examples of women rulers with modern ones, and Western examples with Asian ones, a program Dupin would indeed follow in Part II. But his canvas was too small, too old, and not sufficiently philosophical for the tableau Dupin had in mind. Saint-​Pierre celebrated “warrior virtues” reminiscent of the femme forte ideal of the seventeenth century and 19 Gelbart, Minerva’s French Sisters, 9–​10. 20 In a 1735 letter to Dupin, Madame de Tencin feigns jealousy at the Abbé’s devotion to Dupin: “You are a rascal, my pretty little lady, when you speak to me of ‘my’ Abbé: you know in your conscience that this Abbé will be neither mine nor anybody’s, unless you wish it so. He is henceforth attached to your chariot; it is true that the chains are of roses, but they are chains nevertheless, and I don’t know what Philosophy will say, seeing one of her dearest infants tied up in this manner.” Claudine Guérin de Tencin, Portefeuille, 477. 21 Charles-​Irénée Castel de Saint-​ Pierre, Projet pour rendre la paix perpétuelle en Europe (Utrecht: A. Schouten, 1713). 22 Charles-​Irénée Castel de Saint-​Pierre, Discours sur la polysynodie: où l’on démontre que la polysynodie ou pluralité des conseils est la forme de ministère la plus avantageuse pour un roi et pour son royaume (Amsterdam: Du Villard & Changuion, 1719). 23 Charles-​Irénée Castel de Saint-​Pierre, “Lettre sur les femmes,” in Portefeuille, 269–​302, 281.

Introduction to the Volume  7 applied his erudition to accumulating women’s names without distinguishing legendary figures from historical ones. Moreover, he neglected causal analysis. How did inequality come to be, if men and women were naturally equal? In an early document which we call the long “Preliminary Discourse,” Dupin establishes her own blueprint in a prospectus of the whole work.24 This document—​very rough and all in her hand—​shows her to be deeply engaged with François Poulain de la Barre’s On the Equality of the Two Sexes (1673). She narrates humankind’s emergence from the state of nature; finds no significant physical differences between men and women; describes the education of boys and the noneducation of girls; and discusses “the manner in which the idea of the inferiority of women is continually reinforced” in the discourses of history, law, and politics—​subjects she would develop into multiple chapters. Did she assign her newly hired secretary to read this “Preliminary Discourse”? It was a different Castel—​Louis Bertrand Castel—​who sent Rousseau to Dupin, impressing on him that “one does nothing in Paris except by means of women.”25 The thirty-​year-​old interloper from Geneva was not finding a receptive audience for his musical annotation system and was in dire straits. On Father Castel’s suggestion, Rousseau visited Madame Dupin and became friendly with her stepson, Louis Dupin de Francueil, Claude Dupin’s son from a first marriage, and a fellow music lover. In March 1743, the three of them—​Rousseau, Dupin, and her stepson—​attended Guillaume-​François Rouelle’s chemistry lessons.26 Just a few weeks after Dupin’s mentor, Castel de Saint-​Pierre, died (April 1743); Rousseau had his first job for the Dupin family. Madame Dupin hired him to chaperone her thirteen-​year-​old son, Jacques-​Armand Dupin de Chenonceaux, for a week until a replacement could be found for the boy’s governor.27 Rousseau then left Paris for a year as secretary to the French ambassador to Venice, but in the fall of 1745, was hired back as “a sort of secretary” to the Dupin family, his services to be shared between Dupin de Francueil and Madame Dupin.28 “Madame Dupin 24 A sketch of the Work on Women, the long “Preliminary Discourse” has just been edited by Marty as Louise Dupin, Des femmes: Discours préliminaire. See also Marty, Louise Dupin, 117–​125. 25 Rousseau, Confessions, 243. 26 Le Bouler, “Rousseau et les Dupin en 1743,” 111–​112. Rousseau and Dupin de Francueil (and perhaps Louise) continued these classes again in 1745 when Rousseau was working in the Dupin household. 27 Thomas-​François Dalibard. Le Bouler, “Rousseau et les Dupin en 1743,” 114. Rousseau sent them his “Projet pour l’éducation de Monsieur de Sainte-​Marie.” Villeneuve-​Guibert includes it in the Portefeuille under the title “Mémoire présenté à M. Dupin sur l’éducation de son fils” (361–​414). 28 Rousseau, Confessions, 286. On the timing, see Le Bouler, “Rousseau et les Dupin en 1743,” 120; and Michel Launay, “Le Discours sur les sciences et les arts: Jean-​Jacques entre Mme Dupin et

8  Louise Dupin’s Work on Women had not waited for Jean-​Jacques,” Sénéchal emphasizes; “she had already assembled ideas and documents and had put other secretaries to work.”29 But Rousseau seems to have been a particularly valuable secretary. The son of a Genevan clockmaker, well-​read but mostly self-​taught, Rousseau had the skills, judgment, and tenacity necessary to support Dupin in achieving the vision that distinguished her project from the canvas offered to her by Saint-​Pierre. With Rousseau’s assistance, she would argue that “the usurpation of women’s rights was neither primitive, nor natural; it was modern.”30 In working for Dupin, Rousseau would in turn participate in the construction of a polemical change-​over-​time narrative and gain access to rare books. Rousseau left the Dupins’ service in early 1751, around the time that his Discourse on the Sciences and Arts (1751) was published. This winning submission to the 1749 contest sponsored by the Academy of Dijon earned him recognition (and notoriety). He followed up with the Discourse on the Origin and Foundations of Inequality among Men, deploying arguments and strategies borrowed from Dupin.31 Dupin abandoned her project around the time of Rousseau’s departure. Sénéchal reports finding sand, used for drying ink, still stuck to a few folios,32 suggesting that she never revisited some pieces. Were Rousseau’s services so essential that she gave up when he left? We suspect that she had come to view publishing a book as an impossible gambit. The misbehavior of her now adult, married son could be used to mock anything she might say about education. Furthermore, publication was a liability for women. Dupin knew women who had published, all anonymously: Françoise de Graffigny, author of the very popular novel, Letters from a Peruvian Woman (1747), and Madame de Tencin, whose Siege of Calais (1739) she ranks, with Madame de Lafayette’s Princess of Clèves (1678) and Zayde (1671), as the best novels in the French language (“The Learned”). Dupin paid attention when the Marquise de Lambert’s moral writings were published without her knowledge, and under her name. Among Dupin’s papers at MJJR, a page cut from the preface to Lambert’s New Reflections on Women reproduces (in print) a letter in which she expresses chagrin at the publication of her “manuscript Montesquieu,” in Jean-​Jacques Rousseau et son temps: politique et littérature au XVIIIe siècle, ed. Michel Launay (A. G. Nizet, 1969), 93–​103, p. 94. On a possible February 1746 start, see Sénéchal, 263.

29 Sénéchal, 186 note 3.

30 Thielemann, “The Thousand Lights,” 327.

31 Thielemann, “The Thousand Lights” and Wilkin, “ ‘Réformez vos contrats!’ ” 32 Sénéchal, 179.

Introduction to the Volume  9 on women.”33 Likewise in science: since there would be no doubt as to her authorship, Émilie du Châtelet framed her Foundations of Physics (1740) as advice to her son. Adding to the reputational risks of publishing as a woman, the Work on Women was polemical and bound to offend multiple categories of men. The Dupins’ critique of The Spirit of the Laws had already enraged Montesquieu, leading to ad hominem attacks on both Louise and Claude.34 Enmity was no prerequisite to misogyny (see Art. 45); as the condescension of a member of Dupin’s circle reveals: “Madame Dupin, who was very pretty, and who always liked the idea of thinking more than she liked thinking, worked for ten years to show that men have no superiority, even physically, over women. I don’t think that her work, if it ever comes out, will change received ideas.”35

The Work on Women under Construction Dupin’s Work on Women never came out, and Sénéchal describes a “construction site” (chantier):36 drafts and notes in various stages of completion and assembly, some continuous and some evidently disordered by previous handlers. There is only one possible title for the whole work, in one of three drafts that Dupin had labeled “Preliminary Discourse”—​one that Sénéchal did not see, as it was part of the Montgermont lot of Dupin papers auctioned earlier in 1751 (see Appendix B). Inside the cover of this draft, there is a title featuring cross-​outs and additions: “physical, historical, and moral observations on the common prejudice of the difference of the sexes.” The crossed-​out adjectives correspond to three of the four sections of the total project.37 On the outside cover of this draft, Dupin wrote “first sketch,” 33 The letter is reproduced in most editions of Lambert’s New Reflections after 1729. We were not able to identify the edition of the cut-​out page at MJJR. We consulted Anne-​Thérèse de Margenat de Courcelles, Marquise de Lambert, Réflexions nouvelles sur les femmes et lettres sur la véritable éducation (Amsterdam: Pierre Humbert, 1732), 4. 34 In a July 1749 letter: “Madame Dupin is furious about what she claims I said against women; if ever I write the history of illustrious caillettes [ninnies], she will be the queen.” Charles de Secondat, Baron de Montesquieu, Correspondance de Montesquieu, eds. André Morize and François Gebelin (Champion: 1914), 216. Marty relates this nastiness in Louise Dupin, 215–​219. 35 François Joachim de Pierre, Cardinal de Bernis, Mémoires et lettres, ed. Frédéric Masson (Paris: Société d’éditions littéraires et artistiques, 1903), 1:98–​99. These memoirs, written before 1758, were not published until the early twentieth century. Rousseau identifies Bernis as part of Dupin’s circle in Confessions, 245. 36 Sénéchal, 179. 37 She does not refer to the Law section. Granted, there was no adjective pertaining to law that could have been added to this list; légal at the time was almost exclusively used to refer to Mosaic Law.

10  Louise Dupin’s Work on Women

Figure 1  Folder of Article 23, “On Education,” with title, flourish, number in Rousseau’s hand, and hole for string. Courtesy of The William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, University of California, Los Angeles.

identifying the contents as a draft. Another hand, probably after her death, added: “Madame Dupin’s work on women.” Villeneuve-​Guibert referred to his great-​aunt’s “work on women,” and subsequent scholars made it into a title. Marty uses Dupin’s draft title, but we have kept the working title as an homage to the construction site. To visualize how Dupin built the Work on Women, it is helpful to imagine a filing cabinet with hanging file folders,38 though Dupin’s folders were probably layered in horizontal piles in an armoire or trunk. The basic ingredients of Dupin’s filing system were loose-​leaf pages and papers twice the size folded in half and labeled with their contents. We have found holes at the edge of some folders (Art. 23), which indicate that they were tied closed with string (see Figure 1).39 Folios traveled from folder to folder. Sénéchal saw folders

38 The hanging file folder was invented in the late nineteenth century. 39 String tying packets of paper together was the original means of filing papers, through a vertical storage system that involved hanging documents on walls. Heather Wolfe and Peter Stallybrass, “The Material Culture of Record-​Keeping in Early Modern England,” in Archives and Information in the Early Modern World, eds. Liesbeth Corens, Kate Peters, Alexandra Walsham (Oxford University Press, 2018), 179–​208.

Introduction to the Volume  11 containing reading excerpts, labeled with the title of the book;40 folders containing contents that did not match the folder title;41 and folders labeled “Miscellaneous” (Mélanges) containing “drafts, notes, excerpts, etc. without any order whatsoever”—​the leftovers of what Dupin did not use elsewhere.42 The folders that have been most consistently preserved are those that were titled and numbered in Rousseau’s hand—​the criterion in Sénéchal’s system for distinguishing drafts included in the Work on Women from extraneous pieces (on our use of “article” vs. “chapter,” see Appendix B).43 Some numbered folders contain complete, coherent chapters; others contain unprocessed excerpts (Art. 8); end in lists (Art. 26); are only rough sketches (Art. 7); or comprise “a discontinuous series of notes and observations” (Art. 17).44 Some drafts lacking folders and numbers, like “Reflections on the Adornments of Women,” are less rough and more continuous than the contents of several numbered folders. The construction site is a record of Dupin’s and Rousseau’s working methods, and a rich example of the social character of authorship and bookmaking in the eighteenth century. Rousseau performed standard secretarial duties for Dupin. He took dictation, made clean copies, and made reading excerpts, which sometimes involved translating passages from Latin. 1. Dictation. We glimpse evidence of dictation in corrections that Rousseau made “live” as he was writing down what he heard Dupin say. In the Article 23 draft, we see Dupin backtrack mid-​sentence as Rousseau adjusts accordingly; he crosses out a word he hasn’t finished writing (“determines absolu[tely]”) and follows immediately with the correction (“not only encourages”). A correction in the draft of Article 42 shows that Rousseau heard “without” and then realized that Dupin meant “100” as she continued speaking; sans and cent sound the same in French. 2. Copying. “Observations on the Equality of the Sexes and on their Difference” (Art. 1) demonstrates Rousseau’s work as a copyist. In an early draft all in Dupin’s hand, we find suggestions, likely by Sauveur-​François

40 Sénéchal, 188. 41 Sénéchal, 179. 42 Sénéchal, 259. 43 Sénéchal, 184. 44 “Various European Countries.” Sénéchal 239. We have not consulted the draft in Rousseau’s hand, which ended up at the Abbaye de Chaalis. What we find cataloged under the rubric of Art. 17 at the HRC ranges from full drafts (including a history of Brittany with a giant waterhole through it) to a simple list of the rulers of Navarre and their dates—​all in Dupin’s hand.

12  Louise Dupin’s Work on Women Morand, a founder of the Académie de chirurgie (surgery) and the director of the Académie des sciences.45 He recommends shedding the opening quote and beginning the chapter with the next page. Further down, he suggests: “Wouldn’t it be good here to give some general idea of what is meant by sex. And then write a first article that would have as a title ‘particular organization of the difference of the sexes, etc.’ ” Dupin followed this advice; in a draft in Rousseau’s neat écriture ronde (French round hand), the Sinibaldus quote is gone and there is a section called “Particular Organization.” On the cover, Rousseau identifies the cleaner draft as a “copy.”46 However, we do not always find rough drafts leading to cleaner drafts of the same chapter. Often, Dupin cannibalizes bits from one piece for another. In Article 23, a chunk on boys’ education taken from the long “Preliminary Discourse,” and commentary about how boys are taught heroism in school is taken from a draft of a history of Macedonia, featuring Alexander the Great (see Figure 2). It was the job of the secretary to write neatly, and the prerogative of the employer to write sloppily.47 Dupin’s angular scrawl was not necessarily a mark of her lack of formal education, but her nonstandard spelling was (see Figure 3). French spelling was beginning to be standardized in the eighteenth century, based on etymological principles relating to Latin. Latin was deemed superfluous for girls, and although Dupin had some Latin training,48 evidently she did not learn these rules. Like most literate women, she “fell back on the phonetic spelling the uneducated had been using for generations, modified more or less by their familiarity with printed models.”49 In copying out clean drafts, Rousseau would smooth out Dupin’s spelling quirks (such as her doubling of consonants in obbsservations); flesh out her abbreviations (h. for homme; f. for femme; p for pour or premier; m for mais, q for que, and =​ité for égalité); and integrate corrections and additions she had made to

45 On Morand, see Gelbart, 170; and Marty, 113–​114. 46 According to Le Bouler, “Un article inédit,” 253. We did not see this. 47 Blair, “Early Modern Attitudes towards the Delegation of Copying,” 275–​276. 48 Villeneuve-​Guibert, Portefeuille, 34. This is confirmed by folios listed on the Bibliorare website in advance of a May 29, 2015 sale by the dealer Alde at the Salle Rossini in Paris. The photo of the first page and the description indicate Dupin’s translation of passages (followed up with further passages translated by a secretary—​not Rousseau) from Jean-​Henri Cohausen’s Hermippus redivivus (1742), about old age and the means of prolonging life. In the top left of the folio, Dupin writes, “translated from Latin.” 49 Dena Goodman, “L’Ortografe des dames: Gender and Language in the Old Regime,” French Historical Studies 25, no. 2 (Spring 2002): 191–​223 (195).

Figure 2  Draft of “Macedonia” repurposed with commentary on education of boys for Article 23, “On Education.” Rousseau’s hand on the right; Dupin on the left. Courtesy of The William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, University of California, Los Angeles.

Figure 3  Dupin’s hand with abbreviations from Article 23, “On Education.” Courtesy of The William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, University of California, Los Angeles.

Introduction to the Volume  15 the previous draft. To accommodate corrections, the page is divided into two columns. Rousseau writes in the right-​hand column, where Dupin makes small edits, crossing out words and inserting words between the lines. The left-​hand column is blank, to provide space for Dupin’s additions.50 Dupin indicates the place where the addition should go with matching symbols. Seeing a 0 in the right column, Rousseau would look for the same 0 in the left column, and would, in the new draft, insert that addition at that spot. 3. Excerpting. Rousseau made excerpts from books assigned to him by Dupin to skim or to search for passages she had seen cited elsewhere. To say that these included over 100 titles does not do justice to Rousseau’s labor, because many of these books comprised multiple volumes. His longest series of excerpts, according to Sénéchal’s inventory, numbered 178 folios of passages copied from Claude Fleury’s 36-​volume Church History (1722–​1736). He undoubtedly made good use of indexes.51 While taking dictation and copying drafts were mechanical exercises, good judgment—​ a prized quality in secretaries52—​was required in selecting passages. Rousseau fast forwards in excerpts of Jean Gillet’s Treatise on Tutorships (1656): “After having thoroughly declaimed against women, cited Seneca, Plato, and even the Gospel that compares them to snakes, he adds [ . . . ].” Enticed by her secretary’s snarky summary, Dupin evidently read the book herself; she cites a passage from his Treatise in “On Tutorship” (Art. 36) that Rousseau did not include in his excerpts. Similarly, additions in Dupin’s hand to Rousseau’s excerpts of André Favyn’s Theater of Honor and Ancient Chivalry (1620) indicate that she went back and read around in it. Rousseau also made pencil marks in the margins of books—​lines down the side of passages he thought might interest her.53 For Latin books, Rousseau’s excerpts are also translations; this was especially crucial for Part III, where Dupin compares what French jurists said about Roman law to what Roman law actually said. Rousseau’s excerpts informed Dupin of the content of a book, especially when that book was inaccessible to her because it was in Latin, and 50 Rousseau used this double-​column method in later work, often making a crease down the middle of the folio to create a clean line against which to align the text in the right-​hand column. We have seen no folded folios in the Work on Women. 51 Marty, Louise Dupin, 103. 52 Blair, “Early Modern Attitudes towards the Delegation of Copying,” 280. 53 Le Bouler and Lafarge, “Les emprunts de Mme Dupin,” 122–​123.

16  Louise Dupin’s Work on Women provided “stubs” that she could integrate into her drafts. They were a paper quarry from which she could extract the building materials she needed for work she was constructing. Rousseau usually includes one passage to a folio, so that Dupin could extract a folio from the series and integrate it into a draft. Often, she selected excerpts to summarize. Four continuous folios from Fleury’s Church History plopped in the middle of the draft of Article 8 indicate either that she meant to mine their contents in a subsequent draft or that she had already done so to her satisfaction and the folios had not yet been removed from the folder. In other cases, she integrated the text of the excerpts directly into her draft. In Article 23, Dupin takes a folio containing a passage about the teaching vocation of the Ursulines from Rousseau’s excerpts of Pierre Hélyot’s eight-​volume History of Monastic Orders (1714–​1719); she changes some words and adds text all around it to fit it in a development about the decline of the education on offer for girls (see Figure 4). While building one’s text from excerpts of other books may not meet today’s standards of academic integrity, it was common practice in the eighteenth century.54 This brings us to Dupin’s sources. Sources identified in the left-​hand column are usually holdovers from Rousseau’s excerpts. Dupin did not reference her sources consistently, which was hardly unusual,55 and one source often hides another, as erudite titles mask multivolume compilations. Jean-​ Pierre Le Bouler—​the first scholar to edit any part of the Work on Women—​ emphasizes “the difficulty experienced by the reader (and editor) of Madame Dupin in separating the listed references from those which, taken from this or that ‘work, rich in citations [ . . . ]’ are ‘probably second hand’.”56 We have pursued unmentioned intermediary sources to the best of our ability and documented our findings in the notes to give readers an accurate picture of what Dupin was reading. Her Work on Women reflects the growing market for books that made specialized discourses accessible to laypeople (law, for instance), and that serialized popular genres of writing (like travel narratives). Dupin also refers to books she read about in periodicals, sometimes citing the book rather than the review she had read. The Dupins

54 Building books from excerpts was a scribal practice perfected in the sixteenth century. See Anthony Grafton, Inky Fingers: The Making of Books in Early Modern Europe (Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2020), 5. 55 As Le Bouler remarks, her husband’s works are equally minimalistic in their references. “Un article inédit,” 245, note 12. 56 Le Bouler, “Un article inédit,” 245. He echoes Sénéchal, 188 and 282.

Introduction to the Volume  17

Figure 4  Excerpt from Hélyot’s History of Monastic Orders in Rousseau’s hand, with commentary by Dupin. Courtesy of The William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, University of California, Los Angeles.

undoubtedly subscribed to several of these periodicals (Le Mercure de France and Le Journal des sçavans) and probably received books by subscription as well, such as Jean-​Frédéric Bernard’s Ceremonies and Religious Customs (see the introduction to Part II). Letters written to her by Saint-​Pierre, Morand,

18  Louise Dupin’s Work on Women and Voltaire reveal a steady book traffic among friends,57 and she borrowed books from the King’s library, where Claude Sallier, who was part of her circle, almost certainly set aside books for her based on her interests.58 She also had access to books in the library of the Académie des inscriptions.59 Dupin’s sources were not just textual. She draws from engravings in Bernard de Montfaucon’s Antiquity Explained and Represented in Figures (1719) and from his Monuments of the French Monarchy (1729–​1733). She describes an image in an early sixteenth-​century printed books of hours (Art. 8); Marguerite Bahuche’s painting of the Sibyls in the church of Saint-​Séverin (Art. 8); and Jean-​Baptiste Santerre’s controversial painting of Adam and Eve sans belly buttons (Art. 45).

Madame Dupin in Society Books in the absence of the interpersonal exchange that Dupin calls “commerce” would not have much value. As she recognizes in “On Education” (Art. 23), social interaction is essential to accessing new ideas and thus for developing one’s own. Women contributed to the development and circulation of knowledge as hostesses of weekly receptions in which men and women gathered for conversation or entertainment. In the eighteenth century, these gatherings were called assemblées, sociétés, or cercles, but since the nineteenth century have been called salons; their hostesses, salonnières.60 Hostesses issued invitations, set the tone and guided conversation, welcomed guests and connected them to each other, provided refreshment, organized entertainment (musical performances, games, readings of literary works).61 57 See Marty, Louise Dupin, 57 (Saint-​Pierre); 114 (Morand); 64–​65 (Voltaire). 58 Sénéchal 277. 59 Marty, Louise Dupin, 102. 60 There is a rich scholarly literature on the salon tradition in France. See Joan Landes, Women and the Public Sphere in the Age of the French Revolution (Cornell University Press, 1988); Dena Goodman, The Republic of Letters: A Cultural History of the French Enlightenment (Cornell University Press, 1994); Daniel Gordon, Citizens Without Sovereignty: Equality and Sociability in French Thought, 1670–​1789 (Princeton University Press, 1994); Steven Kale, French Salons: High Society and Political Sociability from the Old Regime to the Revolution of 1848 (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004); Antoine Lilti, The World of the Salons: Sociability and Worldliness in Eighteenth-​Century Paris (Oxford University Press, 2020)—​abridged version of Le monde des salons: sociabilité et mondanité à Paris au XVIIIe siècle (Fayard, 2005); Faith Beasley, Salons, History, and the Creation of Seventeenth-​ Century France: Mastering Memory (Ashgate, 2006); Jolanta T. Pekacz, Conservative Tradition in Pre-​revolutionary France: Parisian Salon Women (Peter Lang, 1999). Lilti discusses the various terms used for these types of gatherings (Le monde des salons, 135–​141). 61 In his definition of a salon, Lilti focuses on mixed-​gender sociability (Le monde des salons 116), respect for politesse in conversations (110–​111), and the presence of food and entertainments of

Introduction to the Volume  19 In so doing, they made intellectual connections flourish and mediated between artists and writers “and the public of wealthy amateurs and government officials who controlled state-​ sponsored institutions of letters.”62 Salons were social networks that overlapped with other networks: the cultural scene of operas and theaters; the political network of ambassadors, visiting dignitaries, and bureaucrats; and various formal and informal philosophical, literary, and scientific networks, many of which excluded women from membership. They were also social circuits. Some guests were partial to a particular salon—​and some had limited invitations—​while others frequented multiple salons, of which there were dozens at any given time in Paris. Historians continue to explore the doings, attendance, and discussions of specific salons, but evidence suggests that among the most well-​known eighteenth-​century salons, attendees were disproportionately male, aristocratic, and well-​educated.63 Friday was the day that Louise Dupin hosted gatherings in her residence in Paris, first at the magnificent Hôtel Lambert (1732–​1739), and then, after 1741, at the less opulent but more convenient Hôtel de Vins in the financial district (hôtel, in this context, refers to an urban mansion). Contemporary accounts of Dupin’s salon, as of other salons, enumerate its most illustrious guests and highlight the burnishing and tarnishing of its attractions.64 Madame Dupin’s salon flourished in the 1730s and 1740s. “As brilliant at that time as any other in Paris,” Rousseau remarks, her home “drew together social circles which needed only to be a little less numerous to be the elite of every sort,” for she hosted “all the glamorous people: Nobility, literary people, beautiful women. Only Dukes, Ambassadors, knights of the cordon bleu.”65 various sorts (384–​386). Dupin’s salons included musical performances and literary readings (notably, by Fontenelle). 62 Elena Russo, Styles of Enlightenment: Taste, Politics, and Authorship in Eighteenth-​Century France (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007), 63. 63 Melanie Conroy and Chloe Summers Edmonson, “The Empire of Letters: Enlightenment-​Era French Salons,” in Digitizing Enlightenment, eds. Simon Burrow and Glenn Roe (Oxford University Studies in the Enlightenment, 2020), 339. Conroy and Edmonson use a quantitative approach to understand likely discussions in salons and their influence on Enlightenment thought. They studied the social composition of six select female-​hosted salons, categorizing attendees by social networks (e.g., military, nobility) and knowledge networks (e.g., letters, sciences, etc., each with various subareas). Dupin’s salon was not included in this study. See also Maria Teodora Comsa, Melanie Conroy, Dan Edelstein, Chloe Summers Edmondson, and Claude Willan, “The French Enlightenment Network,” Journal of Modern History 88, no. 3 (2016): 495–​534. 64 The historical records available tend to be contemporaneous letters, memoirs, diaries, and chronicles published about social and political life (Conroy and Edmonson, 333; 336–​337). 65 Confessions, 245. For a partial list of Dupin salon attendees, see Buon, 184–​188. For a discussion of Dupin’s familial, social and intellectual relations, see Marty, Louise Dupin, 37–​82.

20  Louise Dupin’s Work on Women A list of 223 women’s names and addresses that Dupin used for social visits reveals acquaintances with aristocratic women of the highest echelons.66 Of the prestigious men in her circle mentioned by Rousseau—​“M. de Fontenelle, the Abbé de Saint-​Pierre, the Abbé Sallier, M. de Fourmont, M. de Bernis, M. de Buffon, M. de Voltaire,”67—​most were born in the seventeenth century, only two were younger than her, and all of them died before her. Salon membership evolved and overlapped, but it appears that in the 1740s, Dupin’s salon skewed scientific and academic, with connections to the royal academies devoted to literature, archeology and history, science and surgery (see the introduction to Part I).68 Claude-​Adrien Helvétius visited her salon, and his wife—​Anne-​Cathérine Helvétius—​appears on the list of residences that Dupin visited.69 Dupin was a supporter of the Encyclopédie project,70 but not connected to its leaders—​Diderot, d’Alembert, or d’Holbach—​except via her secretary, who wrote his entries on music while still in her service. Nor was she closely connected with Émilie du Châtelet, even though the Marquis du Châtelet bought the Hôtel Lambert from Claude Dupin in 1739, and despite the fact that Émilie was the lover of Dupin’s friend, Voltaire. In exile much of the time, Voltaire mainly kept in touch with Dupin through correspondence, although he did attend her salon and dinners when in Paris,71 and his niece and intermediary, Madame Denis, attended in his absence. Dupin’s husband merits special mention in this overview of her social and intellectual connections. Claude Dupin was interested in economics and politics, publishing (anonymously) in this area.72 Together, they collaborated with a couple of friends on a critique of Montesquieu’s Spirit of the Laws (1748).73 This much-​ anticipated book propelled Montesquieu to fame 66 Villeneuve-​Guibert reproduces the list (581–​590). Buon calculates that 85 percent of the women were noble (185). The list likely dates sometime in the period between 1751 and 1754 (Marty, Louise Dupin, 37–​38). 67 Confessions, 245. 68 Based on the limited data available to Conroy and Edmonson, Dupin’s members were associated with the knowledge networks: Sciences, Sciences (mathematical), Letters (philosophical), Letters, Letters (literary), Political economy, and Sciences (natural), meaning that men identified as guests of her salon published works in these areas (Melanie Conroy, email message to Hunter, July 5, 2021). 69 Lilti mentions Helvétius describing his plans for visiting various people, including Madame Dupin on a Sunday evening (Le monde des salons, 121–​122). 70 In a letter, Dupin asks Rousseau to thank Diderot for sorting out subscriptions. “Louise Marie Madeleine Dupin [née Guillaume de Fontaine] to Jean-​Jacques Rousseau: November 1753,” Electronic Enlightenment Scholarly Edition of Correspondence, ed. Robert McNamee et al., Vers. 3.0 (University of Oxford, 2022), https://​doi.org/​10.13051/​ee:doc/​rou​sjeV​F002​0238​a1c. 71 Villeneuve-​Guibert reproduces some of Voltaire’s letters to Dupin in the Portefeuille 321–​327. 72 Notably, his Œconomiques (1745) and a piece about wheat production and trade, Mémoire sur les bleds (1748). 73 Potentially any or all of these three: Father Guillaume François Berthier, editor of the Jesuit Journal de Trévoux, Father Plesse, Count Carl Fredrick Scheffer, Swedish ambassador to France

Introduction to the Volume  21 throughout Europe and was the talk of the Dupin salon. Claude was an ardent defender of the ferme générale, a system of tax and customs oversight across the kingdom that Montesquieu had criticized; Louise objected to his comments on women and luxury, marriage, polygamy, and the principles of governments. They had a handful of copies printed for a limited circle—​ Reflections on Some Parts of a Book Entitled On the Spirit of the Laws (1749)—​ and hardly more of a revised version printed a few years later: Observations on a Book Entitled On the Spirit of the Laws.74 Both of these books were known to be Claude’s, and Louise’s participation was not a secret.75 A cache of her preparatory materials and early draft sections for this group refutation are collected at the municipal library of Bordeaux. In this “Critique of The Spirit of the Laws,” we see her work in several sections as well as in a long preface.76 A note on a manuscript cover page may be evidence of the spouses’ cooperative spirit: under the title in Rousseau’s neat hand—​“Preface to the Critique of The Spirit of the Laws”—​is a crossed-​out but just barely legible line in Louise’s hand: “Went to sleep at four in the morning, please don’t make any noise.”77 If these papers were on a desk in a chamber adjoining her bedroom,78 the note was perhaps addressed to Claude and the others reassembling the next day. The group project lasted several months, just a fraction of the late nights Louise put into the Work on Women over the years. Claude seems to have respected the space and time she needed for her scholarly work on women.

On Fortunes and Futures Dupin’s participation in the world of elite sociability, and her access to intellectual resources both human and material, was made possible by the vast (Marty, Louise Dupin, 224–​225). Rousseau worked as secretary for this project (although he was not the only one). 74 Réflexions sur quelques parties d’un livre intitulé De l’esprit des loix, 2 vol. (Paris: Benjamin Serpentin [Claude Guérin], 1749). The revised version (which seems to have been Claude’s handiwork) was titled Observations sur un livre intitulé De l’esprit des loix (n.p., n.d., 3 vol.). 75 Marty summarizes a few notices of Louise’s participation (Louise Dupin, 216–​219). 76 Marty describes these working drafts, many of which are Louise’s contributions, noting that a separate collection of Claude’s preparatory manuscripts is missing (Louise Dupin, 234–​239). 77 This line was first deciphered by Sénéchal (227–​228). 78 The salon at the Hôtel de Vins where Dupin received people contained an antichamber, a dining room, and a salon de compagnie holding about twenty people. This adjoined her appartement, which no doubt included several rooms as well (Buon, 71).

22  Louise Dupin’s Work on Women wealth accumulated by her father and husband. She was the daughter of the powerful financier and banker Samuel Bernard and Armande (Manon) Carton Dancourt de Fontaine, a Parisian actress from a famous theater family.79 Bernard amassed his fortune in banking and commerce, including capital investment in the slave trade. He was Louis XIV’s principle banker, loaned large sums to the royal treasury (for which he was ennobled in 1699) and to the nobility, and made handsome profits during the Regency by speculating downward on the collapse of France’s first central bank in 1720.80 Born a Protestant with familial ties to the Dutch Republic, he renounced Protestantism after the 1685 Revocation of the Edict of Nantes. Shortly thereafter he invested in the Compagnie de Guinée, which netted profits for investors from the trafficking of humans from the Central Coast of West Africa to the Caribbean, where sugar plantations consumed black labor and lives. Along with several formerly Protestant bankers, Bernard was one of the twelve shareholders of the Compagnie de Saint-​Domingue (established 1698–​ 1699), which involved speculation on profits from sugar and the slave trade. He was also one of the select investors in the Compagnie de l’Assiente (1702) organized by the kings of Spain and France to run trade (including human trafficking) in the Spanish Atlantic and Caribbean colonies.81 Through these ventures, Bernard enriched himself and his family. In 1722, the same year that Louise, at the age of 16, married Claude Dupin, Bernard acquired the magnificent Château de Passy for his mistress Armande; Armande in turn co-​purchased the Hôtel Lambert with Claude Dupin in 1732.82 Although Bernard’s daughters with Armande—​Louise and her two sisters—​would not inherit the colossal sums received by his legitimate children at his death (1739), he ensured that they grew up with exceptional means and connections, even though on paper, their father was Armande’s husband,

79 Buon speculates that Louise’s maternal grandfather was not actually actor and dramatist Florent Carton Dancourt, but instead the man listed as Louise’s official godfather, the Duc d’Aumont, first gentleman of the King’s chamber (also present at the signing of the Dupin marriage contract). Buon, 44. 80 Marty, Louise Dupin, 40; Buon, 36–​38. Bernard became the Comte de Coubert through purchase of a titled domain. 81 Although not particularly profitable, this initiative was instrumental in turning what is now Haiti into a profitable plantation economy. Whereas in 1700 there had been around 9,100 slaves in Sainte-​ Domingue, by 1715 that number had tripled, and in 1720, there were around 47,500. Karsten Voss and Klaus Weber, “Their Most Valuable and Vulnerable Asset: Slaves on the Early Sugar Plantations of Saint-​Domingue (1697–​1715),” Journal of Global Slavery 5, no. 2 (2020): 204–​237, pp. 210–​211, 217–​220. 82 Armande gained the title Dame de Passy through this purchase in 1722 (Buon, 48). The Hôtel Lambert was co-​purchased in 1732 (Marty, Louise Dupin, 314).

Introduction to the Volume  23 Jean-​Louis Guillaume de Fontaine—​an écuyer (squire) and a comptroller in the Navy. Bernard’s network of elite financial clients led to connections that carried into Louise’s generation. He loaned a large sum to the Comtesse de Parabère (mistress of Philippe d’Orléans), from whom Claude purchased property near his native region of Berry; Parabère also figures on Dupin’s list of visits.83 Most importantly, he ensured that Louise would enjoy high social status by sponsoring his son-​in-​law’s entrance into the ferme générale, through which tax collection was outsourced to private financiers. To obtain a post as a tax farmer, one had to pay a sizable deposit into a lease, and in 1726 Bernard secured Dupin’s spot and advanced the sum for it. A fermier-​général worked under orders of the king who assigned a set number of leases granting tax farmers the right to collect these revenues through local officials. They paid a fixed amount to the king’s treasury, keeping the profit as well as interest from various initiatives for themselves. During Claude’s tenure, the ferme took on an additional role in the king’s finances, advancing sums to the treasury and gaining interest from it. Claude’s wealth and status grew spectacularly after he became a fermier-​général. In 1728 he was appointed conseiller-​ secrétaire du Roi (counselor and secretary to the King), a venal office that after twenty years of service would ennoble him and his descendants.84 He bought the Château de Chenonceau (1733) and the Marquisat du Blanc (1738).85 In 1748, he rose to the Comité des caisses, which managed the entire ferme operation. Although the ferme was the source of the lion’s share of his wealth (still worth only 10 percent of his father-​in-​law’s at his death), in 1748 he followed in Bernard’s footsteps by joining a group of tax farmers investing in the Société de Guinée which trafficked humans for enslavement.86 Given that the (mis)management of tax collection was one of the main complaints registered by the French people in the regional cahiers de doléances leading up to the Estates General of 1789, it is extraordinary that the widow of a tax farmer survived the French Revolution unscathed.87 She fled Paris for Chenonceau in September

83 Louise’s sister, Marie-​Louise d’Arty (also fathered by Bernard), was the mistress of the blood prince Louis-​François Bourbon, Prince de Conti (future protector of Rousseau) for over a decade (Marty, Louise Dupin, 40–​41). 84 Buon, 68. 85 Marty, Louise Dupin, 314. 86 Marty, Louise Dupin, 122, note 16. 87 The writer George Sand, Dupin’s descendant via her stepson’s second marriage, would later associate Louise with the more democratic views of her mentor, Saint-​Pierre (Marty, Louise Dupin, 273–​274).

24  Louise Dupin’s Work on Women 1792.88 Around this time, the operations manager of the château, the Abbé Lecomte, burned paintings, papers, and most of Dupin’s correspondence89 to thwart the curiosity of vindictive revolutionaries and as it turns out, of future historians. In Year II of the Republic (1793), the National Convention decreed the confiscation of all domains having ever belonged to the Crown, considered national assets. On the seizure list for the region around Tours were the Chenonceau castle and estates, the erstwhile residence of Diane de Poitiers (mistress of Henri II), Catherine de Médicis (widow of Henri II), and Louise de Lorraine (widow of Henri III). But Citizen Dupin protested that Chenonceau had always been a private property.90 She prevailed and remained there until her death in 1799. We began this introduction by lifting the veil on a non-​dit (something left unsaid) in Rousseau’s Confessions: the nature of the project to which he had served as secretary to Louise Dupin and the intellectual debts he owed to her. We round it out with a reflection on things left unsaid in the resulting, unfinished Work on Women. Dupin benefited from the finance sector that made her family’s fortunes and their connections to the monarchy and high nobility. She argued vehemently for equality between men and women, for independence and freedom and natural human rights (Art. 27). Yet she was invested in social stratification, maintaining that women and men should be equal within the rank to which they belonged. She argued that whether under a monarchy or in a republic, “subordination among the various states forming a body politic is inevitable for the common good” (Art. 27). In the French body politic of the eighteenth century, the most privileged class—​the nobility—​was exempt from the taille (income tax), a privilege that could be bought by tax farmers like Claude Dupin who made their fortune on the backs of non-​noble taxpayers. Though Dupin was of bourgeois stock—​the portion of the third estate that would benefit most from the French Revolution—​she identified with the second estate (the nobility). She argued that women used

88 Buon, 112. Her nephew, Pierre-​Armand Vallet de Villeneuve, stayed behind in Paris, although his wife and two sons accompanied Dupin. Pierre-​Armand would soon be arrested and condemned to execution, although he died in prison first. 89 Portefeuille II and 35. Villeneuve-​Guibert published a number of the remaining letters to Dupin from people he deemed illustrious, with historical notices for each (Portefeuille, 151–​513). Although Buon (114) seems stunned that Dupin was close to the Abbé Lecomte, who served as president of the revolutionary committee of Amboise and was eventually defrocked, it is interesting to consider in light of Dupin’s potential reception of the Revolution. 90 Buon, 115–​116; the Portefeuille contains the entirety of the brief (131–​150).

Introduction to the Volume  25 to (and should still) hold and pass on nobility and titles themselves without going through male lineage.91 While Dupin’s adherence to class inequality limits the scope of her case for gender equality, her condemnation of slavery appears morally fraught, as it can only result from hypocrisy or from the selective ignorance that protects extreme privilege. She calls for the abolishment of slavery—​“abominable” wherever it exists (Art. 27)—​yet her father and husband were among the select cohorts who supported the expansion of the slave trade through capital investments and profited from it. Did Louise know that while she was researching the despoilment of women at the hands of the French state, her husband had joined the Société de Guinée which sold black Africans into bondage? By law, husbands controlled marital resources and did not need their wives’ authorization to make transactions (Art. 30). Yet it seems unlikely that Claude would have neglected to discuss his investments with a wife so adept at other matters that concerned them both, like litigation. Whether she was aware, or whether she was in the dark, the contradictions or blindnesses that inhere in her feminism were typical of the Enlightenment—​hence our term “Enlightenment feminism” in the introduction to Part II—​and they remain embedded in contemporary white feminism, in which middle-​class and wealthy white women aspire to the goods and prestige the most fortunate white men enjoy, without questioning the exploitative mechanisms that enable that good fortune, and in indifference to the particular struggles of women of color, working-​class and poor women, and LGBTQ women.92 Later feminists would align their arguments for the equality of the sexes with calls to abolish slavery. Nicolas de Caritat, Marquis de Condorcet, who wrote a manifesto On the Admission of Women to the Rights of Citizenship (1790), was also the author of a 1781 tract denouncing slavery93 and a member of the Society of the Friends of Blacks, which advocated for the abolition of slavery. Olympe de Gouges, author of the Declaration on the Rights of Woman and of the [Female] Citizen (1791), gained fame as a playwright, especially for an antislavery play performed at the Comédie-​Française in December 1789.94 We long to know whether and how Dupin’s thinking

91 In Art. 35, “On Nobility and Titles” (not included in our selection). 92 See Zakaria, Against White Feminism. 93 M. Schwartz [Condorcet], Réflexions sur l’esclavage des Nègres (Neufchâtel: Société typographique, 1781). 94 Olympe de Gouges, L’esclavage des Noirs, ou l’heureux naufrage: drame en trois actes (Paris: widows Duchesne and Bailly, 1792).

26  Louise Dupin’s Work on Women evolved in the second half of the eighteenth century.95 She raised Marie-​ Thérèse Adam, her alleged granddaughter from her wayward son, who served as her reader in later years.96 Did Marie-​Thérèse read Condorcet to her grandmother? Olympe de Gouges? The French translation of Mary Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Women?97 How did Louise Dupin greet the Revolution of 1789, France’s first Republic, and the Haitian Revolution? Precious information went up in smoke with those burned letters. We nevertheless share Dupin’s hope regarding documents that preserve women’s words and deeds: “With additional research, perhaps others will be found” (Art. 21). What we do know, right now, is that Louise Dupin’s Work on Women—​unfinished, unpublished, and for too long unknown—​deserves a place in that fraught and unfinished story that is the history of equality.

95 Dupin continued her salon up until the Revolution. Lilti includes it in a table of Parisian salons frequented by diplomats who were being tracked by authorities as potential spies from 1774 to 1789 (Le monde des salons, 217–​219). 96 Buon, 103, 114–​115. 97 The French translation came out in 1792. Isabelle Bour, “A New Wollstonecraft: The Reception of the Vindication of the Rights of Woman and of The Wrongs of Women in Revolutionary France,” Journal for Eighteenth-​Century Studies 36, no. 4 (2013): 575–​587.

Part I Science Introduction The Science section is the most accessible part of the Work on Women. It is the only section with no missing articles and no articles that are obviously incomplete. Further, there is no uncertainty regarding their order: all five were numbered, and we are able to track the development of most of them from early to polished drafts or from original subsection to freestanding article, despite the rocky road of manuscript dispersal. In an unfinished draft of a “Preliminary Discourse,” hereafter called the short “Preliminary Discourse” (short PD), Dupin lists the topics to be examined in this section, which parallel the Work’s first articles: the difference between the sexes considered in their anatomical and physiological organization (Art. 1), reproduction (Art. 2), temperament (Art. 3), and the connection between the body’s mechanics and the mind’s functioning (Arts. 3 and 4). Article 4, on strength, grew out of Article 3’s connection between the mind and the body, ultimately offering a critical analysis of bodily strength. Article 5, on analogies and the language of science, complements the first four articles’ focus on observable differences by underscoring and ridiculing the sexist bias that contaminates the truths of scientific discourse. Part I is also the only section that bears a title of its own—​Partie physique—​on the cover folio of the cleanest draft of the first chapter. In its broadest sense, la physique encompasses knowledge about nature and its laws. Its adjectival form indicates the physical: the material world and, especially for Dupin, the animal body. Tangible and observable, the body provides an accessible entrance to The Work on Women. Dupin’s opening salvo is a frank look at sexual difference and men’s use of science (past and present) to justify women’s subjugation. The body is a crucial starting point because it grounds the idea of equality that Dupin will advance throughout the Work on Women: sameness between men and women in every important aspect of their constitution and abilities. In the short “Preliminary

28  Louise Dupin’s Work on Women Discourse,” she lays out the roadmap for the Partie physique, explaining why existing social inequality must first be approached through the body: Inequality can only result from differences; consequently we must rigorously examine differences in order to judge their importance. Only two types of difference can ever be admitted: those that are physical or natural, and those that are artificial or instituted. If the physical differences are not real, or if those that are real are not important, the consequences taken from them are also not [real or] important. If the instituted differences are unjust, the consequences taken from them are also unjust, and the inequality no longer holds.

By the end of the Partie physique, Dupin will conclude that many “physical or natural” differences between men and women don’t exist as claimed and that observable differences are either insignificant or “artificial and instituted.” In either case, they fail to justify the radically different opportunities and experiences of men and women in society. To readers of François Poulain de la Barre’s On the Equality of the Two Sexes (1673), this argument may sound familiar, and indeed, the Partie physique is the section of the Work on Women in which Dupin hews most closely to his strategies.1 Like Poulain, she uses Cartesian dualism to establish the natural equality of the minds of men and women; she dismantles received ideas to disprove their inequality; and she adopts his understanding of equality as sameness to argue that one sex has no business dominating the other sex that it so closely resembles. Yet Dupin generates fresh insights in the Partie physique, and this introduction provides orientation to her original claims as well as context for her engagement with science.

From Prejudice to Masculine Vanity Dupin indicates just how important On the Equality of the Two Sexes was for her project when she cites it in the short “Preliminary Discourse” as one of only two books she plans to discuss on the subject of women.2 Two of 1 On Poulain and Dupin, see Marty, Louise Dupin, 145–​165. On Descartes and Poulain, see Broad, “Early Modern Feminism and Cartesian Philosophy,” 71–​81. On Poulain, see Pellegrin, Pensées du corps, 309–​402, and Stuurman, François Poulain de la Barre. 2 This line is at the bottom of a folio and the continuing page is missing. We do not know the title of the second book she planned to discuss.

Part I: Science  29 Poulain’s concepts are particularly formative for Dupin. First, Dupin takes up Poulain’s feminist application of Cartesian dualism. Descartes held mind and body to be distinct substances: mind consists in thought; body, in extension. The two are therefore in no way comparable. Poulain uses this distinction to declare that “the mind has no sex,” and to dismantle homologies between women’s (weaker and inferior) bodies and their (presumably weak and inferior) minds. He argues that through claims about the different temperaments of the sexes, doctors aim to establish the inferiority of female minds by positing specious resemblances to their bodies.3 Dupin takes a similar tack in “On Temperament” (Art. 3), showing that scientists who would certainly dismiss Poulain’s main target (Marin Cureau de la Chambre) as unscientific nevertheless recapitulate his gendering of the mind through new physiologies. Second, Dupin borrows Poulain’s notion of prejudice (préjugé): an unexamined belief, opinion, or habit of mind based on “superficial appearances, by which they have allowed themselves to be persuaded”4—​of which none is more entrenched, he says, than the opinion of the inequality of the sexes. Descartes explains that prejudices are formed in childhood, based on perceptions that are not counterbalanced by rational understanding.5 And Poulain elaborates that prejudices are continually reinforced through custom—​the everyday practices and institutions that shape people’s lives. As a result, even when the mind is capable of critically examining preconceived ideas, it often fails to do so simply because they are familiar.6 Dupin echoes Poulain’s critique of prejudice in the short “Preliminary Discourse” when she urges her readers to set aside unexamined ideas in favor of clear and distinct ones. Men should not “cede to the evidence of equality that we claim to bring if their idea of superiority appears to them clearly and distinctly.” Nor should women “claim to be equal to men if they have perceived in men qualities of which they see themselves distinctly incapable.” What we do ask, she says, is that both men and women “set aside unexamined ideas on this important subject, [ . . . ] examine and to weigh the reasons that we will present to them,

3 A Physical and Moral Discourse concerning the Equality of Both Sexes, in The Equality of the Sexes [1673], ed. and trans. Desmond M. Clarke (Oxford University Press, 2013), 127. This text will be abbreviated as “Equality” throughout. On the implications of Cartesian mind-​body dualism for gender, see Katharine Hamerton, “A Feminist Voice in the Enlightenment Salon: Madame de Lambert on Taste, Sensibility, and the Feminine Mind,” Modern Intellectual History 7, no. 2 (2010): 209–​238. 4 Equality, 122. 5 Descartes, Principles of Philosophy (1644). 6 Amy Schmitter, “Cartesian Prejudice: Gender, Education and Authority in Poulain de la Barre,” Philosophy Compass 13, no. 12 (2018): 1–​12, p. 3.

30  Louise Dupin’s Work on Women and [ . . . ] do justice to these reasons [by accepting them] if they are good” (short PD). In the Partie physique, Dupin models the work of examining and weighing that she requests of her readers, exposing socially convenient certitudes about gender that masquerade as scientific truth. Yet she does not simply update Poulain’s project by applying it to a new generation of scientific inquiry. She innovates by grounding prejudice in the psychological motive of “masculine vanity” (Art. 5). Poulain recognizes self-​interest as a barrier to overcoming prejudice. He notes that “to judge soundly whether [the male] sex has some natural superiority over women, one would have to consider the question seriously and without self-​interest.”7 Yet in the Partie physique, self-​interest—​or more precisely what the French moralistes called self-​love (amour propre)—​does more than cloud men’s judgment; it produces delusional thinking. Men not only see things through a sexist filter, like jaundice makes one see yellow (Art. 5, echoing Poulain); they derive pleasure from imagining themselves other than they are, in a “chimera of superiority” (long “Preliminary Discourse”). In the moralist tradition, self-​love introduces hidden motives into the human heart, deriving as it does from concupiscence as a consequence of man’s fall from grace.8 Inflected by moralist understandings of self-​love, Dupin’s concept of masculine vanity is both more psychological and more erotic than Poulain’s notion of self-​interest. Men imagine sexual positions as expressions of domination (Art. 2). Physicians interpret erections (even failed ones!) as evidence of the great force of animal spirits in men and rhapsodize about the “fertile fire” of their loins (Art. 2). And botanists lavish admiration on the penile conformation of flowers (Art. 5). Indeed, so attached are men to their “masculine majesty” (Art. 5) that they readily identify with male quadrupeds. The beard that evinces virility, strength, and dominance in men (Art. 1) conveys such glory to a he-​goat (in Art. 5) that the she-​goat hangs back at the sight of it, cowed by the sight of her mate striding boldly forward.9 Dupin responds to masculine vanity with belittling ridicule, in keeping with the corrective function of comedy from Molière to Voltaire. The work 7 Equality, 123–​124. 8 Moriarty, Fallen Nature, Fallen Selves, 225–​248. See also Force, Self-​Interest Before Adam Smith. 9 The German philosopher Immanuel Kant thought that women like Émilie du Châtelet who “conduct thorough disputations about mechanics [ . . . ] might as well also wear a beard; for that might perhaps better express the mien of depth they strive for.” Observations on the Feelings of the Beautiful and the Sublime and Other Writings, ed. Patrick Frierson and Paul Guyer (Cambridge University Press, 2011), 36–​37.

Part I: Science  31 of deflating pretensions is serious business, because the vanity that makes all things female a foil to “masculine magnificence” (Art. 3) justifies and perpetuates women’s subordination. Unlike the French moralists of the seventeenth century who reflected anthropologically on the fallen state of humankind—​including Madeleine de Souvré, Marquise de Sablé and Marguerite Hessein, Madame de la Sablière10—​Dupin is interested in how the self-​pleasuring fictions of masculine vanity create a social reality that devalues women. By inventing and exaggerating differences, men ensure their domination and women’s unequal status in society. Yet Dupin shows that in addition to reinforcing gender hierarchy, masculine vanity impedes the progress of science. Notably, the persistence of temperamental thinking hinders the advance of knowledge. Temperament is a particular bodily constitution that shapes personality and behavior; it was at the heart of essentialist characterizations of men and women since antiquity. Dupin deplores that scientists in her day still allow the assumption of essential differences between men and women to guide their findings: the English physician John Freind’s research on menstruation and transpiration; the Dutch physician Herman Boerhaave’s investigation into the functioning of fibers and solids in the body; and the German anatomist Lorenz Heister’s exploration of physiology, as “translated” and presented by Jean-​Baptiste Sénac (a student of Freind). Despite their intense curiosity about women’s bodies, the men who study them manifest very little interest in questioning the outsized role attributed to sex difference in almost every scientific theory, as evidenced by their complacent reproduction of received ideas. Harking back facetiously to her request that readers “do justice” to her reasons, she ironizes: “But let’s do them justice: whatever involves women is what they have examined the least; in speaking of them, they almost all copy each other and thus have accumulated errors on this point instead of making progress as they have on other matters” (Art. 3).

Systems, Skepticism, and Eclecticism: Science in the 1740s In the production and transmission of scientific knowledge, Dupin’s moraliste contemporary, Vauvenargues, identifies three kinds of people: the strong, who “fall in love with their systems, [ . . . ] seduced by their own inventions”

10 On Sablé and Sablière, See Conley, The Suspicion of Virtue, 20–​44; 75–​96.

32  Louise Dupin’s Work on Women and impose their ideas by dint of sheer confidence; the weak, who accept those ideas uncritically; and middling folks who respond to the fraught force-​ field of scientific debate by suspending judgment in the manner prescribed by pyrrhonic skepticism.11 In treating science as a “vanity,” Vauvenargues identifies himself as the mediocre middling sort, and so his cynical commentary is hardly to be trusted. Vauvenargues’s scorn for the strongmen of science nevertheless captures general suspicion surrounding systems promising to connect every aspect of nature to underlying philosophical premises—​ such as Descartes’s mechanism, and to a lesser extent, Leibniz’s monism.12 Newton’s Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy (1686), which the mathematician Elisabeth Ferrand promoted in the early 1730s13 and that Émilie du Châtelet was translating into French at the same time as Dupin was at work on the Work on Women,14 showcased the advantages of induction for scientific discovery. Professing loyalty to this or that system increasingly indicated discipleship to a great man’s philosophy rather than a commitment to finding truth, so suspending judgment between opposing arguments was a comparatively rational demeanor, and Dupin often avails herself of this option. Faced with competing animaculist and ovist explanations of generation (Art. 2), she says that “there is no shame in admitting” that the laws of generation remain unknown, and she laughs “at both sides of [the] debate” about the magical properties of menstruation (Art. 1). By far the more common response to the fading of systems-​thinking, however, was a passion for observation and experimentation and an openness to combining various approaches. This was the stance that Diderot celebrates in his article on eclecticism in the Encyclopédie. He too pictures three types: the sectarian, who embraces the doctrine of a philosopher (as an article of faith); the skeptic, who remains aloof from all systems; and the eclectic, who takes skepticism as his touchstone, but creates “an individual and domestic philosophy” by gleaning scraps that the skeptic leaves in his wake.15 Diderot’s promotion of

11 Luc de Clapiers, Marquis de Vauvenargues, Maxim 421 (posthumous), as numbered in the Œuvres de Vauvenargues, [1746] ed. D.L. Gilbert (Paris: Furne et Cie, 1857). 12 Dupin mentions Leibniz in “Ideas on Several Works and Authors.” 13 Gelbart, Minerva’s French Sisters, 20. 14 Isaac Newton, Principes mathématiques de la philosophie naturelle, trans. Gabrielle Émilie le Tonnelier de Breteuil, Marquise du Châtelet (Paris: Desaint and Saillant, 1756). Du Châtelet worked on the translation from 1745 to 1749, when she died postpartum. 15 Diderot, “éclectisme,” Encyclopédie, ou dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers, etc., eds. Denis Diderot and Jean le Rond d’Alembert. University of Chicago: ARTFL Encyclopédie Project (Autumn 2017 Edition), eds. Robert Morrissey and Glenn Roe, 5:270. http://​encyc​lope​die. uchic​ago.edu/​.

Part I: Science  33 eclecticism reflects a flourishing of scientific inquiry in the mid-​eighteenth century that gave devotees of science lots to glean. Changing understandings of science can be observed in the vocabulary used to identify it. “Science” (from the Latin scientia, knowledge, learning, or a particular branch thereof) was not yet a standard name for delimiting inquiry into the natural world. It referred to any kind of knowledge (e.g., “the science of government”) and in its more usual plural occurence in French (les sciences), it denoted disciplines of knowledge. The physical and life sciences, so central to the research that Dupin completed for this section, were variously called natural philosophy or physique. As the name “natural philosophy” indicates, science was originally a branch of philosophy. La physique (“physics” or “physick” in English) emerged as a synonym for natural philosophy, as Dupin’s own definition in the long “Preliminary Discourse” attests. Philosophy includes four main sciences: logic, ethics, metaphysics, and physics. [ . . . ] Physics has as its object the understanding of all natural things; of the earth and of all that it contains inside and out—​of vegetables, minerals, animals, meteors, and constellations. And to this speculative physics is added experimental physics which provides proof to the former and in our day has been a big support to it.

Over the course of the eighteenth century la physique “began to take on the narrower connotation of the study of inanimate matter by means of experiment,” which Dupin gestures toward in her description of experimental physique above.16 Throughout the Work, Dupin mainly uses the term physique to mean study of nature and the causes and effects of natural phenomena (and physicien primarily for those who practice this study). In our translation, for physique we employ “science” and, occasionally, “physics”; for physicien, we use physician. Dupin’s lifespan corresponded to this shift from understanding the natural world within the purview of philosophy to constructing science as an autonomous field with its own validation of truth claims pursued in increasingly distinct specializations.17 She wrote the Work on Women at a moment 16 John Gascoigne, “Ideas of Nature—​Natural Philosophy,” in The Cambridge History of Science, vol. 4, Eighteenth-​Century Science, ed. Roy Porter (Cambridge University Press, 2017), 285–​304, p. 286. 17 Gascoigne, 303–​304.

34  Louise Dupin’s Work on Women of great ferment, especially in the fields of anatomy and physiology which she foregrounds in the Partie physique.18 In the early eighteenth century, different versions of natural philosophy competed in the space left open after Descartes and other “moderns” dismantled the Aristotelian natural philosophy that had been taught in schools since the Middle Ages. The principle that “all knowledge was part of an underlying unity” and that philosophy could explain “the workings of Nature in terms of a basic set of laws and procedures” still held sway.19 Many French philosophers of the 1720s and 1730s kept one foot in the Cartesian camp and another in the Newtonian camp.20 Yet by the 1740s the heuristic framework of Cartesian mechanism—​ the basic idea that all natural processes could be explained in terms of matter in motion—​had withered: Dupin’s friend, George-​Louis LeClerc, Comte de Buffon rejected “the coarse mechanical laws that we have imagined and to which we want to reduce everything.”21 He advocated a kind of Newtonian attraction. The very busy animal spirits of mechanist physiology remained well-​occupied in Dupin’s time (see Arts. 3 and 4), but were mocked by vitalists like Georg Ernst Stahl22 and Théophile Bordeu;23 Buffon replaced them with a theory of organic vibrations—​ébranlements organiques—​in his Natural History (vol. 3, 1753). In the 1750s, Bordeu spearheaded a new vitalist school of thought in a throwback to pre-​Cartesian frameworks that attributed agency to matter. Increasingly, mechanism was taken up and transformed by materialist thought that made God superfluous to the workings of nature—​notably Julien Offray de la Mettrie, Denis Diderot, Paul-​Henri Thiry Baron d’Holbach, and Claude-​Adrien Helvétius.24 Those with an appetite for systematizing turned from deduction-​based heuristics to taxonomy and classification. Descriptive and comparative studies of animals and plants as well as anatomy and chemistry were common from the second half of the seventeenth century, growing in scope and sophistication throughout the eighteenth century. Countering Carl Linnaeus’s System of Nature (1735), Buffon transformed classificatory systems through

18 Shirley A. Roe, “The Life Science,” in The Cambridge History of Science, vol. 4, Eighteenth-​Century Science, ed. Roy Porter (Cambridge University Press, 2017), 397–​416, pp. 398–​399. 19 Gascoigne, 284–​285. 20 Gascoigne, 300. 21 Histoire naturelle, 2:486. 22 In Theoria medica vera physiologiam pathologiam (1708). 23 In De sensu genericè considerato (1742). 24 Helvétius was originally a tax farmer like Dupin’s husband, and they were acquainted socially (see introduction to volume).

Part I: Science  35 comparison and analogical analysis in his thirty-​six-​volume Natural History (1749–​1788).25

The Social Practice of Science Dupin participated in a scientific field in which combination was more common than agonism, and in which new theories, tools, and experimental methods sometimes replaced—​ but more often incorporated—​ formerly dominant ones. Accordingly, in the Partie physique she refers to some ancients (Aristotle, Galen, Aelian); engages with many moderns (Johann Juncker, Georg Franck von Franckenau, James Primerose, Giovanni Maria Lancisi, Herman Boerhaave, John Freind, Lorenz Heister via Jean-​Baptiste Sénac); and occasionally alludes to the ideas of her French contemporaries (Buffon, René Antoine Ferchault de Réaumur, Pierre-​Louis Maupertuis). How, practically speaking, did Dupin access scientific thought? And how, more generally, did women engage with science? In the long “Preliminary Discourse,” Dupin laments women’s exclusion from the formal education in philosophy (and thus science) that men take for granted. Schools were only one venue for the dissemination of scientific knowledge, though. Amateur scientists and interested lay people with sufficient means could avail themselves of a growing number of periodicals throughout Europe that reported on experiments, techniques, ideas, and debates. Since the late seventeenth century in France, readers could subscribe to periodicals like the Journal des sçavans and the Nouvelles de la république des lettres.26 We know Dupin had access to such publications; she alludes to an English experiment involving fish castration that she read about in the January 1746 issue of the Journal des sçavans (Art. 1). Additionally, from the mid-​seventeenth century, a host of educational entrepreneurs popularized scientific knowledge for an eager public, including the Aristotelian Louis de Lesclache, who specifically marketed his services to women. The most iconic work of scientific vulgarization was Bernard le Bovier de Fontenelle’s Conversations on the Plurality of Worlds (1686), which saw many editions 25 Peter H. Reill, Vitalizing Nature in the Enlightenment (University of California Press, 2005), 33–​70. 26 Jean-​Pierre Vittu, “Du Journal des savants aux Mémoires pour l’histoire des sciences et des beaux-​arts: l’esquisse d’un système européen des périodiques savants,” Dix-​septième siècle 228, no. 3 (2005): 527–​545.

36  Louise Dupin’s Work on Women throughout the eighteenth century.27 Structured as a conversation about Copernican astronomy and Cartesian physics between a male narrator and a quick-​witted Marquise, this work made visible a new dynamic: the professionalization of (male) scientists required an audience, and elite women were the ideal public for such an enterprise, because in theory (though not in practice), women’s attention came free of competition.28 Women were excluded from national and regional academies (scholarly associations), including the Académie royale des sciences (begun in 1666, officialized by Louis XIV in 1699). Elite women were necessary to the success of these institutions as spectators and promoters; they formed an audience for the male members at occasional sessions open to the public and publicized their work in private salon gatherings.29 Dupin was well-​connected to the Académie royale des sciences; members of her circle included Fontenelle, its perpetual secretary, as well as his successor, the mathematician and astronomer Jean-​Jacques Dortous de Mairan, who had sparred in 1741 with Du Châtelet over the question of forces vives.30 We know that she learned about the doings of the Académie not just through its proceedings and attendant essays in Histoire de l’Académie royale des sciences, but also through correspondence with academicians. Sauveur-​François Morand (surgeon, anatomist, and founding member of the Académie royale de chirurgie) aided Dupin with aspects of the Partie physique: annotations in his handwriting are found on a few pages of drafts of Articles 1 and 2, and two pages he wrote about reproduction were preserved (see Art. 2). In a 1746 letter, he summarizes the proceedings of the most recent meeting of the Académie royale des sciences for her.31

27 Dupin views the earth from the perspective of Fontenelle’s philosopher character in “Virtues and Rights Ceded.” 28 On Fontenelle and women’s role in the professionalization process, see Terrall, “Gendered Spaces, Gendered Audiences,” 207–​232. On the Marquise as spectator in the Conversations, see Erica Harth, Cartesian Women: Versions and Subversions of Rational Discourse in the Old Regime (Cornell University Press, 1992). 29 On the institutionalization of science in relation to academies and salons, see Terrall. On the role of scientific ideas in salons, see Elizabeth A. Williams, “Physicians, Vitalism, and Gender in the Salon,” Studies in Eighteenth-​Century Culture 29 (2000): 1–​21. See also Rebecca Wilkin, “Gender Equality in Cartesian Community: Descartes, Poulain de la Barre, Fontenelle,” in Towards an Equality of the Sexes in Early Modern France, ed. Derval Conroy (Routledge, 2021), 39–​59. 30 In Lettre de M. de Mairan, secrétaire perpétuel de l’Académie royale des sciences, etc., à Madame *** sur la question des forces vives en réponse aux objections qu’elle lui fait sur ce sujet dans ses Institutions de physique (Paris: Charles-​Antoine Joubert, 1741). Du Châtelet responded in Réponse de Madame *** à la lettre de M. de Mairan (Brussels: Foppens, 1741); Mairan withdrew from the debate. 31 Morand also provided several extracts of texts and helped find books Dupin was seeking. Marty, Louise Dupin, 113–​114.

Part I: Science  37 While the academies cultivated a strict distinction between experts and the public, the courses in botany, mineralogy, and chemistry held in the Jardin du Roi in Paris, which were free and open to the public, mixed lay people, amateurs, and professional scientists.32 The Jardin du Roi (the King’s Garden) was the common name at the time for the Jardin royal des plantes (The Royal Garden of Plants), which encompassed laboratories, collections, an amphitheater, and a cabinet of natural history. The Comte de Buffon, a member of Dupin’s circle, had served as its director since 1739. Dupin, her stepson Dupin de Francueil, and Rousseau, attended courses of the chemist Guillaume-​François Rouelle, who was demonstrator and professor there from 1742 and also offered classes in his private laboratory.33 Dupin may have crossed paths with two women who were actively engaged in scientific pursuits there. Geneviève Thiroux d’Arconville, who appears on her “visiting list,” attended many courses at the Jardin du Roi and was an active member of the scientific community.34 Her extensive experimentation on decomposition led in 1766 to the publication of a semianonymous Essay Serving the History of Putrefaction.35 Was Dupin acquainted with Madeleine Françoise Basseporte, as D’Arconville was? Basseporte, like D’Arconville, had studied with the top botanist at the Jardin du Roi, Antoine de Laurent de Jussieu. She was a portraitist who trained from 1726 with the Jardin du Roi’s botanical illustrator, and was named to that post herself in 1742.36 Individuals of means not content to spectate could have private physical and chemical laboratories installed at home. Dupin’s correspondent Claude-​ Nicolas Le Cat, Chief Surgeon of the Hôtel-​Dieu of Rouen, was the creator 32 After the Revolution, this institution became the National Museum of Natural History. 33 A love poem ostensibly addressed to Dupin during such classes was found among her papers. Snippets such as “to Madame Dupin who closed her eyes during a chemistry lesson in which the nature of fire was explained” provide a glimpse of the class and allow likely dating to Rouelle’s 1743 course (Jean-​Pierre Le Bouler, “Rousseau et les Dupin en 1743,” 108–​109). 34 Leigh Waley, “Marie-​Geneviève-​Charlotte Darlus Thiroux d’Arconville and Community during the French Enlightenment,” The Scholar & Feminist Online, January 15, 2018, https://​sfonl​ine.barn​ ard.edu/​women-​and-​commun​ity-​in-​early-​mod​ern-​eur​ope-​app​roac​hes-​and-​persp​ecti​ves/​marie-​ genevi​eve-​charlo​tte-​dar​lus-​thir​oux-​darc​onvi​lle-​and-​commun​ity-​dur​ing-​the-​fre​nch-​enligh​tenm​ ent/​. For Dupin’s visiting list, see introduction to volume. On women and the natural sciences see Maria Susana Seguin, “Les femmes et les sciences de la nature,” Dix-​Huitième Siècle (Femmes des Lumières), ed. Sylvain Menant, 36 (2004): 333–​343. 35 [Geneviève Thiroux d’Arconville], Essai pour servir a l’histoire de la putréfaction (Paris: Didot le jeune, 1766) (Gelbart, 212–​225). For more on d’Arconville’s writings, see Selected Philosophical, Scientific, and Autobiographical Writings, ed. and trans. Julie Candler Hayes (Tempe: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies and Iter Press, 2018). 36 Gelbart, 107; 115–​125. On another woman botanist working at the Jardin du Roi recently recovered from the archive, see Sarah Benharrech, “Botanical Palimpsests, or Erasure of Women in Science: The Case Study of Mme Dugage de Pommereul (1733–​1782),” Harvard Papers in Botany 23, no. 1 (June 30, 2018): 89–​108.

38  Louise Dupin’s Work on Women of an exemplary cabinet de physique. Reflecting the prestige of scientific expertise, amateurs followed suit. Dupin de Francueil, who aspired to join the Académie royale des sciences, boasted an impressive cabinet de physique et de chimie, which has been restored and can be visited today at Chenonceau.37 It does not seem that Madame Dupin spent much time in this space, however. In effect, while Dupin’s friends and acquaintances included scientists, surgeons, and mathematicians, and while many women of her time were actively engaged in scientific discovery, she herself was not a practitioner of science. Consistent with the middling kind of person described by Vauvenargues, or with the haughty skeptic described by Diderot, Dupin affected to remain above the fray. Her preferred mode of experimentation—​the thought experiment—​required no laboratory, and was more philosophical than scientific. To test how essential male sex organs are to a man’s constitution, and to discover whether they have any bearing on his courage and intelligence, what better way than to castrate him? She reports on experiments relating to the castration of fish, but also avails herself of the example of famous eunuchs throughout history (Art. 1). Similarly, to confound the habits of binary thinking (not to mention the tendency to project socially constructed gender relations onto animal life), what could be more illuminating than an aphid? Which half of this hermaphroditic creature, she asks, congratulates itself for its excellence, while scorning the other for its deficiency? (Art. 2). From her recurring interest in the mathematical concept of proportion emerges yet another thought experiment. Perhaps inspired by Poulain, it involves an analogy between strength and money. She asks her reader to reflect on what amount of difference is meaningful: “Should a man who has a hundred thousand and one in income consider himself much richer than one who only has a hundred thousand, and could he do very different things with this fortune than the other would do with his?” (Art. 4). A hundred thousand things in common mean nothing because “the tiniest foundation suffices to erect a grand edifice when it comes to vanity,” and no difference is too small for “men to rest the throne of their domination” on it (Art. 4). In the Partie physique, the intrepid opening of her Work on Women, Dupin aims to prove that women and men are the same in all important ways, and 37 For Dupin de Francueil, Rousseau compiled Institutions chymiques: excerpts from works on chemistry and notes from courses with Rouelle. See Jean-​Jacques Rousseau: Institutions chimiques, ed. Christophe van Staen (Paris: Honoré Champion, 2010). On women who had cabinets, see Adeline Gargam, “Savoirs mondains, savoirs savants: les femmes et leurs cabinets de curiosités au siècle des Lumières,” Genre & Histoire 5 (2009): http://​journ​als.open​edit​ion.org/​genreh​isto​ire/​899.

Part I: Science  39 that evidence to the contrary is vitiated by prejudice. Dupin concluded an early draft of the Partie physique, this way: If men and women are organized in a perfectly similar way, plus or minus a few differences that we have looked at and that can’t have destined an advantage for masculine subjects—​neither with respect to the perfection of the mind, nor with respect to that of the body; if we have shown the way that distinctions sought out in temperament have been abused; if we are not wrong in saying that women are as necessary to generation as men; if we find masculine domination at a general level only in [forced] comparisons of nature [dans la nature comparée]; if each [sex] is created complete and perfect in its own distinct existence, with an equal need for union to participate in the propagation of the species and for the unique pleasure which attracts both of them equally to it, how can we reasonably ground the slightest idea of superiority and inferiority in science?38

Dupin emphasizes the negligible character of the “few differences” between men and women in order to assert their equality, that is, their sameness. For better (and sometimes for worse—​see the introduction to Part II), she goes on to apply this understanding of equality to other fields of knowledge in subsequent sections of the Work on Women. At the same time, she gestures toward the complementary character of the sexes—​each one is “complete and perfect” in its own way. In the second half of the eighteenth century, the complementary vision of the sexes prevailed, drowning out the Poulainian refrain of sameness, and introducing an essentialism far more sophisticated than the ancient (and early modern) theory of the temperaments.39 In the flow of eighteenth-​century science, Dupin recognized the authority of science to establish truth, challenged the biases implanted in it by masculine vanity, and through a combination of old and new tools, resisted a seductive but dangerously flawed gender essentialism that her secretary would go on to champion.

38 Rough draft of Art. 3, “On Temperament.” 39 “A woman is not woman in only one spot, but from every facet from which she can be considered.” Pierre Roussel, Système physique et morale de la femme (Paris: Vincent, 1775), 2. See Steinbrügge, The Moral Sex, 35–​40.

40  Louise Dupin’s Work on Women

Article 1. Observations on the Equality of the Sexes and on Their Difference There’s no master I’m bound to swear loyalty to

The traits that distinguish men from women seem in no way to be the source of a difference in merit, intelligence, insight, nor in any other quality.40 Perhaps there is such a difference between the sexes, even though it remains unknown; if it were found, it would be one of the most fascinating points that metaphysics, physics, and ethics have ever discovered. We can assume that this discovery would shed great light on nature in general. But can we imagine that it would give preference to masculine or feminine nature, which seem, with so few exceptions, so generally and constantly the same? Ever since there have been men and women on earth, from what obvious sign have we been able to infer that one sex is worth more than the other?41 Whenever people discuss the two sexes, they call up all the differences that custom has introduced; they take them for so many natural differences, yielding the opinion that there is a fundamental difference between men and women, despite the evidence of equality that can be seen with one’s own eyes.42 Their exterior configuration is nearly the same—​everyone knows it. Their inner differences are even smaller. One can educate oneself on this matter with the best anatomists; and the most exact researches will not lead to the discovery in one sex of what is not in the other, given the constitution of beings endowed with intelligence and souls. Men are born like women; they have the same lifespan; they die the same way; they share the same gifts and trials of nature. The physical organization that constitutes life and its functions is the same. The senses that constitute intelligent humanity are the same. In what respect could one sex be different and better than the other? 40 Manuscript drafts of this article are at Musée Jean-​Jacques Rousseau (IR.2002.489.1) and Harry Ransom Center (MS-​03636, I.B.art.1). Draft pages also exist at the Abbaye de Chaalis in Oise, France, not consulted for this selection (S 5634 and S. 5636); according to Frédéric Marty, they are similar to the MJJR draft, although mainly in Dupin’s hand. The MJJR draft is entirely in Rousseau’s hand with some corrections by Dupin. Dupin’s hand dominates the much shorter and rougher HRC draft, with Morand and several unknown hands contributing as well (Marty, Louise Dupin, 133). We refer to the HRC draft in notes where relevant. The MJJR version was published by Le Bouler, “Un chapitre inédit.” Many of the notes to this article regarding Dupin’s sources are based on his. The epigraph: Nullius in verba jurare magistri, from the first “Epistle” of Roman poet Horace (Satires and Epistles, trans. John Davie (Oxford University Press, 2011), 336. 41 Throughout Part I, Dupin refers to les uns and les autres—​“the ones” and “the others”—​to distinguish men and women in the most ungendered way possible. 42 Poulain de la Barre chides those who fail to “distinguish between what is natural and what results from custom and education” (Equality, 184). On Poulain, see the introduction to Part I.

Part I: Science  41

Particular organization We must examine whether the elements that constitute a sex—​whether a beard on the chin, a different inflection in the sound of the voice, or a little bit more brute strength—​we must examine, indeed, whether these things can be the principles of the superiority of masculine character; since they are in reality the only distinctions that can be identified.43

On the constitution of the sexes Everyone is sufficiently aware of the difference that constitutes the sexes, which consists only in a single organ particular to each sex. We will simply point out that this difference has as its sole purpose, in humans as among all other animals, the perpetuation of their species by means of these particular organs; which serve to fulfill one of Nature’s greatest plans, and, in this regard, are worthy of consideration in general; but, in particular, they are so inessential to each individual that they are in no way tied up with the principal resources of life, and in animals, we see that both sexes can be deprived of them, for various reasons, without any observable change apart from the alteration they underwent.44 This operation was very common among Lydian women {according to Franckenau and others}.45 It has been performed in different countries on almost all kinds of female animals. It is hardly practiced in Europe, except on the pig species, and on some fowl for the purposes of fattening them up. It was recently—​and successfully—​tried in England on male and female fishes for the same reason.46

43 Throughout, Dupin uses “particular” to refer to one sex and “general” to both at once, along the lines of Buffon’s categorizations in Histoire naturelle, générale, et particulière (Paris: Imprimerie Royale, 1749). On Buffon, see introduction to Part I. 44 Addressing sex difference by first discussing castration parallels Buffon’s discussion of circumcision, castration, and eunuchs as a prelude to his explanation of puberty Natural History of Man (Histoire naturelle, 2:479–​485). 45 Georg Franck von Franckenau, Satyrae medicae XX (Leipzig: M.G. Weidmann, 1722), 39–​ 40. Franckenau quotes from Gilles Ménage’s posthumous Menagiana (1693), including Ménage’s sources: Théophile Raynaud’s 1655 treatise on eunuchs and De castratione mulierum (1673) by “Georgius Francus, physician of Heidelberg”—​none other than Franckenau himself. 46 The fisherman Samuel Tull’s method for fattening up male and female carp by castrating them is mentioned in a review of the Histoire de l’Académie royale des sciences for 1742 in the Journal des sçavans of January 1746 (41).

42  Louise Dupin’s Work on Women I know that if one wished, one could go searching for fine and delicate distinctions in this operation in order to perpetuate [claims about the] differences between men and women: But, in consulting experts and books, we learn that this operation corresponds in men to the same operation in women; and this can be understood all the more easily to the extent that in one sex, as in the other, the operation has the same goal and the same effect, which is to destroy the generative faculty. It is said, in general, that this operation produces weakness, but there is reason to believe that this weakness is negligible, if the strength of geldings is any indication. People emphasize the relation between the male sex and beards when they want to bolster the difference between the sexes. In effect, we observe that this [operation] diminishes the beard significantly when performed on men, but when performed on animals, not a single hair is lost; and we see that men who pluck their beard,47 instead of shaving, barely have more facial hair than castrati.48 This operation changes the voice as well; yet we see that some men who have not undergone it also have very high voices. And anyway, even if these points had any relation to each other, must it necessarily follow that they are linked to qualities that could legitimately elevate the male sex? We know that this operation does not change the feelings of the heart and soul: We also know that it does not diminish any qualities in either. And yet, a series of prejudices about masculine advantages—​founded on the difference of the sexes—​make people want to see a reduction in all sorts of merits and qualities among those who are thus deprived, in order to justify a comparison between eunuchs and women. We could respond to those who have proven particularly stubborn on this point with the following Problem from Routzeus: “Why are eunuchs and castrati smarter than other men?”49 Photios and several others would support the premise of this Problem.50 47 Marco Antonio Olmo describes plucking the beard as “obliterating” the hair in Physiologia barbae humanae (Bologna: Giovanni Battisti Bellagamba, 1603), 208. 48 A eunuch was any man who had been castrated or whose genitals were seriously damaged, intentionally or accidentally. In ancient Rome, surgically castrated men were called castrati. In eighteenth-​ century Italy, castrati were male singers castrated prior to puberty to preserve the high register of their voices. 49 Number 49 of Routzeus’s Problematum miscellaneorum (Leiden: Godfrey Basson, 1616). See R. C. Bald, “A Latin Version of Donne’s Problems,” Modern Philology 61, no. 3 (1964): 198–​203. On the problem genre, see Ann Blair, “The Problemata as a Natural Philosophical Genre,” in Natural Particulars: Nature and the Disciplines in Renaissance Europe, ed. Anthony Grafton and Nancy Siraisi (MIT Press, 1999), 171–​204. 50 Photios I, Patriarch of Constantinople, instigated a schism between Rome and Constantinople (see Art. 8) and was largely detested in the Latin Church; hence the eunuch insult. Théophile Raynaud

Part I: Science  43 We could further point out that, among many ancient peoples—​in the Roman empire, in that of Constantinople—​eunuchs were almost always found at the head of the government.51 Today, among Turks, Persians, and Indians, eunuchs are for the most part the ones who govern; and in a word, they have in all times shared with other men possession of the greatest qualities and of the greatest reputations. Bagoas in Persia,52 Philetaerus in Macedonia,53 Narses at the head of the Roman army,54 and so many others, accomplished acts of war and politics that are so great and so well known that it is useless to cite them. From all of that, we can conclude quite simply that the deprivation specifically of the organs that constitute sex is neither as important nor as interesting as people have made it out to be, when they want to use it to convey some niceties that promote one sex at the expense of the other. I have heard it recounted very discreetly in the presence of women that an intelligent and moreover very upstanding monk, in all of the rigor of his state, had had to undergo the operation of eunuchs following an unfortunate illness. The operation having gone well, the patient well recovered, the story goes that this holy man, feeling the deprivation of his sex—​which he had never had the pleasure to use—​, died of humiliation owing to his degradation.55 This is said with an air of smugness; those who listen applaud at the importance and truth of the thing that passes from hand to hand, with a serious air that is quite comical—​at least to those who have reflected on the principles that make people believe and repeat such things. The adventure that Montaigne reports about Marie Germain, who became a man when she jumped over a ditch {Pliny and his ancient translator report six or seven examples of the same phenomenon},56 is quite humiliating lists Photios along with other illustrious Christian eunuchs in Eunuchi nati, facti, mystici, ex sacra et humana literatura illustrati (Dôle: Philibert Chavance, 1655), 46, 60. 51 Charles Ancillon, Traité des eunuques (Berlin: [s.n.], 1707), 50. 52 Some ancient sources praise Bagoas’s political wisdom as minister in the Persian Achaemenid Empire (fourth century bce); others claim that as a eunuch lacking a beard, he could not be considered a philosopher. Raynaud, Eunuchi, 46, 96, 156. 53 Ancillon credits Philetaerus with founding the Greek city of Pergamon (third century bce) in his Traité (64). Also Raynaud, Eunuchi, 54. 54 Narses served the Byzantine Emperor Justinian I (sixth century). In the HRC draft, Dupin discusses his military exploits. See Ancillon, Traité, 27; Raynaud, Eunuchi, 157. 55 dégradation. Loss of rank. 56 Montaigne recounts the sex change of Marie/​ Germain Garnier in “Of the Power of Imagination”: “straining himself in some way in jumping, he says, his masculine organs came forth.” The Complete Essays of Montaigne, trans. Donald Frame (Anchor Books, 1960), 1:93–​94. Montaigne cites several cases of women changing into men from the third-​century Roman, Pliny the Elder (Gaius Plinius Secundus), from Natural History (7.4).

44  Louise Dupin’s Work on Women for those who cannot tolerate mockery of the masculine gender and who do not see that this adventure is nothing but a development, one for which all women have inside of them the requisite matter and form.57 But, all things considered, why would men find such a thing offensive? Are women offended that men have a similar breast structure as theirs—​so similar that several authors have claimed to have seen milk in male breasts,58 even though women’s more developed version of this trait would seem to be an apanage?59 Difference between certain organs was necessary for Nature’s designs: but having ordered, by one of her most absolute decrees, that one sex cannot act without the other to carry out her plans, I do not see by what reason one could adduce that there is more advantage or perfection on one side than on the other. A feature of the difference between these organs gives women, for a portion of their lives, certain regular signs that men do not have. Indians and Malabars display the advent of these signs with great ceremony. This can be considered folly, but is it not equally irrational to characterize these signs as impurities? Nothing that is necessary in the constitution of beings can be regarded with good sense as an impurity, and would it not be à propos to say that these signs merit neither excessive honor, nor indignity? Some ancients {the physician Democritus, Solinus} have said that women in this state60 were capable of producing monstrous things, that fruits would not germinate, that grapes would turn sour, that plants would die, that iron would rust, that copper would blacken, that dogs would contract rabies, and that women would ruin mirrors with their appearance. The author of a work entitled The Mind’s Ascent to God by the Ladder of Created Things says that [the material of] these periods, the first, most basic matter of the human body, is a thing so shameful that the eyes refuse to see it, the hands to touch it, and that the mind loathes the thought of it {Cardinal Bellarmine}.61 Almost 57 Dupin refers to Galen’s claim in De usu partium that women have the same genital organs as men. See Jacques Dalechamps’s French translation, De l’usage des parties du corps humain (Lyon: Guillaume Rouille, 1566): “the generative parts that are in man are also found in women and there is but one difference [ . . . ] [In] woman, they are hidden and nestled within the body while in males they are thrust out and prominent” (833). See Winfried Scheinler, “Early Controversies about the One-​Sex Model,” Renaissance Quarterly 53 (2000): 180–​191. 58 Buffon, Histoire naturelle, 2:543. 59 A fief conceded to the youngest prince as compensation for the fact that the eldest inherits the crown. Compare to Buffon: “Man has strength and majesty; grace and beauty are the apanage of the other sex” (Histoire naturelle 2:518). 60 Dupin replaced “the blood of periods” with “this state”—​one of several euphemisms here. She addresses menstruation more directly in Art. 3. 61 Dupin follows Franckenau, Satyrae medicae, 89–​101. He cites the third-​century Roman compiler Gaius Julius Solinus—​who mentions the monstrous effects of menstruation as alleged by the Greek

Part I: Science  45 all of the Ancients {Hippocrates, Galen, Pliny, Columella, Aelian}, Fernel, and a few Moderns lent credence to these ridiculous opinions. That is why, says one of them, that by the laws of the Zabres, women in this condition were ordered to stay in their houses so as not to pollute others.62 These laws stem from a degree of reason and insight just about equal to that of some Indians called Nairs, among whom a man was held to be polluted when another man, not of his kind, approached him. Of all the foolishness that has been expressed on this subject, hardly any remains in circulation, beyond the idea that women in this state can spoil wine; and this is even said fairly commonly, although we can see that in most establishments women tend the cellars. If this observation reduces our adversaries to saying that women only harm wine in vats, then let them have a look in peasants’ homes and in all of the great vineyards: they will see women harvesting grapes with men, coming and going in the cellars, without anybody asking what their situation might be. Nor do these women give it any thought, insofar as they are participating in or overseeing a harvest that sometimes comprises the entirety of their fortune. It is true that some physicians63 have not had the same opinion regarding the calamities that this situation of women supposedly produces. There are even some who have maintained that, far from inducing rabies, [menstruation] cures it, and that putting on just one piece of a [menstruating] woman’s clothing can cure fever and gout as well {Rodericus, Franckenau, Primerose}. First we must laugh at both sides of this debate and then think, along with good physicians and reasonable people, that the blood to which such remarkable effects have been attributed is the exact same blood found in the rest of the body: it comes from the large artery just like the blood that is distributed to all the other parts of the body. From that artery to its issue, the blood does not even have much of a path to travel. Nor does it acquire a different quality Democritus (fifth century bce) in Polyhistor—​as well as the Jesuit Cardinal Roberto Bellarmino’s De ascensione mentis in Deum (1614), along with Pliny, Plutarch, Hippocrates, and Galen. 62 Dupin follows the Scottish medical doctor, James Primerose, De vulgi erroribus in medicina (Amsterdam: Jan Janszoon, 1639), bk. 2, c­ hapter 20. Primerose mocks the views of Rodrigo de Castro (Rodericus)—​a Jewish Portuguese doctor—​in De universa mulierum medicina (Hamburg: Georg Ludwig Frobenius and Philipp von Orh, 1603), 48 (2.10). Primerose and Rodericus attribute the same claims to an identical list of ancient and modern natural philosophers, including the doctor Jean Fernel, who discusses menstrual blood in his Medicina (Paris: André Wechel, 1554). Rodericus is Dupin’s source for the Zabres and for the Nairs, an elite warrior caste among the Malabar. Dupin wrote, then crossed out: “Rodericus maintains this opinion and refutes Pliny, Aristotle and others on this subject. Primerose, in his Traitté des erreurs vulgaires en médecine (1658), rejects all of this.” 63 physicien. On word choice, see the introduction to Part I.

46  Louise Dupin’s Work on Women at any point along the way. It cannot therefore be vicious on its own; it only becomes so as a result of illness, in which case, the blood’s harmful influence would be common to men and to women, as indeed is the case.64 Based on examination and experience, how could the difference of the sexes impart special dignity to men?

On beards We see that men have beards and, usually, that women do not. But the beard seems to be an entirely indifferent trait, by which a person is just a little more inconvenienced than beautified. If having a beard is a distinction from which we should infer some advantage, then those men whose beards start below their eyes and go all the way down to their chest should have more of that advantage than those who only have hair on the chin; yet it has never occurred to these hirsute men to claim such a prerogative. In almost every other animal species both males and females can have a beard. The hair that makes a beard, and similar hair that grows elsewhere on the body, is just a kind of outgrowth created by something or other that implies nothing about the merit of bearded or beardless individuals. I think we have to leave it to the Arnolphes {Agnes’ tutor in L’Ecole des femmes} of the world to say: “the beard is on the side of the all-​powerful.”65 However, if we wished to delve more deeply into the matter, we need only consult some authors. Almost all of the physicians and doctors have spoken of the beard with distinction. One of them {Marco Antonio Olmo} wrote a whole book about it entitled The Physiology of the Human Beard. Another {Jean Tardin} wrote a book ad hoc, entitled An Investigation of Hair and Beards. Yet another author {Hervet} wrote On Hair and on the Beard, a discourse that was published in 1536.66 The first two spoke about beards with 64 Franckenau, Satyrae medicae, 90. 65 An allusion to Molière’s The School for Wives (1662), Act III, scene 2. Arnolphe, an older man, cultivates ignorance in his intended bride Agnes to ensure her future fidelity to him. It was commonplace in the eighteenth century to refer to a jealous husband as an “Arnolphe.” 66 Dupin accumulates titles to underscore their silliness. In philosophy, an ad hoc hypothesis is a circumstantial one, invented for the purpose of shoring up a failing explanation. According to the principle of Ockham’s razor (see Art. 3), explanatory excess signals a weak premise. Olmo disparages shaving because the beard is a sign of the masculine generative faculty. In a poem prefacing his Disquisitio physiologica de pilis (Tournon: Guillaume Linocier or Claude Michel, 1609), Jean Tardin claims that beards give men “a grave and majestic demeanor” (n.p.). In his Orationes (Orléans: François Géiard, 1536), Gentien Hervet argues first in favor of shaving, then in favor of beards; finally, he leaves the reader free to choose, as Dupin does here.

Part I: Science  47 the gravity and dignity appropriate to the subject, inferring from them a well-​founded masculine dignity; the last one mocked the whole idea quite sincerely. Wise readers will take from this whatever they so choose. What novel claims might one make about the relationship between beards and what is called, par excellence, virility, if one refers to travel accounts from India and China which tell us that these heavily populated nations number almost no beards at all? Most types of Negroes do not even have hair; we know that they have a light, woolly down on the head and hardly any on the chin. Most of the Carthaginian troops were black. Jugurtha’s soldiers were black. The famous Numidian cavalry were black and, consequently, had no or little beard.67 These observations are evidence that physical strength, mental courage and other qualities of mind are not strongly tied to the presence of a beard. One can be illustrious with little or no beard, both individually and as a whole nation. The color of men varies. Some Asians have olive coloring; Europeans are white; South Americans are reddish; Africans are black. Some of these nations are entirely bearded; others are just slightly or not at all; human females generally are not. Other female animals all have beards.68 Whatever the reason for all of these variations, it doesn’t change the case at hand;69 and I believe that we can here parody the fable and say that if men had as much prudence as they had hair on their chin, they would not have sought advantages so carelessly in things that in no way confer them.70

67 Jugurtha, King of Numidia (second century bce) led his cavalry in defending Carthage against Rome in the Second Punic War. Neither the Numidians (ethnic Berbers) nor the Carthaginians (ethnic Phoenicians) were black. Though racial taxonomies generally served to justify slavery, Dupin preempts the association between enslavement and cowardice in the HRC draft of this article. Black people, she says, are as capable of bravery as white people, and anyway, white bearded men have also been enslaved. On French scientific interest in black Africans in the 1740s, see Curran, The Anatomy of Blackness. 68 “There are even entire nations where men have almost no beard” (Buffon, Histoire naturelle, 2:489). Buffon considers beards a matter of fashion; he returns to them in a section on clothing (2:537). 69 [les raisons] ne changent pas l’espèce. Legal jargon. No amount of variation will change the fact of the essential sameness between humans. 70 In “The Fox and the Goat,” adapted from Aesop by seventeenth-​century moralist Jean de la Fontaine. A fox and a goat descend into a well for a drink. The fox climbs out using the goat as a stepping stool, then breaks his promise to pull the goat up after, scolding him: “Had Heaven put sense thy head within, /​To match the beard upon thy chin, /​Thou wouldst have thought a bit, /​Before descending such a pit.” The Fables of La Fontaine, trans. Elizur Wright, ed. J. W. M. Gibbs (1882), ebook via Project Gutenberg.

48  Louise Dupin’s Work on Women

On the sound of the voice We usually hear a difference between the sound of men’s and women’s voices.71 Nature perhaps made this difference on purpose in order to create harmony. What is certain is that from the blending of these two sounds, harmony is born. But we do not see anything in this that gives one side an advantage over the other. It only reminds us that the nature of sound is not well understood; but this does not mean that a deep sound is more dignified than a high one. Each sound has its third and its fifth, whether high or low. And each time the vocal cord shortens or lengthens, or the flow of air increases or decreases, new high notes and new low notes are created; and we cannot see how to assign to that any degree of preference or dignity. If we wanted to presume a superior degree of strength in men’s voices, which would seem natural enough, we would nevertheless be contradicted by the fact that some men have extremely high voices and some women have extremely deep ones.72 Everyone knows of such examples. We notice a change in the voices of both men and women when they reach the age of nubility. Among men’s voices, countertenors,73 which come close to women’s general range, are the most pleasant; and if we were to conduct a full investigation, we would perhaps find a great number of such voices among men. Likewise among women, there are some voices that come close to men’s; these are called bas-​dessus74 and are rarely used in France. But 71 Dupin follows the Encyclopédie article “Voice” that Rousseau wrote in early 1749 (Confessions, Bk VII). This is the only direct evidence we have of Dupin using Rousseau as a source, and Dupin’s preoccupations shine through in Rousseau’s article. He prefers women’s voices for high registers instead of castrati, and he protests the underutilization of women’s voices in French opera: “Why three parts in the voices of men and only one in voices of women,” if the voices of women include as big a range as the voices of men? He urges consideration of causes: “we should not limit our examination to what is before our eyes; we should also acknowledge that common practice contributes much to forming voices to the character they are meant to have.” He denies any natural foundation for parts as they are usually assigned: “As for choirs, even if the parts [comprising them] are generally distributed in Italy as they are in France, it’s a universal but arbitrary practice that has no natural foundation.” Encyclopédie 17: 436–​437. 72 Compare to Rousseau: “Measure the interval between the highest sounds in the highest women’s voices and the lowest sounds among the lowest women’s voices; and do the same for men; I am certain that not only you won’t find a difference sufficient to justify three parts on one side [for men] and only one on the other [for women]; but moreover that this difference, if it exists, will amount to hardly anything.” 73 haute-​contre. A high tenor voice (in men), similar to the Italian contralto sung by second sopranos (women) or castrati (men); eighteenth-​century English sources refer to it as “countertenor.” 74 bas-​dessus. The ancestor of the mezzo-​soprano, whose range and harmonic function overlapped with the countertenor. Compare to Rousseau: “In France [ . . . ] basses and countertenors are prized, and [ . . . ] bas-​dessus is given no consideration [ . . . ]. But in Italy, where a beautiful bas-​dessus is valued as much as the highest voice, there are very beautiful deep voices among women that they call contr’alti.”

Part I: Science  49 Italians know how to put them to full advantage, and such voices contribute to very pleasant harmonies. In Venice, there are four churches called scuole where girls perform all of the large choral music festivals without the support of male voices.75 Is it reasonable to view variety among human voices as favorable or unfavorable to either men or women? We believe we have investigated and responded to three points of noticeable difference between men and women, and we will reserve the fourth, which deals with strength, for the article on temperament, after having treated one of the consequences of the difference of the sexes: generation.76 And to follow Nature in her path, we will speak first of nubility.

On nubility Nubility takes its cue in women from the thing that designates the start of their power to give life to others—​what we mean when we say that they are “big girls.” Nubility in men is declared from the same point, that is, starting when their organs demonstrate the capability to contribute to the same operation. Here we have, more or less, the gist of the School’s77 ideas on nubility: in a man, nubility stimulates the progress of reason because the reabsorption by the blood of a certain liquid emanating from it after a new elaboration brings new spirits to him, thereby bringing about a firmer and more robust stride, which can invigorate his mind.78 Some authors have called the organ of this special elaboration a “second brain”;79 but this magnificent nomenclature is 75 Compare to Rousseau: “And furthermore, can we not admire in several places, and especially in Venice, music for full choirs sung exclusively by adolescent girls?” Rousseau recounts his own emotional experience listening to girls of an Italian scuola sing in a church in Confessions (bk 7). 76 Dupin lays out the order of subsequent articles in Part I: 2 (“On Generation”) and 3 (“On Temperament”), which originally included a section on strength that she expanded into 4. She does not mention 5, a later addition. 77 Scholastic teachings, or the way natural philosophy is taught in schools, based on medieval glosses of ancients like Aristotle and Galen. 78 Part of the semen, a product of the blood, gets reabsorbed into the blood after having been transformed or added to; it then nourishes the animal spirits, making pubescent boys stronger. Male puberty is described in Jean-​Baptiste Sénac’s French augmentation of the German Lorenz Heister’s work in anatomy, especially the Compendium anatomicum (1721); in French, L’Anatomie d’Heister, avec des essais de physique sur l’usage des parties du corps humain sur le méchanisme de leurs mouvemens, [1724] (Paris: Jacques Vincent, 1735), 232. 79 Sénac underscores the “unique connection between [men’s] genitals and the brain” (L’Anatomie, 131). According to the doctor Nicolas Venette, the brain and the testicles are glands that transform blood; the brain purifies blood from the heart, turning it into animal spirits, while the testicles distill those animal spirits into seminal spirits found in semen. Tableau de l’amour conjugale [1686] (Amsterdam: Pierre Mortier, 1742), 14–​18.

50  Louise Dupin’s Work on Women in no way fitting. It only serves to privilege the idea that masculine animal economy is somehow the richer for possessing this organ, and confuses any investigation into how nature actually operates in this matter. “Glands” is the name given to certain bundles of vessels that serve as special filters for the human body. “Ganglions” is the name for certain coils of nerves whose function we understand less well. It is generally believed that nerves serve the circulation of spirits. Following this idea, a famous anatomist {Lancisi} dubbed all of the nerve-​based ganglions in animals “brains”:80 but that does not make it any more accurate to call the specific organ we just mentioned a “brain”—​or even to compare it to a brain—​since the organ in question is not made solely of nerves, nor is it even accompanied by more nerves than any other part of the body. It is formed simply by all the same ordinary vessels that work together to form the whole animal and could more naturally be compared to other kinds of glands. We are thus justified in denying that this organ produces or receives any large abundance of spirits: and unbiased expertise will no longer allow this comparison to the brain, since it finds the analogy fitting neither in substance nor in function, and since the brain is a unique substance with a completely distinct structure. But we must not lose time quibbling over such nomenclature: we employ several other names in anatomy with just as little accuracy, and in the other sciences too; and those who use these names are sometimes right to do so, as they are often not in a position to do better. But those who infer ridiculous things from these names are wrong, and it is for them that we are spelling things out. Even though no one has applied the name “brain” to any glands in women, and even though women are not even considered when men argue their assumptions about how the body’s development contributes to the progress of ideas, this is no reason to doubt that the same natural operation, or its equivalent, happens in women. For, women too have organs that produce secretions analogous to those of men, and these secretions are pumped back into the blood just as they are in men.81 The rapid progress of reason that we observe at a certain age in human childhood is general to boys and girls. We 80 Giovanni Maria Lancisi, Dissertatio de gangliis nervorum, published in volume 4 of a collective work, Opera quae hactenùs prodierunt omnia (Rome: Nicolo and Marco Palearino, 1745). Lancisi credited ganglions with controlling the flow of animal spirits (Pierre Tarin, “Ganglion,” Encyclopédie). Both Lancisi and Jacques [Jacob] Winslow characterize ganglions as “subsidiary brains” according to James Johnstone, “Essay on the Use of the Ganglion of the Nerves,” Philosophical Transactions (1683–​ 1775) 54 (1764): 178. 81 Buffon describes the “continual repumping” into the blood of the “seminal liquid” of both sexes in Histoire naturelle (2:334–​335). The more traditional “repumping” story concerns male semen

Part I: Science  51 could of course deny, in accordance with good science,82 that such progress has anything at all to do with nubility, whether male or female: but, whether we deny the assumption or accept it, it can result in nothing disadvantageous for women. The greater or lesser amount of this liquid emanating from the blood—​ and that returns in part to it—​proves nothing more than its common effect, despite the myriad powers that some scholars have attributed to it. That is to say that people more or less generously divided on this point have no other concrete marker of value or non value.83 And, even though it has been said in such matters—​“Praise be to idiots for making us feel smart!”84—​examples show that it would be quite unjust to assume that this magnificence cancels intellect, just as it would be to assume that it imparts intelligence. The men and women best equipped for the resulting inclination are not those who boast the most intellect.85 Even though it is said that women are typically formed a little earlier than men are,86 Nature informs men of what she demands from them in a certain matter at an earlier age than she does women, insofar as she gives [pubescent boys] a visible sign of their feelings, which quickly becomes an object of curiosity and investigation for them, whereas women’s feelings remain absolutely interior. But lest one seek to infer an advantage from Nature’s clearer explanation to males, La chercheuse d’esprit suffices to establish women’s parity

being “pumped” back into the blood when erection doesn’t culminate in ejaculation. See Julien Offray de La Mettrie’s translation of the Latin edition of Herman Boerhaave’s Institutiones medicae (1739–​1744): Institutions de médecine de Mr. Herman Boerhaave, 2nd edition (Paris: Huart, Briasson, and Durand, 1743), 3:69, 74–​75. Boerhaave follows the ancient view, further developed in the seventeenth century, that semen derives from blood. 82 en bonne Physique. On word choice, see introduction to Part I. 83 Compare to Sextus Empiricus’s claim in Outlines of Pyrrhonism that judgment must be suspended in case of opposing arguments in the absence of a common standard of truth. This text, rediscovered in the sixteenth century, stimulated a flourishing of skeptical thought. Dupin calls Sextus Empiricus the “doctor of philosophers,” in “Ideas on Several Authors and Works.” On non-​ valeurs as a category of asset, see Art. 30. 84 Vivent les sots pour donner de l’esprit! A proverb in La Fontaine’s fable, “How Girls Become Intelligent.” Lise is told that she can acquire esprit from a priest; he convinces her to receive it via sex. When a friend confesses to acquiring esprit in the same way from Lise’s brother, Lise is surprised; her brother is stupid. The friend then utters the proverb. The same proverb concludes the opéra-​comique Dupin mentions. She plays on two meanings of esprit—​animal “spirits” in semen and “intelligence”—​ to mock the claim that virility determines intelligence. 85 Abundant spirits (and their magnificent erections) portend neither intellect nor stupidity. 86 Environmental factors influence the onset of puberty, according to Buffon, but girls reach puberty before boys in any given region. The body devotes energy first to growth and then to puberty; boys’ stronger, firmer, harder bodies take longer to grow (Histoire naturelle, 2:489–​490, 517–​518).

52  Louise Dupin’s Work on Women with men in this matter, since we see [the heroine’s] intelligence bloom in step with the feelings of her heart.87 In some animals, an emanation detectable by the sense of smell occurs in both males and females after nubility is reached; this is principally the case in species preoccupied by propagation only at certain times of the year. As for species for which there is no specific season for these cares of propagation, this odor either does not exist or is not detectable. Among humans, we do not usually perceive it, but that might be due to our cleanliness. Despite the observations just made about the non-​generality of this odor, zealots for masculine difference will not abandon the odors that are found in some males and, without providing any clear explanation as to why, they seem to interpret this to be something advantageous to them. During hunting parties I have heard some very strange and laughable discussions on this subject.88 Nevertheless, in infamously odiferous civets, both male and female are equipped with the reservoir of scented liquid that gives their bodies such a repugnant smell.89 Without conducting further investigation into the origin of animal smells, which would likely turn out to be inconsequential both to the operations of the mind and to the important mechanical operations of the body, we will simply point out that the odors given off by animals vary based on the animal’s food and according to circumstances of health or illness. The smell of these emanations is only ever caused by a specific secretion, and by the length of time that the liquid has been accumulating in the body; the liquid in general neither alters nor privileges the individual animal, however it comes to them—​at least in ordinary cases.

87 La chercheuse d’esprit, a one-​act opéra-​comique by Charles-​Simon Favart, first performed February 20, 1741 (Paris: Veuve Allouer, 1743), is about two stupid young people desirous of gaining intelligence or esprit. As in La Fontaine’s fable, obtaining esprit means achieving sexual experience. 88 The tarsal glands on the hind legs of male and female deer, when mixed with urine, produce an odor especially prominent in bucks during rutting season. Dupin’s participation in hunting parties indicates her high social status. 89 The annals of the Histoire de l’Académie royale des sciences for 1728 include a report on Sauveur-​ François Morand’s investigations “On the odiferous sac of the civet” (Paris: Durand, 1753), 14–​17, which states that he had a civet. Morand assisted Dupin in the Partie physique (see introduction to Part I).

Part I: Science  53

Article 2. On Generation The idea of male superiority, having claimed the difference of the sexes for its advantage, never fails to make an appearance when the question of generation arises.90 Since men have invested everything with the idea of their superiority, so must we pursue it everywhere in order to judge its worth in all cases and circumstances. I once heard a man—​an intelligent man, learned in many things—​say in all seriousness that the basic position in which men and women found themselves at the beginning of the world when it came time to think about the future of the human race, may have determined preeminence on the side of men.91 I confess that this made me laugh and made me think that this idea was perhaps at the origin of a common way of speaking to express in general terms someone’s advantage over something or other: but that does not convince me of men’s advantage, nor of the inequality of women’s merit. We know that this lovely position is neither essential nor even necessary, and if we wanted to combat this folly with another, we would be just as justified in saying that a more convenient position, a position to which one gravitates naturally because of its comfort, is incomparably superior and more dignified.92

On the difference between men’s and women’s contributions to generation Men retain the potential to propagate longer than women do: but does that prove their belief that they are more essential to it? It instead tends to prove 90 Manuscript from Musée Jean-​Jacques Rousseau (IR.2002.489.1). Draft pages at the Abbaye de Chaalis in Oise, France (S 5632) were not consulted for this selection; according to Frédéric Marty, they follow closely the MJJR draft, but almost entirely in the hand of Dupin with some pages by an unknown scribe. Two folios titled “Reflections on how the long duration of men’s aptitude for generation has consequently been used to favor male superiority” are inserted between the cover and the opening of the chapter in the MJJR draft. They are in the hand of Sauveur-​François Morand, according to Le Bouler and Thiéry (“Une partie retrouvée,” 379). We include passages of the Morand addition in notes. The following notes—​104, 105, 106, 110, 111, 114, 125, 128, 130, 131—​were developed from the notes and commentary in Frédéric Marty’s edition of this article (“Rousseau secrétaire de Mme Dupin”). 91 Dupin is likely alluding to the expression “avoir le dessus sur quelqu’un”—​to have an advantage over someone, but literally, to be on top of someone. 92 Does Dupin clap back with an endorsement of the woman-​on-​top position? In a crossed-​out bit, she says that taking up an incommodious position that a woman wouldn’t choose for her own sake could be seen as a mark of humiliation.

54  Louise Dupin’s Work on Women the contrary and does little to establish that belief since, despite the decline that accompanies aging, they almost always have enough vigor for this operation. It must nevertheless be acknowledged that this ability men have gradually decreases and at some point usually comes to an end.93 The power to ensure successors for oneself neither benefits one’s health, nor spares one from aging earlier rather than later. We know that it doesn’t work this way and that a man can enjoy the status of father even if he is in middling health, has lost much of his strength, and even after he has reached what we call old age. In order for the longevity of this ability (which one uses perhaps as much for one’s own account as for that of posterity) to be an advantage reserved for men alone, women would have to be deprived of it when their fecundity ceased, and to settle that question, without querying all women, we need only ask those who hold the distinction of the condition called “canonical” {the servants of priests}.94 The difference in men’s and women’s contribution to generation means that one man and twenty women will populate a colony more quickly than one woman and twenty men.95 But what does that prove for men’s advantage? It only proves that, in a very extraordinary case, such a thing could happen. While this demonstrates how useless twenty husbands are for a single wife, it doesn’t demonstrate that twenty wives are necessary for a single husband: on that matter no judge is necessary beyond each person’s conscience. We see that one sex’s role in the production of the species is more painful than the other’s, but is that a reason to esteem it any less? Seen from a more reasonable and humane point of view, we might instead esteem this sex more highly.96 People make too much of the pains and dangers of childbirth. Do they do so charitably, by adding to real pain opinions about it? The natural and common experience of this operation is without danger. The pains that accompany it progress gradually and are necessary and bearable. In most cases, they cease at the moment when nature finishes her work, and so much 93 In the Morand addition, menopause is discussed: “But what dissuaded the author of nature from enabling women to propagate as late [as men]? It’s because his power and his justice are inseparable. The greater or lesser extent of a woman’s fecundity sets a term for her repose, and that term begins at about the age of forty-​five. Some women only begin to live for themselves when they reach that age.” 94 Dupin jokes about the “canonical age,” the minimum age (forty) set by canon law for a woman to serve priests. Dupin suggests that this rule failed to avert sexual temptation in priests, and moreover, that women themselves felt sexual desire despite being past childbearing age. 95 On polygamy, see the introduction to Part II. 96 Echoes of Poulain de la Barre: “It is women who conceive us, who form us, give us being, birth, and education. It is true that it is more burdensome for them than for us. That effort, however, is no reason to scorn them or treat them unfavourably, rather than respect them as they deserve” (Equality, 183).

Part I: Science  55 so one could say that a woman is in her normal state an hour after giving birth.97 Women who give birth in secret and the great majority of women who are not privy to special care during childbirth incontrovertibly prove what we are saying. We might furthermore note that black women in the colonies, employed in manual labor, interrupt their work only for the time it takes to give birth, then go right back to work after having bathed themselves and their babies in a stream.98 We learn from travel relations that in some parts of India and in Brazil that once women have given birth, it’s the men who take to their beds while the women tidy up and prepare for the celebration.99 This folly can only be based on how little women are inconvenienced by childbirth; we cannot suspect the human race of the barbarity that would be required otherwise, no matter the country. According to the reflections one can make on these facts and in light of a fortunate experience, if a woman speaks about having easily given birth, and people criticize her and take the side of women who complain more, might this be because they prefer to hear complaints? Or because men feel their advantage in not having to withstand the pain of childbirth to be greater the more women are oppressed by it? To sum up then, even if this miracle of nature cannot occur without some pain, we know that it is short-​lived; that the final push leaves no trace of it; that the object produced is its consolation and reward, granting a pleasure superior to the pain suffered.100 In general, we see that Nature does not put much stock in pain: she erases its memory

97 Dupin minimizes one of the most dangerous moments of a child-​bearing woman’s life. The estimated maternal mortality rate in eighteenth-​century rural France was around 11.5 deaths for every 1,000 births, with regional variations. See Hector Gutierrez and Jacques Houdaille, “La mortalité maternelle en France au 18ème siècle,” Population 38, no. 6 (1983): 975–​994. 98 “[T]‌hroughout the Americas and in the greater part of Africa, where women work alongside men, pregnancy is no hindrance to them”; women give birth alone and return to work “with greater freedom than before.” Poulain de la Barre, On the Excellence of Men [1675], in Three Cartesian Feminist Treatises, trans. Vivien Bosley, ed. Marcelle Maistre Welch (University of Chicago Press, 2002), 302. Dupin gestures toward slavery when she refers to black women “in the colonies” but ignores the coercion that structures their lives, from labor to childbearing. On the blindnesses of Dupin’s “Enlightenment feminism,” see the introduction to Part II. 99 The French public first encountered bedridden fathers among the Tupinambá, in Jean de Léry’s Histoire d’un voyage fait en la terre du Brésil (La Rochelle: Antoine Chuppin, 1578). While Poulain situates this custom “in the Americas and parts of Africa” (Excellence, 302), two of Dupin’s others sources associate it with Brazil: Primerose in chap. 13 of Traité de Primerose sur les erreurs vulgaires de la médecine and Jean-​Frédéric Bernard in Cérémonies et coutumes religieuses de tous les peuples du monde (Amsterdam: Jean-​Frédéric Bernard, 1723–​1743), 7: 340, 505–​506, 510. 100 Dupin wrote, then crossed out: “Just because this event doesn’t happen to men, I don’t find that reason to believe that they’re Nature’s favorites for not having been tasked with it.”

56  Louise Dupin’s Work on Women widely and promptly. She steeped animal life in it, and despite that, each of us cherishes and enjoys our own existence. History has preserved Prince Philippe’s witticism about William the Conqueror, who was very large around the middle: after William had tried several remedies for this excessive corpulence, Philippe said that his lying in was lasting a long time. Having heard this, William responded that he would arise101 and go “visit”102 Philippe with ten thousand lances. A historian adds that William’s response was all the more fitting given that he must have been very offended to be compared to a woman, and in the most disgusting state that women can be in.103 How can good science or even reason thus consider an act that should only incite our admiration? How can men possibly regard the circumstance of childbirth with disdain? It seems to be Nature’s most marvelous work. Without it, men wouldn’t see the light of day. By what depravation of thought and feeling has it become the butt of so many indecent jokes?

On the generation of certain animals The law of nature that entrusts the task of carrying children mainly to women is not universal. Some animals have both sexes {garden snails and ichneumons} which creates double marriages between them, and makes each one both father and mother.104 We would need to know how these types of animals get along, and what their sentiments of preference and esteem may be. Do they place their glory in one part of themselves and their humility in the other? Or do they just add up their parts and call it even, knowing that without one, the other would be far off the mark in all manner of merit? Other types of animals also have both sexes {like the aphids that abound in our honeysuckles},105 and are themselves father and mother, without any assistance other than their own persons. We should ask them whether they 101 se reléveroit. This verb approximates the noun relevailles: a Catholic ceremony marking the end of a woman’s forty-​day lying in after childbirth (“churching” in English). 102 pour lui faire la visite. To subject him to a gynecological exam. 103 Paul Rapin de Thoyras tells the story of the exchange between kings in Histoire d’Angleterre (The Hague, 1724). Rousseau made excerpts of Rapin’s book, but Rapin does not mention the insult. 104 Scientist Pierre Louis Moreau de Maupertuis addresses the double-​sexed snail in Vénus physique, issued anonymously with no place of publication in 1745 (86, 89, 90–​91), as does Buffon in Histoire naturelle, générale, et particulière avec la description du Cabinet du Roi (Paris: L’imprimerie royale, 1749), 2:312. 105 In the eighteenth century, aphids were the posterchildren of parthenogenesis—​unisex reproduction without fertilization. The entomologist René-​Antoine Ferchault de Réaumur studies the hermaphroditism and parthenogenesis of aphids in his Mémoires pour servir à l’histoire des insectes

Part I: Science  57 recognize excellence on one side and deficiency on the other. And, in this case, which of the two halves scorns the other? The ichneumon’s double faculty [of generation] is cited in a political work in which the author, in an attempt to lead Nature herself to second his conclusions in favor of masculine dignity, says that this animal fights with its peer, the husband always prevailing.106 He infers from this all sorts of edifying things for good governance. While the author of this ingenious application is ranked among good political thinkers, we can be sure that he will never have the same rank among naturalists, nor among reasonable people no matter their profession. Two sorts of ichneumon have been identified. The example given by this political thinker is credible for neither. We believe that one of these species might be the hyena which the ancients mentioned. One ancient {Aelian} reports that this animal is male one year and female the next and that they mate every other year under a different sex.107 It would be good to question this creature further; it could teach something about this superiority that we contest. The female toad of Suriname deposits her eggs on the male’s back which is pocked with little cavities made to receive them; inside these cavities the young develop, grow, and are carried until the time they are ready to live on their own.108 Is this male worthy of contempt among his species or any other because of this? Nature has more than one way, when she so wishes, to produce things that appear to be the same. There still exists a republic without sexes; or rather, the sexes reside there only in an extremely fertile mother and in a small number of foreigners who work with her to propagate, before being chased away by the native inhabitants of this country once they have completed their ambassadorship. This is the Republic of Bees.109 For a long time masculine vanity

(1737). Le Bouler and Thiéry, “Une partie retrouvée,” 379. Maupertuis and Buffon both discuss aphids after snails in their works, as Dupin does here. 106 Aelian describes the ichneumon—​ a kind of mongoose—​ as having both sexes; a fight determines which is the victor who mounts and inseminates and which is “degraded” and must endure the pain of birth (Characteristics 10.47). 107 Aelian, Characteristics, 1.25. 108 Actually, the female pipa pipa toad releases eggs that are fertilized by the male in the water before coming back to rest on her back. 109 Luis Mendez de Torres observed that Aristotle’s “king bee” was female in his Tratado breve de la cultivación de la colmenas (1586). During the reign of Elizabeth I, the egg-​laying bee was celebrated as the political queen of her hive by beekeeper Charles Butler in Feminine Monarchie (Oxford University Press: Joseph Barnes, 1609). Bernard Mandeville reinstated a king bee in his Fable of the Bees (1714), which Émilie du Châtelet adapted into French to defend commercial society. Réaumur, in vol. 5 of Mémoires pour servir à l’histoire des insectes (1739), adhered to the Queen’s central role in

58  Louise Dupin’s Work on Women took this mother for a king. I in no way advise women to take as a cause for vanity the discovery that she is, in fact, a queen.

On the equality of men’s and women’s participation in generation In Egypt they use the heat from ovens to make eggs hatch; right now in Paris they are being hatched with artificially produced heat.110 But these are fertilized eggs; eggs without fertilization would produce nothing. If animals were all made from the male sex and if females only served to nourish the new animal, it would be quite odd that in the coupling of donkeys and mares the mare’s nourishment alone could give the newborn the elongated tail and shortened ears of its mother, Madam Mare—​just as exact resemblance to mothers and that mix of traits that we see everyday in their children would be odd among humans.111 In trying to establish that the animal is formed inside of eggs, one encounters the same problem. What can we conclude from these equal difficulties on both sides if not that the participation of both parties is equally necessary and, consequently, equally important?112 reproduction. See Felicia Gottmann, “Du Châtelet, Voltaire, and the Transformation of Mandeville’s Fable, History of European Ideas 38 (2012): 218–​232. 110 At the Académie royale des sciences in 1747, Réaumur demonstrated how to hatch eggs in a dunghill, using fermenting manure to replace the heat of the hen (a technique used in Egypt). He shared the results in Art de faire éclore et d’élever en toute saison des oiseaux domestiques de toutes espèces (1749). 111 Following Maupertuis’s reflections on the coupling of horse and donkey (Vénus physique, 104), Buffon raises the mule’s resemblance to both its parents as a problem for ovism and animalculism: “If the spermatic worm of the father’s seed is supposed to be the fetus, how can the child resemble its mother? And if the fetus pre-​exists in the mother’s egg, how can the child resemble the father? And if either the horse’s spermatic worm or the donkey’s egg contain the fetus, how can the mule partake of the natures of both horse and donkey?” (Histoire naturelle 2:158). 112 Dupin was privy to the latest theories about generation and underscores the sterility of seventeenth-​century versions of preformationism still feuding in the eighteenth century: ovism and animalculism. Preformationism posits that the animal exists in miniature in all of its parts prior to copulation, the on-​switch for its growth. Ovism held that all future animals were present in the first female of every species from the moment of God’s creation, conveniently denying embryonic development, which physics-​based mechanism was ill-​equipped to explain. Animalculism emerged with improved microscopes; the Dutch lens-​grinder Antoni van Leeuwenhoek saw spermatozoids and the Dutch mathematician Nicolas Hartsoeker saw fully formed men within them. Preformationism fell out of fashion by the 1740s. The German physician Georg Ernst Stahl speculated that the fetal soul conducted vital processes like organ formation (Theorica medica vera, 1708). The discovery of regeneration in marine animals led to the principle of intelligent organization. In Vénus physique, Maupertuis uplifts William Harvey’s epigenetic claims from a century earlier. Maupertuis imagines a force of attraction in the smallest units of living matter that drives their coalescence into body parts in Essai sur la formation des corps organisés (1754). Stéphane Schmitt, “Mécanisme et

Part I: Science  59 Some physicians saw animalcules that they took to be the human race in a certain fluid {Heister}.113 A treatise on anatomy reports having similarly seen animalcules in female fluids. If the comparison had been pursued, no doubt some inferiority would have been found in the female fluids with respect to the male fluids: but, since Nature is more easily examined in males on this point, the female’s production has been spared the disdain of comparison. What were once taken to be animalcules are today imagined to be pistils and stamen, doing their thing in the manner of flowers.114 Perhaps the truth of the matter will be found once all false leads have been exhausted. The precise laws of generation are not known; there is no shame in admitting it. If scholars had thought this way on any number of points, we would be less rich in errors.

An examination of some maxims of the Ancients that have caused the Moderns’ errors Even with just a smattering of scientific knowledge, we are frankly taken aback to read in the work of a respectable ancient, “the material that makes males is stronger and that which makes females is weaker” {Hippocrates}.115 Anatomy confirms the impossibility of this difference, as the reservoirs and paths of the generative fluid are the same whether to produce males or females. Aristotle said that old men and those who are not yet adults engender females; that males are formed earlier than females because of their strength; that males inhabit the right side of their mother’s womb and females the left side.116 Boys survive after coming into the world at seven months, while girls épigenèse: les conceptions de Bourguet et de Maupertuis sur la génération,” Dix-​huitième siècle 46, no. 1 (2014): 477–​499. 113 Semen. Dupin’s source for animalcules is Jean-​Baptiste Sénac’s adaptation of Lorenz Heister’s work: L’Anatomie d’Heister, [1724] (Paris: Jacques Vincent, 2nd edition, 1735). This is not a faithful translation of Heister, but is based on his work and on that of others (preface). Sénac rehearses the debate about preformationism (233–​234) and notes that animalcules have been observed in women’s seminal fluid (234). 114 Nehemiah Grew, of the Royal Society of London, compares stamen to male sexual organs and the pistil to female ones in The Anatomy of Plants (1682). Dupin mocks the extension of preformationism to botany—​the idea that seeds contain tiny but fully formed plants. 115 Dupin wrote semence (seed) after matière but then crossed it out. See The Hippocratic Treatises, “On Generation,” “On the Nature of the Child,” “Diseases IV”: A Commentary, by Iain M. Lonie (De Gruyter, 1981), 3. 116 In book 4 of On the Generation of Animals. This list is commonplace. See also Nicolas Venette, Tableau de l’amour conjugal, 145.

60  Louise Dupin’s Work on Women only emerge after nine months because Nature hides her mistakes as long as she can {Renaudot}.117 These follies weren’t fully adopted in society, but we still encounter their distant cousins. Even today it is still common for people to say that when a woman feels well during pregnancy she will give birth to a boy, and vice versa. And yet experience teaches the opposite: that is to say, good or ill health during pregnancy depends on other things entirely than the sex being formed in the mother’s womb, since one can feel well or ill as much for one sex as for the other. Some ancient physicians called one particular organ in women an “animal” {the womb}.118 This wording still persists in some rural areas; when peasant women are in some way indisposed, they imagine that their “animal” is devouring them. For those who do not grasp the ridiculousness of this, how can such errors fail to convey that women are beings slighted by Nature? Others {Marulle, following Aristotle} said that woman is a crime of nature: that women are deformed or imperfect men.119 The nomenclature “mutilated man” is found in several places. And we still find scholars who are not far from this sentiment. They explain the idea thus: men’s external organ seems to them to be of the same stuff as women’s internal organ; and, without even thinking of the structure or function of either organ, they suggest that Nature determined the difference of the sexes by an extra turn of her wheel.120 Could mens’ desire to claim for themselves an extra turn of Nature’s wheel have led the human mind to this strange extravagance? 117 The doctor Théophraste Renaudot organized and published public debates, called conferences. Women’s deficits, including this one, are listed in the conference “Whether is the more noble, Man or Woman.” See A general collection of discourses of the virtuosi of France, upon questions of all sorts of philosophy and other natural knowledge, trans. G. Havers, Dring and Starkey, 1664. Early English Text Creation Partnership, 2011. 118 We translate sein (literally, “breast”) as “womb” throughout the article. Here, however, Dupin uses matrice (uterus, from the Latin matrix). The idea of uterine mobility was inherited from several strands of Greek medicine. In the sixteenth century, Plato’s comparison in Timaeus of the womb to an animal appears in misogynist litanies, like the one spewed by the doctor character Rondibilis in François Rabelais’s Tiers livre (1546). 119 In On the Generation of Animals. Renaudot’s conference demonstrates the association of Aristotle and the woman-​monster: “Woman is an imperfect Animall, [ . . . ] whom Aristotle termes a Monster; they who treat her most gently, stile her a simple Error of Nature; which through the deficiency of natural heat, could not attain to the making of a Male” (155). See also Poulain (Equality, 197–​198). Marulle is possibly Franceso Maurolico (Marulì or Marul), an early sixteenth-​century Sicilian who edited a work by Aristotle. 120 Dupin describes the Galenic model of sex difference: the male and female have the same genital organs, but the female’s are retained inside the body due to her colder nature, a sign of her incomplete development. See Art. 1.

Part I: Science  61 While it is true that older authors advanced this opinion of the [woman as] “mutilated man” {Sinibaldus, Rodericus},121 others contradicted it at the time and even decried it. Is it possible to protest too much against such madness? If Nature had only created men, the human race would have seen one century, at most, before perishing. And what would that have been like, since women are not only a necessary other half for men, but also a pleasant one. It’s true that to do justice to this principle’s detractors, we must remark that while disapproving its excess, they admit at least a part of it: that is, dignity [of men] and inferiority [of women]. While good modern physicians don’t write anything like what we’ve just cited, based on their studies and the opinions they’ve invented, they can still be heard speaking magnificently of the marvels of generation when describing the male organs and the fertile fire that drives them, whereas they speak very plainly of women as accessories to this fertile fire and as if their organs were less amazing.122 Can we not wonder what men’s fertile fire would be without that of women? Because the necessary organs in men are not always in a state to accomplish Nature’s grand design, they have inferred from this an exceptional abundance of animal spirits. For they esteem this state so nobly that they want to remain in sole possession of it.123 Nevertheless, as good science would certainly lead us to expect, the same effect takes place internally in women. Without going into too much detail, if what is called the fringe in women in fact accomplishes the task that has been attributed to it, not only does it experience this mechanical movement, but it also functions as a little intelligent hand when it stretches out to cover the ovary.124

121 mas læsus. Rodericus (Rodrigo de Castro) echoes Aristotle on the deficiency of female semen in bk. 2 of De universa mulierum medicina (Hamburg: Philippi de Ohr, 1603). Giovanni Benedetto Sinibaldi, a seventeenth-​century Italian doctor, citing Aristotle and others, describes females as incomplete, degenerate, and as mas læsus in Geneanthropeiae, sive de hominis generatione decateuchon (Rome, Francisci Caballi, 1642), 113–​118. 122 Feu fécond. Sénac describes the male function in reproduction as “ce feu si fécond” (251) and the male genitals and fluids as “marvelous” and revered throughout time: “man solidifies his empire over half the human race” through them (L’Anatomie, 221). 123 Sénac follows the course of the “amazing” fluids causing erection and ejaculation, marveling that erection can still occur in a penis limp from repeated intercourse (L’Anatomie, 131)—​evidence of a great abundance of animal spirits. 124 Sénac, L’Anatomie, 278–​279. But Dupin’s wording (pavillon, faire l’office) mirrors that of Maupertuis. He explains that the sixteenth-​century Italian anatomist Fallopius perceived two tubes ending in a fringe [fimbrae] that reaches out to the ovary, presses it, and receives the egg (actually the Graafian follicle) from it (22–​23; 31). Dupin compares the reaching of the fimbriae to the erection of a penis.

62  Louise Dupin’s Work on Women The latter name [ovary] is modern; the Ancients, despite what they say about women, found in their anatomical observations so much resemblance between men and women that they often used the same names for the organs of generation, whether male or female. While the Moderns have rightly corrected them on this matter, because no nomenclature can be overly distinct and clear, they should not admire principally, let alone uniquely the marvels of generation in males since the structure of female organs is perfectly marvelous. It seems to me that this is a case in which we can say quite naturally that the honor is equal between us.125 If modesty were adduced as an excuse here,126 we would be quite surprised to learn that physicians find nature immodest; and all the more so given that the intellectual disposition with which these books are written and usually read is far removed from prurience.

Reflections on a modern book Some years ago a book entitled Treatise on the Communication of Illnesses and Passions was published. The milk of wetnurses and mothers—​a baby’s first nourishment—​presents a very great danger, according to the author. This work is written with intellect and method, and assumes considerable knowledge; but with such commentary, it can hardly pass as more than folly among sensible people. Scorn for common sense in this work appears to go just as far as scorn for women. He says that they should not nurse their children, because that harms the newborn’s health in this world and their salvation in the next.127 This would have been the moment to investigate the authors whom we have cited and to employ all imaginable means to perpetuate the human race without women. This was worthy of the author’s zeal for 125 l’honneur est égal entre nous. An expression of polite conversation, applied to sexual organs. 126 Sénac chides prudish readers who would censor scientific explanations for offending modesty, but speaks about chickens instead of humans to appease them (L’Anatomie, 222–​223). Dupin suggests that self-​censorship is an excuse for not praising female anatomy. 127 [Louis Malo Moreau de Saint-​Elier], Traité de la communication des maladies et des passions (The Hague: Jean Van Duren, 1738). Warnings against sending infants to wetnurses were commonplace and largely justified. Urban families believed outsourcing nutrition to be in the best interest of the child; Paris was a dirty and dangerous place, and peasant women were supposedly healthy. But half of all babies sent to wetnurses died in their care. Moreau de Saint-​Elier criticizes all human breastfeeding, blaming women’s milk for transmitting vices and disease (193). He promotes animal milk instead. Dupin rebuts his claims in a crossed-​out paragraph following this one. See Nancy Senior, “Aspects of Infant Feeding in Eighteenth-​Century France,” Eighteenth-​Century Studies 16, no. 4 (1983): 367–​388.

Part I: Science  63 masculine human nature. Nevertheless, he did nothing with this and seems to have come to terms with the unfortunate necessity of letting women work concurrently with men toward this task. This book is perhaps not worth speaking about in relation to women. Nor are the majority of things taken up in this chapter, were we to judge them on their own merits. But since they are the source of an infinite number of opinions and ridiculous maxims on our topic, we had to attack the principle behind those opinions to justify our opinion of equality. No doubt, there are reasonable people whose minds have never so much as entertained the ideas that we are refuting and who would never agree to them. To them, we reply that the author of Don Quixote didn’t string together the follies of his hero to correct those untouched by the spirit of chivalry.128

On fantastical opinions about how men contribute to generation It was no doubt based on the principle of great masculine magnificence that some philosophers called females “Nature’s field” and thought that all other parts constitutive of the human race resided in males.129 {From this derives the expression of Diogenes, the trials of Paracelsus, Arnold, and the Tales of Salmuth, etc}.130 Based on these ideas, the most modest men generally believe that they contribute more essentially than women to procreation.

128 Don Quixote de la Mancha, the eponymous hero of a Spanish novel (1605, 1615) by Miguel de Cervantes, becomes so enthralled with chivalric romances that he styles himself a knight-​errant and sets out on a series of comical adventures. 129 Arvus Natura. A field that has been plowed but not yet planted, conveying the Aristotelian view that women provide only passive matter in reproduction. Dupin addresses arvus natura in the Morand addition. 130 Each of these refers to an anecdote in which reproduction is supposedly accomplished without women. Venette combines Diogenes the Cynic’s reputation for masturbating in the streets of Athens with the legend that Athenians sprang directly from the soil to characterize the uterus as “that field where Diogenes customarily planted men, and where he immortalized himself in the streets without shame” (27). Alchemical texts explaining how to grow humans from semen in glass bottles, were attributed (apocryphally) to the thirteenth-​century Spanish doctor Arnau de Villanova and the sixteenth-​century Swiss doctor Paracelsus (Theophrastus von Hohenheim). Dupin’s source is a review in the Nouvelles de la république des lettres (August 1686, pages 931–​945) of Jan Baptist van Lamzweerde’s Historia naturalis molarum uteri (Leiden, Pieter van der Aa, 1686). Lamzweerde, professor of medicine at Cologne, mocks Paracelsus’s test-​tube homunculus and the German doctor Philip Salmuth’s story about a tiny baby born from the mouth of its mother; the woman thought all children were conceived that way since her husband never had sex with her any other way. Salmuth recounts this story in Observationum medicarum centuriae tres posthumae (Brunswick: Gottfried Müller, 1648), 156–​157.

64  Louise Dupin’s Work on Women But this opinion is poorly considered on their part along with others of the same type. Nature has less work to do to adequately dispose men to this design. She has but one preparation to make; she acts in them only for a few moments. In women her work is more complicated; her effort exceeds one preparation. And after that, she is active for nine months and beyond, as long as is required to provide the sustenance needed by this new being.131 Some authors have claimed that what men contribute to propagation is of no use to it, but they do not seem to us to have reasoned any more clearly than those who uphold that their contribution alone could make it happen. We adopt here none of the systems that have been proposed to explain generation.132 Each one’s unresolved difficulties and their sheer diversity argue against them. The experiments currently being conducted with electricity may shed some new light on this point, but female bodies will not be found to be deprived of this electrical fluid nor of this subtle fire which appears to play such an important role in nature.

Article 3. On Temperament When describing temperament, the ancients said it was an exact proportion of the four primary qualities, which are hot, dry, cold, and wet; and these are the principles on which depend the actions proceeding from the four humors, which are blood, bile, phlegm, and melancholy.133 After this first division, they made many subdivisions by which they sought to explain all of the different temperaments and characters.

131 The Morand addition asks who deserves more credit for the outlay of time and effort in procreation: “Is there any proportion between the time that men and women devote to this grand operation?” Dupin calculates: “[A woman] carries a child in her womb for nine months of efficient cohabitation [ . . . ] What is the man’s part in this operation? [ . . . ] a half minute at most is the extent of his labor. [ . . . ] Where, we ask, is that most vigorous man who, in operating for as many half minutes, including necessary breaks, could spend up to the age of eighty the equivalent of the time spent by a woman to produce only one or two children in her lifetime?” 132 “I know too well the faults in the systems I have proposed to adopt any one of them; I find that there’s still too much darkness over these matters to be able to form any system.” Maupertuis, Vénus physique, 119–​120. A “system” refers to an ensemble of principles that form a distinct doctrine. 133 Three drafts exist: Musée Jean-​Jacques Rousseau (IR.2002.489.1); Harry Ransom Center (MS-​ 03636, I.B.art.3); Bibliothèque de Genève (Ms. fr. 217, f. 187–​210). The drafts partially overlap. We use the MJJR draft, which is the most complete, supplemented by BGe. We supplement from the HRC draft in the untitled first section and quote from it in notes.

Part I: Science  65 Within this explanation was included the view that heat and dryness produced good qualities and comprise the temperament of men, and that coldness and moisture produced bad ones and comprise that of women.134 It’s the pure doctrine of the majority of doctor physicians,135 following Hippocrates and Galen.136 One of them {Juncker}, speaking of the sexes, extends this distinction to include even vital actions and those of the soul and to a precise application of the external senses. The same author cites some wise people who, he says, would like all of this temperament twaddle to be abolished, and yet he reasons according to this nonsense.137 Others {Parmenides, Democritus} believed that women had more heat than men, such that on all points we often find arguments for and against, and we don’t know which way to turn.138 We must nevertheless concede that the view that heat is found in men is the dominant one, meaning that many more physicians have adopted it. Let’s take a little look at the results of these principles and their contradictions; here is a sample. When men consider that particular effect of temperament known as “having temperament”139 as a mark of strength and indeed want to make a virtue out of it, they attribute it to themselves and refuse it to women; but when they consider the same object as a weakness or a vice, they leave it to women. There is not a person who hasn’t encountered, a hundred times over, commentary on such principles in books and conversation. It would nevertheless be much simpler to say that men and women are tied on this point, and that nature solicits them equally, with equal desire, since they have to have an equal degree of determination to obey her orders. Men regularly mistake custom for nature and it’s easy to catch them contradicting 134 “There are physicians who have discussed at length, to women’s disadvantage, the temperament of the two sexes, and who have written endlessly to show that women must have a temperament that is completely different from ours and makes them inferior in everything” (Poulain, Equality, 184–​185). Poulain singles out Cureau de la Chambre for making temperament “the source of faults commonly attributed to women” (186). 135 physiciens medecins. On word choice, see introduction to Part I. 136 The Hippocratic treatise On the Nature of Man views man as composed of four humors whose imbalance causes disease. Galen’s On Temperaments discusses the effects of various mixtures of the four primary qualities on health. 137 Johann Juncker, leader of the Pietist movement in medicine in Halle, Germany, and defender of the vitalist theories of Georg Ernst Stahl in the 1720s. We have not located Juncker’s discussion of sex difference. 138 In Part 2 of Parts of Animals, Aristotle attributes to Parmenides the view that women are hotter than men due to the heat of the menstrual blood. Dupin transcends opposing, irreconcilable arguments by suspending judgment—​one of the modes of skeptical pyrrhonism. 139 avoir du tempérament. To be lustful (a euphemism).

66  Louise Dupin’s Work on Women themselves, above all in their system regarding women. They can often be heard claiming that young women unaccustomed to intimate commerce with men manifest a kind of natural apprehension toward it that is very noticeable. This is apparently rooted in men’s desire to believe themselves capable of persuading women against their will, or in their desire to attribute to women a sort of fear of and respect for their persons; women perhaps seeing themselves as hardly worthy of the honor men wish to do them. But is nature what we see there? If men and women were raised without being taught different manners, wouldn’t they seek each other out equally, and wouldn’t they listen to what they asked of each other with all the simplicity of a desire that neither, naturally, would see as sinful or intimidating? In nature, do we observe the fear men speak of in other animals? True, the behaviors of certain animals among whom females appear to resist are sometimes explained in this way, but this explanation reflects the prejudice of men more than their actual knowledge. It might be truer to suppose that the behavior of these animals serves to perfect the means meant to lead them to their goal, than to attribute to them fears or difficulties largely unrelated to the task before them. We could say more straightforwardly that males and females of all species seek each other out and sometimes demonstrate reluctance to each other when nature does not solicit them equally. It is highly likely that that was how it happened for a long time among humans, until men decided to turn it into a matter of rank: the woman would always be inclined and the man would take charge of making the advances. There is a proof of this in a Jewish law that forbade women from making certain propositions to their husbands.140 Whatever the case may be, the custom that has women ever inclined but men in charge of making advances has the appearance of justice: the one’s deference always creating an opportunity, but the other’s not doing so as regularly. Yet despite what both men and women may say based on their prejudices, by digging deeper into this subject, we might find that, for the good of the common cause, two inclinations are necessary; one is not enough. If women were born with the natural reticence and fear we mentioned above, how would the insatiable desire for men’s ardor that is the subject of

140 Dupin wrote but crossed out: “It also proves that the councils of the ancients were always composed of the most elderly men, it being less likely that this opinion would have been initiated by the young of the nation.”

Part I: Science  67 so many bad jokes come about? And if women are born with such lively and lasting desires, how can it be said that they lack temperament? Another contradiction: It is commonly said that women are more sensitive than men. While according to the principles of scholars, this is easy to deduce from women’s coldness and humidity,141 it would seem to us just as difficult to infer the same about men from the heat and dryness that they reserve for themselves, the principle of sensibility likely depending on other factors. When men say that women are more sensitive, they do so with certain distinctions in mind, implying that women are more sensitive to trifles and to trifling afflictions and woes, while denying them anything great, even in pain and sorrow. I heard a man of first-​rate intelligence argue that women were less sensitive than men to the pain of a wound or other serious injury. This seemed to him the simple consequence of the supposed humidity of women, whose bodies, according to him, yield more easily to [the causes of] pain. As confirmation of his claim, he cited the pain of childbirth borne by women that he couldn’t imagine men enduring. For childbirth is everywhere thrown at women with inconceivable tenacity, and far from deriving an argument favorable to women from it, as it would be easy to do, it’s always the opposite reasoning that emerges. I understood this man to be basing his comments on the work of bad anatomists and bad mechanists,142 for a simple rearrangement [disposition] of men’s body parts would establish the possibility of childbirth, which they could accomplish like women with nature’s help. Childbirth would thus depend as much on temperament as on [physical] conformation, which would be quite difficult to fix.143 This judgment that pain harms women less than men shows human reason at its most reckless. Fables present us with the scene of a judgment about the differing sensations of men and women, but through the means of metamorphosis.144 In the absence of such means, it is absurd to claim to be able to 141 Cureau de la Chambre attributes women’s weakness and fearfulness to their cold temperament (Art de connaître les hommes, 26–​27). 142 On mechanism, see the introduction to Part I. 143 Temperament was crucial to the theory that coldness caused the sexual organs to remain within the body, while heat caused them to emerge (see Arts. 1 and 2). 144 Dupin compares ideas of spontaneous sex change to the story of Tiresias recounted in Ovid’s Metamorphoses (Book III): Tiresias encounters mating snakes and strikes them with a stick. He turns into a woman on the spot. Tiresias repeats the gesture to transform back into a man. Jove and Juno call on Tiresisas to settle the question of whether men or women have more pleasure during sex: Tiresias says women do. Angered, Juno blinds him.

68  Louise Dupin’s Work on Women judge this with certainty. Another thing that is often said is that sorrow costs men more than it does women. Is that so that men can inflict it on them with fewer scruples? If women are generally more sensitive, then they are more sensitive to pain and to every affliction: if they are less sensitive, then they are so in fewer situations, including essential situations. But the most glaring contradictions seem the most compatible to men, and the worst reasoning on this topic seems to them more just than to posit as a principle the natural equality that we uphold and from which one could nevertheless draw clearer reasoning and truer consequences.

Observations on temperament in Freind and Boerhaave Since we don’t consider the first doctors and physicians to be the most accomplished, we must select from among the Moderns those who are rightly esteemed the most credible to examine whether they sufficiently distance themselves from the blameworthy opinions of the ancients regarding women. We will take up Freind and Boerhaave, persons respected for their excellent writings. The first concurs with the Prince of Medicine {Hippocrates} that women’s temperament is wetter than men’s. This can be seen through inspection and felt through touch, he says, as women’s bodies are softer and more flexible, because, he adds, the least solid parts abound in humidity, whereas in the constitution of men’s bodies, which is more solid, he finds a lesser amount of fluid because the solid parts cannot increase in mass except through the reduction of fluid.145 That these solids are nothing but condensed fluids is something a physician should know, but Freind was perhaps unaware that the animal matter appearing to have the most consistency actually contains the most humidity and air, just as egg whites contain the lymph and bones of animals. Lymph contains at least nineteen parts of phlegm for every solid part. As for bones, what they carry in humidity and air per solids is immense. He {Freind} also says that women have proportionally more blood than men. Apparently he bases this on the organ in women that supplies blood to a large number of vessels both for its own nourishment and eventually as

145 John Freind, Emmenologie, ou traité de l’évacuation ordinaire des femmes, trans. M. Devaux (Paris: J. Clouzier, 1730), 29–​30. Dupin may have encountered the English doctor’s work in L’Anatomie d’ Heister (see Arts. 1 and 2), 257–​276.

Part I: Science  69 destined by nature for that of a new creature.146 However, that doesn’t bring to the entire complexion of the body a larger quantity of blood in women. We would reply that both men and women must have a certain amount of liquid in their vessels, in sufficient but not excessive measure, for without them, the body would fall ill, and there are no wayward fluids in female bodies that could create this supposed humidity; and since women have an organ that men lack, it should have vessels for its own unique regulation.147 Regarding women’s temperament, he {Freind} also says that even when a woman is accustomed to work, her wet temperament and her natural weakness accompany her.148 This obstinacy is rather funny. If a woman’s wetness and weakness can plow a field just like the dryness and strength of a man, what is the point of seeking out subtle differences in causes for effects that are the same? He attributes the earlier maturity of women to their humidity.149 We could attribute it just as reasonably to heat, which is the principle we know to work most actively in nature. Wouldn’t it be simpler and just as likely to say that men, in growing a bit taller [than women], take more time to reach that height? We could go even further, because it is perhaps not true that women develop physically [before men] or that they are in general shorter, but this is what is said, and it is true that one would have to gather a larger number of observations to contradict it. Since we haven’t made these observations, we prefer to agree to this point although we could perhaps contest it. But to not abandon our subject of temperament, how can two systems have been built on humidity and heat where only one was necessary and how can things that are inseparable inside each animal—​without which it would not be alive—​have been separated and assigned to each of them? Isn’t this a prime case of unnecessarily multiplying entities?150 If one were to try to circumvent this difficulty by qualifying the distinction between men and women as a matter of degrees, I would ask on which

146 Freind argues that menstruation results from plethora (a superabundance of blood) because women don’t evacuate all their nourishment and retain blood that men excrete along with spirits in physical activity (Emmenologie, 21–​26; 30–​32). 147 reglage. An allusion to les règles—​a period. 148 Freind, 32. 149 Freind, 29–​30. 150 An allusion to Ockham’s razor, as formulated in the seventeenth century: “entities should not be multiplied beyond necessity.” When multiple hypotheses explain the same phenomenon, the “razor” shaves away those that have more assumptions built into them, letting the more straightforward hypothesis stand. Dupin applies this tool to Freind’s separate explanations of men’s and women’s bodies; it would be simpler, and more plausible, to explain their physiology in the same way.

70  Louise Dupin’s Work on Women principles this [system of] more or less is founded, and until someone supplies some on which this can be firmly grounded, I shall affirm that temperament is a thing both general and common between men and women; and that differences in temperament do not result from the differences of the sexes. Temperaments are hot or cold, dry or wet, bilious or sanguine according to the contingencies of constitution and diet, of country and place, and as a result of differences in age. Various accidents can cause a change in temperament in an individual.151 There are very marked differences [of temperament] among men and, certainly, the temperaments of a bilious woman and a sanguine man differ more than those of a man and a woman who are both sanguine or bilious.152

On the supposed analogy between the temperaments of women and children People have gone so far as to make a broad analogy between children, convalescents, and women.153 The naiveté of this comparison that is found everywhere gives pause for wonder. Boerhaave revived the view of an ancient {Erasistratus}154 who held solids in great esteem, and he included this theory in his aphorisms with some success; but he didn’t reason any better than others when he tried to deduce marked differences between men and women from it.155 151 In the HRC draft pages, Dupin muses: “undoubtedly, the physical does act on the moral in some way, but it does not constitute it.” Character and temperament are not the same thing: “a man who shows the strongest temperament is often found to be full of sweetness and graciousness“; “a very weak man shows himself to be just as often full of anger and capable of the most violent acts”; and “we see very different characters have similar temperaments, and very different temperaments with characters that sometimes appear the same.” She concludes: “temperament decides neither intelligence nor character; and we see—​among women just as among men—​differences between temperaments, characters, and degrees of intelligence. All of this they hold in common, in the good as well as the bad, since they are completely subject to the same sensations, the same reflections, and the same acquired knowledge.” 152 “One can find greater differences still between many men” than between men and women (Poulain, Equality, 185). 153 For example, in Cureau’s Art de connaître les hommes (27). 154 The Greek anatomist Erasistratus (third century bce) rejected the humoral tradition in favor of what came to be known as solidism. 155 Boerhaave imagined the body as composed of fibers that, woven together, created its matter and vessels: veins, arteries, and nerves. Boerhaave’s “fiber body” dominated understanding of the nervous system in the early eighteenth century. See Hisao Ishizuka, “ ‘Fibre Body’: The Concept of Fibre in Eighteenth-​Century Medicine, c. 1700–​1740,” Medical History, 56, no. 4 (2012): 562–​584. Dupin refers to Aphorismes de monsieur Herman Boerhaave sur la connoissance et la cure des maladies (Paris: Briasson, 1745).

Part I: Science  71 In effect, after having explained illnesses involving lax fibers and stiff fibers as any sensible physician would, by posing the principle that health depends on the tonus of the fibers composed of their tension and natural consistency, it is very surprising to see him end the article thus: “This also explains why children, women, and idle people have lax fibers” {apho. 37}.156 Firstly, we must observe that Boerhaave begins by taking for granted something that others do not. That is, that the three [types of] individuals have lax fibers, and after having breezily assumed this, he says that by means of his theory we understand why this is so. But we are far from understanding this since it isn’t clear why he reduces three very different types of people to one category. Compared to the fibers of an adult, the child’s should naturally be more elastic since otherwise there wouldn’t be sufficient material for development and growth which assumes a greater elasticity for the extension of the fibers. The fiber of idle people slackens by want of exercise and that was all Boerhaave needed to consider in his aphorism, adding to that if he had so desired all of the other dispositions and illnesses involving the slackening of fibers. Then his reader would have understood the pertinence of this theory to [explaining] the causes of illness in terms of the principles he had just presented, but women have strictly nothing to do with this comparison. The fibers of a woman of good constitution are no more lax than those of a man of good constitution. There need not be a difference among healthy men and women in what is known as the tonus of the fibers. In men and in women, it is as it should be for accomplishing the operations nature intended, which are common to both, even in illness. The causes that alter one’s state of health by making the fiber too stiff or too elastic are common to both men and women. Violent illnesses incite madness in both; languorous illnesses, the same despondency; idleness and exercise, the same effects. All the same laws apply in health and in illness; if they are doing poorly or well, it’s according to the same principles and reasons; they maintain and regain their health by the same means. Where, then, will one find a difference of temperament? Children of both sexes resemble each other through the temperament of their age; convalescents, having endured the harms brought on by different illnesses, resemble each other through these illnesses when they are the same, and their condition results from the kind of illness they suffer, and not from

156 Boerhaave, Aphorismes, 10.

72  Louise Dupin’s Work on Women their sex. But it is laughable that the great masters don’t notice the absurdity of comparing the flower of youth to old age, illness to health, idleness to activity, and that the pleasure or habit of distinguishing the species of men from that of women is behind so many extravagant assertions. Health is the same thing in men and women. Illnesses are all the same for both of them, including even madness. It would be quite nice for the view we reject if women alone went mad, but experience teaches the contrary. There is, nevertheless, one illness in men that is rather rare in women-​—​kidney stones—​but it’s due to a different conformation and not to temperament. It’s because the water to be expelled follows a longer route in men than in women and the channel that leads it outside in men has a curve that doesn’t exist in women, making it more difficult to discharge materials that can cause a stone to form. We also observe an illness in women that men aren’t prone to because they don’t have the part where it occurs, but this illness is neither general nor even widespread.157 Afflictions of the breast are in the same situation, but when a bad disposition of blood that causes these maladies is found in men, they have similar pains though not in the same locations. This is what happens when men have ulcers or cancers. {Men have even been operated on for cancer located in the breast just as women have had surgery for stones.}

Observation on temperament as an explanation for periods Freind claims that women transpire less than men and that this lesser transpiration contributes to plethora in them.158 We know that plethora has replaced the venerable notion that the moon and fermentation caused periods. This author elaborated at length on this subject in a treatise he wrote ex professo.159 We could argue against it in several places, but so as not to stray we will hold to a single point. He relies on plethora to explain the unique state of women regarding periods, but at the same time he seemingly contradicts himself. He cites an author {Sanctorius} who observed a periodic evacuation in men, which 157 Uterine or cervical cancer, or the condition of a prolapsed uterus? 158 Transpiration: the insensible exiting of humors from the pores of the skin, caused by circulation and the blood’s heat. Freind claims that women transpire less than men because their blood and humors circulate with less force (26–​28). Accumulated, uneliminated humors result in menstruation. 159 “with requisite competence.” Perhaps used sarcastically.

Part I: Science  73 therefore brings them near to the temperament of women. He says that at the beginning of the month, men feel heavier by about a pound or two, and toward the end of each month return to their usual weight, and this occurs in them by means of a kind of paroxysm.160 From there, he cites an ancient {Hippocrates} who stretches his conjectures on plethora (before periods had been attributed to it) to the point of saying that athletes who have achieved an excess of health cannot remain for long in this state without falling ill.161 How could the abundance of transpiration that they establish in men not preserve them from this plethora? At the very least shouldn’t the men who do the most exercise be spared from it? If plethora is so indispensable and so general in animal life, why does it create a unique sign in women? And if several men are found to have an equivalent to this sign, and if all men are subject to plethora, how does this result in the establishment of such a major difference between the temperaments of men and women? We believe that periods are a logical consequence of formation, not of temperament. Rather than explaining this idea, since it isn’t our subject, we will simply say that we don’t see enough [evidence] to lay the foundation of a difference of temperament between men and women even if we apply the principles of those who wish to establish one, and we will remain persuaded that there is only one temperament for men and for women, just as there is only one matter to form them from; and only one element in which they can live.

Observation on what Freind says about the pulse and about transpiration This author, citing the Ancients, said that the pulse is weaker in women than in men.162 If men are generally a bit taller, the heart’s pumping should be proportionate to this height in order to carry blood to the most distant extremities; for the same reason, the diameters of the vessels may be a little 160 In De Statica Medicina (1614), the Italian doctor Sanctorius (Santorio Santorio), documents experiments using a weighing chair he invented to measure the volume of food intake and evacuation via excretion and transpiration. In men, says Freind, quoting Sanctorius, the humors build up in an abundance of turbid urine (Freind, 73–​74). 161 Freind, 124–​125. Freind agrees with Hippocrates: an excess of blood produces a faster pulse, engorged vessels, and, eventually, degeneration of the blood. 162 Sanctorius, Hippocrates, and Galen all agree that women are weaker than men; Galen attributes this to women’s weaker pulse, because the “most certain signs of bodily strength come from the pulse” (Freind, 27).

74  Louise Dupin’s Work on Women larger and can contribute to giving the pulse a more pronounced beat. But we understand quite well that this observation should be similarly the case between a tall woman and a short man, and furthermore that age, diet, and passions affect the pulse in men and in women, whether by augmenting or reducing it. Thus it remains rather difficult to be certain of what he advances, unless one believes the early scholars just as religiously as he does and without examining any of them. In holding as established this stronger pulse, he infers from it that women transpire less than men because the liquids are carried to the skin with less force and, from their lesser transpiration he concludes that they are weaker. It would have been just as easy to conclude that women were stronger since we are weakened through abundant transpiration and, in summer when we transpire more, we actually feel weaker than in cold weather. He goes on to assert that women transpire less than they should, but who made this new decree for them, and how can we reach an agreement about such things, except with respect to a few women who live in lazy idleness?163 How can this include women in general, of whom there are thousands who get all of the exercise they can tolerate. Wouldn’t it be more plausible to say that women just as well as men transpire as much as they should; that diet and exercise increase or diminish transpiration in both sexes; and that stating as principles the above-​mentioned assumptions does not convincingly recommend them to us, even though they are supported by the authority of almost all of the physicians. But let’s do them justice: whatever involves women is what they have examined the least, [so] in speaking of them, they almost all copy each other and thus have accumulated errors on this point instead of making progress as they have on other matters. Similarity and equality, so simple between men and women, would have thus spared them many superfluous arguments, not to mention inaccurate ones.

Remarks on a thesis defended in schools of medicine Beyond the great teachers of science and doctrine, there are quite a few classrooms, and in them, mediocre reasoners proliferate. I read by chance, in a project to perfect medicine containing many good things, a thesis that was 163 Women’s idleness causes a surfeit of humors and blood; their ligaments and muscles do not purge waste via strenuous movement (30–​32).

Part I: Science  75 defended in 1718.164 Having spoken imperiously about women, in a manner both disgusting and false, the bachelor165 enumerated a quantity of pains and passions supposedly affecting women, which, he insists, men never have to experience. The thesis finishes with these exact words: “do not ask a woman, then, how she is, but where she hurts.” With such a conclusion, one would think the candidate’s propositions were being mocked, and yet it is his own conclusion. This thesis was thought so lovely that the question [that elicited it] was argued again in 1743, and the one who argued it the first time as a bachelor had the pleasure of presiding over it the second time. These doctors would have done better to say, like the doctor in spite of himself: “it’s a grand and subtle question to know whether women are easier to cure than men.”166 The waffling of the doctor in the comedy was certainly worth more than their theses, and it is surprising that bodies of commendable and useful people permit such inanities in their schools, for they can certainly be harmful to the public in general and, in particular, diminish the respect it has for them.

Article 4. On Strength The167 supposed inequality of strength between men and women is based on the assumed difference in temperament between them; we have established, however, that temperament is the same in men and women.168 We are 164 The quæstio, like the disputatio, was a rite of passage in universities since the twelfth century. The thesis, defended by bachelier Gabriel Antoine Jacques, responded to the question “Are women more subject to disease than men?” put to him by François Maillard on January 13, 1718. These formal academic exercises were published as pamphlets often collected into books. Jacques Quillau, the printer for the University of Paris, printed the 1718 Quæstio medica, quodlibertariis disputationibus mane discutienda in scholis medicorum: An mulieres pluribus obnoxiae morbis, quàm viri? A pamphlet of the 1743 version—​indeed presided over by Jacques—​was pasted onto a page at the end of the MJJR draft. 165 bachelier. A young man who has completed studies at the bachelor level. 166 From Molière, The Doctor in Spite of Himself (1666), Act III, scene 6: a peasant (Sganarelle) is mistaken for a doctor and acts the part to distract the nobleman Geronte from seeing his daughter Lucinde in conversation with her beloved. Sganarelle answers both yes and no, spouting nonsense about women’s temperament and the moon. 167 The most complete and developed version of this article is at the Harry Ransom Center (MS-​03636, I.B.art.4). A draft version is at the Musée Jean-​Jacques Rousseau as part of Art. 3, “On Temperament” (IR.2002.489.1). Another section (IR.2002.488.1) shares the same title as the last subsection in the final version of 4 and is very similar to it. Pages from this draft (or of former Art. 3) also exist at the Abbaye de Chaalis in Oise, France (S. 5621), not consulted for this selection. The French is force. Throughout, we typically use “strength” to denote a human attribute and “force” in relation to influence on motion. 168 In Art. 3.

76  Louise Dupin’s Work on Women thus forced to conclude that physical strength is also the same, that is, that there are some men who are stronger than some women, some women who are stronger than some men, and some women who are so strong that they are the equal of very strong men.169 It is commonly held that men are bigger and stronger than women, but this is not proven with exactitude since, in order to be sure of it, one would need to compare a large number of men and women in equal conditions across several countries. Since that comparison has not been done, and would not be easy to do, we must abandon the proposition that men are generally larger and taller, and that they are consequently stronger. Everyone knows the general law that, other things being equal, the solidity, length, and width of a lever, relative to its position on the fulcrum, determines the production of greater or lesser force. One lifts more the longer the lever is; one pulls the lever more or less easily depending on the weight it carries; the distribution of force and of weight determines how much one can lift and pull. But all of these truths apply as much to a very tall, large woman in comparison with a small man as they do to a large man compared to a small woman. I will not speak of the special strength that women need in order to bear children and bring them into the world. Nevertheless, childbearing does require a force and vigor that men disregard, and that wise and caring Nature may not have deigned to grant men in equal measure. I will not say that were women to exert the physical strength each of them has, they would have even more of it. Yet, this truth is easily observed in men; those men who do not regularly exert their strength would not dare compare it to the force of men who do. Everyone has an example of this truth in their own person between the right hand and the left. I will not say that the education of women and specifically, the way they are dressed, even among the people, inhibits their growth and strength. Yet this would not be a groundless claim, for it is quite certain that women’s clothing prevents them from using the strength they’ve developed by the time they’re fully grown. According to an important anatomist of our time {Winslow},170 we can even say that the way women dress today in Europe harms their 169 Sexual difference does not “require women to be less strong or vigorous” than men; there are “strong and weak people of both sexes,” and exercise increases strength, so “if both sexes exercised to the same extent, one could possibly become as strong as the other.” Poulain, Equality, 183–​186. 170 Jacob Winslow, Danish professor of anatomy at the Jardin du Roi in Paris, describes the ill effects of corsets and high-​heeled shoes in “Réflexions anatomiques sur les incommodités, infirmités, &c. qui arrivent au Corps humain à l’occasion de certaines attitudes & de certains habillements,” published in the annals of the Académie royale des sciences in 1740.

Part I: Science  77 health. Whalebone stays determine a woman’s shape, squeezing her at the waist, impeding her arms, restricting her heart and lungs, and hampering the flow of her blood, which contravenes health and surely also physical strength. We will not develop this point any further because it would require too much detail. It is enough to present this idea to those who are willing to suspend their claim to superiority. A mechanical comparison accessible to anybody will make this point obvious: obstacles are avoided in every type of machine serving to maximize movement. Friction that might impede various operations is thereby minimized as much as possible. If we just consider this for a moment, we can see quite easily that the weight of women’s clothing, and the manner in which that weight is distributed, necessarily diminishes their capacity to move—​ and even their ability to walk. Although the size and the strength of the body do not determine the strength of the mind, it is quite common to believe the opposite. Men’s alleged force is their last bastion when they are pressed regarding the general opinion of their supposed superiority, and they resort to sleights of reasoning to insinuate that corporeal force somehow lends their mind an advantage. If one of these types of force caused the other, no matter how small the difference between them, we would have to concede defeat.171 Yet in this case, the same proportion between corporeal force and mental force would have to apply among men as well, and if we are not willing to argue that all strong men are more intelligent than weak men, then we cannot reasonably admit this proportion of forces as a legitimate distinction between men and women either.

Conclusion And172 so once again, this poor female whom people strive to portray as such a feeble creature has a serious interest in finding out just how much less strength she supposedly has than men. Should a man who has a hundred thousand and one in income consider himself much richer than one who only has a hundred thousand, and could he do very different things with 171 passer condamnation. A legal action consisting in consenting to a ruling that favors the opposing party. 172 Art. 4 grew out of Art. 3 and retained some aspects from an earlier ordering, like the subtitle “conclusion” in this subsection.

78  Louise Dupin’s Work on Women this fortune than the other would do with his? And, after what we have just observed, are we really so sure that masculine nature is always stronger than female nature? And even if that were to be true, are we not quite certain that the difference between them is negligible? If women are obligated to interrupt their work for a period of time due to the occupation of childbearing, and if, in some countries, that fact results in a division of labor in which women do less brutish work than men, isn’t the reason for women’s dispensation from such taxing labor important enough that they naturally deserve part of the esteem and admiration that men seem to have claimed for themselves alone in the name of their exertions? A famous author {Hobbes} says that he doubts that there is so great a disproportion of strength between men and women that the former could dominate the latter without meeting resistance.173 These words slipped from the quill of a philosopher, but we cite them here perhaps for the first time, because, on the whole, writers do not attack the chimera of strength that we are putting in question. On the contrary, they invent all kinds of reasons with which to lend consistency to this chimera in order to ensure preference on the side of men. Shouldn’t women’s strength be accounted for alongside men’s?174

Comparisons with animals I will not point out what naturalists report: that among some animals—​ carnivorous ones especially—​the females are stronger than the males. Yet, everyone knows that male falcons, goshawks, gyrfalcons, sparrow hawks, and dukes are all much smaller than the females, and that for this reason, they are called tercelets. Naturalists agree that almost all female insects are larger than their male counterparts. That won’t prevent us from conceding the common claim that male animals are in general bigger and stronger than females. But we will in any case point out that Nature doesn’t seem to have 173 “As to the strength of the body, the weakest has strength enough to kill the strongest, either by secret machination or by confederacy with others that are in the same danger with himself.” Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, or the Matter, Forme, and Power of a Common-​wealth Ecclesiasticall and Civill (Andrew Crooke, 1651), 76. 174 Rousseau views women’s weakness as opportunism: “far from blushing at their weakness, [women] make it their glory. Their tender muscles are without resistance. They pretend to be unable to lift the lightest burdens. They would be ashamed to be strong [ . . . ] They prepare in advance excuses and the right to be weak in the case of need,” such as when they say sex was rape. Emile, or on Education, 360. On rape, see Art. 27.

Part I: Science  79 had much regard for physical strength, given the distribution she made of it. She granted much more force to some animals than to others with no discernable advantage for the former. She gave incomparably more strength to some animals than to men, and yet it seems that she has treated men the most favorably. We know that she gave man the means to master animals’ strength and even to force them to submit to men’s uses. Perhaps she gave as much strength to women in proportion to men as she gave to men over the other animals. Even if this joke were true, any advantage for women would be small since the disproportion of strength is certainly not large between men and women nor between male and female animals of other species, such that a contrary example could always be found to oppose any that someone would cite to try and establish size and strength on one side. There are examples everywhere around us that prove this equality, but people shut their eyes tightly against them, insisting that they can’t see them. It is estimated that a stallion can pull with the strength of about seven men. By how many fewer men would we estimate the strength of a mare? While awaiting the result of this calculation, we note that we don’t tend to hear those who ride mares complain of having to limit their forays, or of having to stop twice as often to change horses just because they are not male. If mares are not always first choice, there are reasons other than weakness for the preference given to stallions. As we have already observed, it was mainly in order to increase the stock of horses—​an issue that had been very inappropriately overlooked for far too long—​, that a king from the last century was obliged to forbid any nobleman from riding a mare, lest he suffer degradation in rank.175 This wise policy was exploited to cast further scorn upon all things female, among those fine minds that seek so carefully to degrade them. Hunting dogs are paired indifferently male and female, and withstand the same exertion with the same vigor. Unlike horses, their rate of propagation makes special care for females unnecessary to ensure the multiplication of the species. Thus, wherever we look to find support for the power and 175 We have found no evidence of a general prohibition against noblemen riding mares of the sort Dupin read about in a summary of Jean-​Baptiste La Curne de Sainte-​Palaye’s Mémoires sur l’ancienne chevalerie in the November 1746 issue of the Mercure de France (vol. 169, p. 89–​103): “mares were a dishonoring mount, limited to commoners and degraded knights,” (96). Maintaining a stock of horses was a problem for Louis XIV. The national horse breeding program he established in 1665 could not keep pace with the wars he waged. Louis XIV’s horse breeding program foundered on the (Aristotelian) assumption (see Art. 2) that males contributed more to generation, leading breeders to neglect the quality of mares. See René Musset, “L’administration des haras et l’élevage du cheval en France au 18e siècle (1715–​1790),” Revue d’histoire moderne et contemporaine 13, no. 2 (1909): 36–​58; 133–​152.

80  Louise Dupin’s Work on Women universality of male physical strength, we struggle to locate a clear and universal foundation. Assuming greater force in males than in females is less absurd among humans than among animals, given the differences in education and in clothing between men and women, given the fact that men are armed and women unarmed, and considering that men learn to handle weapons as well as how to use them to defend themselves and to attack, whereas women don’t even know how to touch them. Indeed it is no surprise that men are more alert and active than women, and that as a result, women expect certain kinds of assistance from men. But none of this reveals anything conclusive about physical strength nor about any other natural advantage.

The effects of force It is not enough to impute strength to one party and deny it to the other. We have to observe what strength produces where we think we see it, and what it accomplishes where we claim not to find it. An examination of the most strenuous labor undertaken by men will find that there is no work in human society that is not also more or less undertaken by women, depending on chance and according to the customs of different countries. In the Indies, women complete all of the most taxing jobs themselves. Among most of the American tribes, they are the ones who cultivate the land. Women in Darien and Panama clear the land and plow it; they plant corn as well as plant and prune trees.176 They accomplish these tasks so well that men need not lift a finger. Among the Caribs, women do all the labor while men remain idle at home.177 In Corsica, women build and plow, and carry out the most brutish tasks. In some French provinces they also plow and sow the fields. In all places, women harvest crops along with men—​and in most 176 This insight about the Cuna Indians of Darien, the region bridging Panama and Colombia, comes from Jean-​Frédéric Bernard, Cérémonies et coutumes religieuses de tous les peuples du monde, représentées par des figures dessinées de la main de Bernard Picart avec des explications historiques et des dissertations curieuses, vol. VII [1723–​1737] (Paris: Prudhomme, 1808), 126. Bernard cites the Welsh buccaneer Lionel Wafer’s A New Voyage and Description of the Isthmus of America (1695), translated into French in 1706. 177 By 1660, most Caribs were confined to Saint Vincent and Dominica, with small communities scattered on Martinique and Saint Lucia. The labor of Carib women is compared approvingly to slavery and servitude by the Dominican missionary Jean-​Baptiste Du Tertre, in Histoire générale des Antilles habitées par les Français (Paris: Thomas Jolly, 1667), 2:382–​383, and by Jean-​Baptiste Labat in Nouveau voyage aux isles de l’Amérique (Paris: Guillaume Cavelier, 1722), 2:13. Dupin interprets Carib women’s work as evidence of women’s strength and ability.

Part I: Science  81 places, even when they are about to give birth. Several days after giving birth, mothers return to the fields nursing their babies, working as the babies sleep under a bush or in a little portable cradle.178 Women of the people everywhere accomplish all kinds of work that requires physical strength. In a town in the Forez region, they forge weapons and test them.179 This task clearly demands strength as well as a kind of daring that is not particularly extraordinary. Nevertheless, even such moderate bravery is generally unexpected in women. Ten miles from this same spot, people doubt that women can even hold a rifle; they assume that women are afraid of weapons. We can infer from the practices of so many countries, even European ones, that people really don’t hold women’s strength in as much contempt as they would like to make others think that they do. We can also infer that women’s strength produces the same value for society as that of men, or very nearly so. Doesn’t it seem that, given the way we ordinarily speak about strength, that this quality belongs essentially and exclusively to men and that the most impotent weakness is the essence of women? Further, that men are always at the ready to protect women, and that women are always in need of that protection? All instances of mutual protection and aid are forgotten, despite there being a good number of them. Such examples do not prevent people from striving to persuade others that women are continually in need of men’s assistance; nor do they diminish the desire to impute this same strength, greatness, and protection to the males of all other species.

On the finesse that is commonly opposed to strength Men want to be stronger than women. In contrast, they cede to women the superiority of a certain finesse. Not the finesse that is a quality of the mind, making it more penetrating, but the kind of finesse that is either nefarious or defensive and that Nature gave women out of pity or as a kind of twisted 178 See Arts. 2 and 20. 179 Saint-​Etienne, where coal reserves fostered weapons manufacturing, with peak production under Louis XIV, and a sharp decline by the 1720s. There is no mention of women workers in a Mémoire sur la manufacture de Saint-​Etienne en Forêt (ca. 1760, author unknown), but the business model it describes—​entrepreneurs buying weapons from workers to sell to the crown—​combined with labor shortages resulting from uneven cycles of demand (notably acute in the early 1740s), would certainly lend itself to periods of high employment for entire families. The Mémoire is extensively cited in Jean-​Baptiste Galley, L’élection de Saint-​Etienne à la fin de l’ancien régime (Saint-​ Etienne: Menard, 1903), 386–​391.

82  Louise Dupin’s Work on Women gift.180 Men have generalized this notion to give it more weight, alleging that the smallest and weakest animals are, in general, the craftiest.181 We ask whether sheep are keener than wolves; roosters and chickens craftier than foxes, mice more cunning than cats? And if this whole slew of animals and insects that men and other animals devour and tread upon have more finesse than those who eat and crush them? And let it not be said that only physical superiority determines which animal prevails, since it is finesse that gives them the first advantage and that enables them to use their brute force. The general principles that people have established to support the lovely claim that men have greater force of mind than women—​which we refute—​ wouldn’t likely lead very far, if anyone bothered to shut them down.182 When physical force is diminished by age, is intellectual force also diminished? (This isn’t always the case, since we often see that the mind conserves its vigor in old age). Is the weakening of the mind particular to women and its conservation exclusive to men? In infancy, do boys show greater intelligence and strength of mind than girls, and do the strongest boys and girls display more perspicacity than those who appear to be weak? If the mind sustains some injury, the consequences are the same for both men and women. There are illnesses in which strength of mind increases the more the body loses force. This happens to men as well as to women, and is the only case in which we can observe a correlation between corporeal and intellectual force. Albeit founded on all sorts of hypotheses that are not at issue here, in the regular and common state of humans, it is impossible to sustain the argument that corporeal force is either evidence or proof of mental force, much less the very principle of force of mind. What do we cede to men in attributing to them a little more strength? We must state, along with the author of The Equality: if preeminence in intelligent creatures is determined by force or by weight, men could perhaps claim it. But if these intelligent creatures allot preeminence to the one who truly merits it among them, then only intelligence could confer it, and in this 180 The French philosopher Nicolas Malebranche claims that women’s delicate brain fibers produce an aptitude for manners—​a délicatesse that can contaminate the minds of men with trivial matters, making them “effeminate.” De la recherche de la vérité [1674–​1675], in Œuvres complètes, ed. Geneviève Rodis-​Lewis (Gallimard, 1979), 200–​201, 234. 181 “All timid animals are more sly and cunning than others; women are naturally more false than men,” Cureau de la Chambre, Caractères des passions, vol. 2 [1658] (Paris: Jacques D’Allin, 1663), 123. 182 The main principle, rejected by Poulain (see introduction to Part I), is that the characteristics of the body are also those of the mind. See Art. 3.

Part I: Science  83 case, preeminence would alternate among men and women.183 How could one conceive it as a disadvantage to women to assume that they are a little less strong? The most important work in a society does not require physical strength, and one can deny force of mind to women neither through principle nor through example. A thousand proofs would belie any attempt to do so. If I were to concede for a moment that strength of mind is linked to bodily force, I would still be able to prove, through a multitude of examples, that there is no manner of magnificent deed or great action in humanity’s repertoire that is not also accomplished by women (which would be embarrassing for the opposing party). And I could prove quite easily that most of the women in these examples were weaker than most other women, just as the majority of our heroes, both ancient and modern, were of small stature and weak constitution. If bodily force indicated intellectual force, then the most physically robust people would be the ones chosen for the head of councils, armies, courts, and academies. Selection by that measure has never been imagined. Athletes were not the most intellectual people of their nations.184 Philopoemen, Alexander, even Caesar, and Monsieur de Turenne185 were all great men without having been either tall or strong. Balzac said somewhere that four Romans would have made a single German; and yet, the Romans beat the Germans.186 We can conclude from these propositions and examples that physical strength, in its usual form, has nothing to do with strength of mind or with courage; further, corporeal force has never been the deciding factor in establishing authority or success among reasonable men assembled together. The principle regarding strength that is invoked to found and justify a supposed superiority is thus no better than any other principle that one might employ as justification. As a result of men’s eagerness to interpret everything to their own advantage, they believed until recently that they lived longer 183 “Sheer physical strength should not be used to distinguish between human beings; otherwise, brute animals would be superior to humans” (Poulain, Equality, 185). Marie le Jars de Gournay similarly rejects brute force as a sign of intelligence in The Equality of Men and Women (1641), The Equality of the Sexes: Three Feminist Treatises of the Seventeenth Century, ed. and trans. Desmond M. Clarke (Oxford University Press, 2013), 64–​65s. 184 See Poulain, Equality, 185. 185 Philopoemen, a Greek statesman and general; Alexander the Great; and Julius Caesar: political and military leaders. Henri de la Tour d’Auvergne, Vicomte de Turenne (1555–​1623) was born with physical infirmities yet distinguished himself in military exploits, earning the title of major-​general of France. 186 Jean-​Louis Guez de Balzac, Dissertations Politiques, “Le Romain,” in Les œuvres de Monsieur de Balzac vol. 2 (Paris: Louis Billaine, 1665), 419.

84  Louise Dupin’s Work on Women than women due to the strength they attribute to themselves. A good mathematician {De Parcieux}187 just demonstrated through statistical calculations, that, in general, women live a little longer than men.

On the relation between corporeal force and intellectual force The tiniest foundation suffices to erect a grand edifice when it comes to vanity, since men rest the throne of their domination on the small difference of their strength compared to that of women. Truth be told, they modestly add to this edifice the opinion that intellectual force is superior on their side, so that they themselves can, in a way, make sense of their domination.188 Here is an argument made by an intelligent man quite determined to advance the opinion of masculine preeminence: Men are stronger than women. The animal spirits that act on the muscles to create physical force are the same as those that act on the brain for the operation of the mind, on condition that the brain and the muscles are appropriately ordered so as to receive the impressions of these spirits. When more numerous and more solid, these spirits provide more strength, enabling more robust and sustained concentration.

We shall decline to attack this claim by instead recalling the view of physicians who deny the existence of animal spirits.189 We could substitute other types of agents to which we might assign the same function. But we’ll point out that there is no way to prove that the spirits that act on the body to make it move are the same ones that act on the brain to make it think. In view of which, an argument based on a supposition has no logical force, because it is impossible to establish a proof on a foundation of doubt. It is reckless to draw conclusions about the nature of the mind and the means of its action. Men are perfectly ignorant in this matter and will likely always remain so. 187 The mathematician Antoine Deparcieux created mortality tables for actuarial purposes, and affirms that women live longer than men on average in “Addition à l’essai sur les probabilités,” in Essai sur les probabilités de la durée de la vie humaine (Paris: Guérin, 1746), 27. 188 Dupin writes but crosses out: “There are few words that are interpreted in so many different ways as esprit.” She lists invitus, mens, anima, animus as synonyms and wonders what philosophers mean by force d’esprit when applied to the faculty of understanding. 189 See the introduction to Part I.

Part I: Science  85 With an equally trained mind, there is no line of thinking nor any type of idea (whether simple or complex) about any object whatsoever that women can’t conceive and follow just as well as men can: this will always prove, when we wish it to, the equality of their faculties. And we have another proof of this equality in ignorant men who haven’t exerted their minds, because we’d have the same difficulty getting them to conceive and follow certain ideas as we would with women in the same situation. Isn’t it an abuse of the principle of force of mind to strive, on the one hand, to extend it to all of masculine humankind and to restrict it to that group alone? The order of human ideas—​whether male or female—​calls for what we call force in certain, necessary cases; but these are rare.190 Simple perceptions have no need of force of mind. We can conceive of the idea of justice without that of force. Memory and insight don’t require force of mind, nor do many other qualities that are specific and essential to the mind, and that are absolutely common between men and women. We can therefore state that force of mind is not only not particular to men; it is moreover hardly useful to human nature in general. When it would be possible to affirm that force of mind is a real and specific quality that provides the vigor needed for every intellectual operation, just as physical force does for the body’s movements, then we would simply be making a comparison which would not come closer to the nature of these forces and would not establish in any way that men are gifted with more force of mind than women. But is it clearly understood when we speak of force of mind whether we mean something other than the definition we have given of it? To be able to understand this expression, we must note that it designates a collection of several qualities. Because, in truth, we do not understand it well; it appears to be a purely corporeal notion transposed onto the mind, that does not really fit the mind. We conceive of the clarity of mind, its sharpness, its liveliness and courage in order to locate needed resources when we lack them, its concentration on a given object, the endurance of that concentration; but pure and simple force is not something we conceive of unless it is, as we have already suggested, the combination of all of these qualities. It is impossible to deny any of these qualities in women; on what grounds then does one endeavor to deny them the results of these qualities? 190 Force of mind consists in “clear and distinct knowledge, and in a strong conviction of the things one knows, and in these respects, women—​and anyone else who has a frail body—​are not less capable than others” (Poulain, Excellence, 286).

86  Louise Dupin’s Work on Women It is inconceivable that people waste so much time and effort resisting the idea that men and women are equal, when that equality is so obvious and has every appearance of reality, and that they seek for that purpose to establish a nearly complete dependence between corporeal forces and those of the mind, despite so many contrary examples.

Article 5. Animal and Plant Analogies Observations on natural history The191 error about the inequality of the sexes has gradually introduced a jargon192 that has spread imperceptibly through all parts of science. The analogies of natural history have been yet another source of arguments against women. We find examples of such analogies in the history of animals, in botany, in chemistry; where do we not find them? A few ancient naturalists {Aristotle, Theophrastus, Pliny the Elder, Aelian}193 advanced ideas so bizarre that it is enough to cite them. They said things about natural history that no one would dare say today: but since it is easier to trust the reports of others than to observe for oneself, those who came afterward were content to echo those who preceded them. These various repetitions created prejudices from which the best modern naturalists are not entirely exempt. They still reveal, in several places, discrete preferences for the masculine genus,194 which may someday also give way to legitimate observation. One ancient {Aelian} reports quite seriously that when chickens die, roosters will hatch their eggs, but only in great silence for fear of being discovered fulfilling a female task unworthy of their masculine majesty.195 The

191 Manuscript located at Musée Jean-​Jacques Rousseau (IR.2002.437.8). 192 Several transcribers have seen jardon (a tumor affecting horses’ legs) rather than jargon here. Though cancer could apply to this context, a made-​up language fits better with Dupin’s emphasis on men’s creation of a reality that serves their interests. 193 On Aristotle’s “bizarre ideas” about women, see Arts. 2 and 3; on those of Pliny, see Art. 1. Dupin may have in mind Theophrastus’s gendering of stones in On Stones. 194 genre masculin. Genre either means type, kind, division or refers to grammatical gender. Dupin plays on the common expression le genre humain, which encompasses all humans, to emphasize the ancients’ exclusion of all things female. Karen Offen notes that in the eighteenth century some started using genre and genre masculin/​féminin to refer to gender roles (European Feminism: 1700–​1950, Stanford University Press, 2000), 27–​28. 195 The Roman rhetorician Aelian (circa 170–​230) reports on the silent cock (4.29); shamefaced female cicadas (1.20); deambulation of goats (7.26); and prudent flies (5.17) in his Characteristics of Animals.

Part I: Science  87 same writer observes that when male cicadas sing, the females fall silent in order to display the respect and reserve that they should maintain in front of males. When a she-​goat in a flock of sheep moves to the front of the herd, he goes on to say, it is because she is flighty and simply wants to go faster to get ahead of the others. A he-​goat, on the other hand, walks ahead out of an instinctual awareness of the masculine dignity that his beard imparts to him. He also reports that the flies of Pisa absented themselves from the Olympic games, not daring to attend the festivities any more than women would have done, with this difference that the flies left of their own accord while the women had to be chased away. This proved, according to him, the superior prudence of the flies. Another ancient {Rodericus}196 reports that Roman soldiers wore a scarab image on their rings, which was a symbol signifying that men alone should have the honor of making war. To help in the interpretation of this subtlety, he makes it known that for a long time it was believed that there were no female scarabs and that the males would roll their eggs in dung until they made them hatch. If feckless musings had any logical consistency, these animals would be the least appropriate of all197 to be the emblem of what they were supposed to signify, according to the very principles just described: since, according to the ignorance of the times, the males were tasked with the main female function. But just as jaundice makes one see yellow, prejudice has made certain men see their excellence everywhere, even in things they have not seen.198 And yet we generally find nothing in animals that establishes masculine advantage; and among the animals most familiar to us, we see nothing approaching the marked empire that men exercise in human society and nothing like the empire of opinion that they seek to extend over all things. It has been pointed out that the characteristics of various animals correspond more or less to ours, and that they moreover serve the same purpose in animals as in humans. Some beasts are always at war with one another; others live together peacefully. Some live alone, others in community. In some of them we can recognize a disciplined order. Wolves observe a kind of battle order when they surround a sheepfold. On the Cape of Good Hope, monkeys that come to harvest in the gardens of the Dutch assemble in a clear 196 This scarab lore is from Aelian (10.15). 197 Dupin plays on two meanings of propre: the least appropriate and the least clean. 198 Poulain de la Barre argues that animal comparisons are inconclusive regarding men’s excellence, since valuing male animals more than females means one already values men over women (Excellence, 303).

88  Louise Dupin’s Work on Women order for this expedition so that they can complete their mission and defend themselves against any interference.199 We do not think that female wolves and monkeys lack the courage necessary to participate as equals with their husbands in these wars and in the sharing of the resultant booty. There must surely be monkey Amazons.200 How can people possibly believe only male animals to be endowed with courage and vigor, when they can plainly see the ferocity with which female cats and dogs defend their offspring, the tenacity of bitches in every single hunt, and the prowess of every female bird of prey? Now, the elephant is said to be a very good animal; no one has anything bad to say about the character of camels; and people marvel at the mild manners of dolphins. And so the females surely partake equally in all of these good qualities. Is it not amusing that people never infer equality from all of the observations that would seem to indicate that male and female animals are equal, yet they trumpet the slightest particularity in a species when it appears to ground a distinction between males and females? And yet, once in a while, certain female animals receive a bit of praise. It is said that the doe is prudent and that she shows it through the care she takes of her fawn. One might say the same of female rabbits, who exercise prudence to keep their mates from eating their own offspring. This example is all to the glory of female nature, to which such horrors are generally foreign. But there is a kind of black pig whose females dine on the little ones they bring into the world if they are not prevented from doing so; female cats are also supposedly subject to this behavior. Thus equality is found even in vice. But it must be acknowledged that no one has ever tried to dispute equality from that side of things. Despite the parity of good and bad between male and female in different species of animals, and despite alternating claims regarding the supposed advantages—​whether on one side or the other—​, one can read in works of the greatest seriousness animal comparisons meant to advance and extend masculine superiority and domination {Grotius}.201 For their own purposes, men have formed harems for some species of animals. The stallion in the stables, the bull in the field, the rooster in the farmyard, have all become sultans—​sultans all the more imperious for having 199 On the raiding parties of baboons, see Peter Kolb, Description du Cap de Bonne-​Espérance, tirée des mémoires de Pierre Kolbe, trans. Jean Bertrand (Amsterdam: Jean Catuffe, 1741), 3:58–​59. 200 On Dupin’s interest in the Amazons, see the introduction to Part II. 201 In De Jure Belli ac Pacis (1625), the Dutch political philosopher, Hugo de Groot (Grotius) describes marriage as a society in which the wife is under the eyes and protection of her husband, “for we see, among some creatures, a similar kind of society between the male and the female.” Le droit de la guerre et de la paix, trans. Jean Barbeyrac (Amsterdam: Pierre de Coup, 1729), 1:230.

Part I: Science  89 been selected among the handsomest and best-​formed of their species, for the necessary service their unique persona provides, and because the master of these animals would give four mares to save his stallion. Perhaps men take this to be the normal state of masculine nature, without even imagining that were these animals to wander freely, equality would once again assert its right. One male would not be any more useful than a fellow male, nor would the males as a whole be more useful than females as a whole. Nourishment and exertion being equal, their strength would be equal as well;202 and if the husbands had several wives, the wives would presumably take several husbands if they so wished. In situations most favorable to them—​when they find themselves with their females—​, it might come to pass that these male animals muse about the inferiority of females and fancy themselves the crown jewel of all of their species. But perhaps it never crosses their mind. It is true that men do not choose to bask in their superiority in the same circumstances. But they have so many other occasions and opportunities to pride themselves on it that temporarily forgetting their advantage hardly amounts to abrogating it. We see in one species of wild animal some behaviors suggestive of interdependence and plurality among females, free from the meddling of men: this is the case of deer. I do not know that we can rule out the possibility that at other times, these females have multiple husbands of their own, whom they beat now and then when they are displeased, if they happen to be stronger: I would not want to say. But we do know that at certain times of the year, one of the old stags will typically surround himself with a number of doe with which he will mate one after the other, having taken care to distance the young males from the spot he has chosen. Outside of the time of such ceremonies, the females wander about and graze freely amidst bucks or alone among doe, as they wish. Except for the moment of mating, they are in no way subjugated to the males; one can observe that something even more powerful than the strength of their stags determines them on their own not to refuse. Comparing these animals to the human race, I would not advise women to refuse a transaction203 involving such fleeting subjugation as long as it were accompanied by the same limits. One could contrast the arrangements of 202 If mares enjoyed better conditions and mated with stallions accustomed to hard labor, poor quality food, and a cold environment, Buffon surmises, maternal traits would prevail. Histoire naturelle, 4:209. 203 marché. The terms agreed to by buyer and seller. A few minutes of mating (or a limited mating season) is a small price to pay for a year of freedom.

90  Louise Dupin’s Work on Women deer to those of boars, roe deer, and the pairing of partridges, etc. All of these animals live as couples and happily so. To male animals’ harems, we can oppose harems of beehives;204 thus the more we investigate nature the more we find notions of equality. The city of Berne, of the Swiss canton of the same name, maintains bears in pits with great care. The state pays the expenses in memory of Berthold Duke of Zeringhen who founded the city, calling it Berne because he took down a bear he was hunting at the spot where he intended to lay its foundations. They made habitats in the pits for the bears; they planted trees to make shaded promenades for them. These pits turned out to be in the middle of the city, so to speak, because they were its first walls, before the walls were expanded as they are today. These bears give the populace a constant example of masculine despotism. People enjoy throwing them breads and cakes, which the husbands grab—​the wives dare eat only the remains. We see the same hunger being satiated at leisure in the males, while being respectfully moderated in the females. We could observe that if these animals were out in the field, the female would have the option of grazing further away should her husband lay claim to the first morsel that she found while she was next to him and denied her the food that Nature had prepared for them to share. These male bears are perhaps the ditches’ most venerable inhabitants, and on this basis, reserve for themselves the honors found there. But we can still see in them a good model of masculine law that men use to their advantage. Nevertheless, this law is contradicted by the example of falcons, which shows the precise opposite. These animals are common in Scotland. I have heard it said by a gentleman of that country that female falcons exercise tyranny over the males, to which the males submit with respect, especially over food. In other animals, and principally among birds, we find prettier examples of sociability. Pigeons are a model of conjugal and paternal love, as well as of reciprocal arrangements full of tenderness and charm. Little poems and songs have incorporated these niceties—​much more than manners have.

Observations on plants Vegetal life is related in many ways to animal life. That the production of plants occurred as the result of generation nevertheless remained unknown

204

On queen bees, see Art. 2.

Part I: Science  91 for a long time. Today, there is no longer any doubt. Plants have been granted sexes. The author of the Botanical Institutions {the famous Tournefort} was dearly mistaken when he disparaged certain plant parts as abject and vile. His offense was challenged in a charming study on the marriage of flowers {Vaillant}, which defends these parts as in fact the noblest, since they correspond to those which, in male animals, serve to propagate the species.205 One wouldn’t exactly expect to find masculine preeminence in works of botany, but where does it not crop up? Any apprentice gardener of mediocre talent, tasked by his master with the grafting of scions, would savor the insinuation and compare his work to that of breeding,206 imagining the scion as male and the rootstock as female, on the pretext that the scion makes himself the master of the rootstock. Although this comparison would be as ridiculous to defend as it is to advance in the first place, I have nevertheless heard such ideas occasionally, even coming from clever people. Giving masculine vanity its due in this matter, we could in large part blame such errors on the principle of analogies taken too far. Everywhere we read that nature acts according to uniform laws, and every day we discover that this is not true. It is rather the human mind that is uniform in its inability to grasp variety with sufficient subtlety and insight. It is only because of the great opinion that people hold of the male species and its substances that one could believe that a man, even after having been hanged, could still produce something that can lend human form to mandrakes—​vegetation, it is claimed, that grows mostly under gallows.207 A modern author {Father Kircher} believed himself to be speaking more wisely in saying that any human or animal body (irrespective of sex), dead in a field, could produce mandrakes. He adds that animals also ordinarily

205 Sébastien Vaillant used racy metaphors to describe plants in a lecture at the Jardin du Roi in 1717. He criticizes his former teacher, Joseph Pitton de Tournefort, chair of botany at the Jardin du Roi, for calling stamens “the vilest and most abject [part] in plants” in his Eléments de botanique (1694)—​or rather in the Latin translation thereof, Institutiones rei herbariae (1700). Vaillant calls stamens “male organs” and considers them “the noblest [part], since they correspond to those in animals that serve for the multiplication of the species.” “Lecture on the Structure of the Flower, Their Uses and Their Parts,” trans. Paul Bernasconi and Lincoln Taiz, Huntia: A Journal of Botanical History 11, no. 2 (2002): 97–​128. 206 mariage. The apprentice-​gardner imagines a sexual union (hence “breeding”), but Dupin also means marriage—​the institution through which men dominate and control women. In grafting, one plant (the rootstock) provides the base for the other (the scion) which grows into and on top of it. Grafting was a common euphemism for sex. 207 Legend held that mandrakes sprouted under gallows from the semen and fluids that dripped from a hanged man’s body.

92  Louise Dupin’s Work on Women produce plants called orchis and satyrions.208 We know that the mandrake is a plant that peasants uproot for certain occasions. They stuff them with millet grain that germinates in the root and sprouts hair. This gives these plants, along with their natural shape, a kind of human resemblance, if you take the roots for legs and the place where the legs come together for the body and head, on which is grafted a type of hair by means of millet seed.209

On animal beauty Someone once defined beauty as the combination of the most common traits. This definition makes good sense and has great currency, because in effect we see that opinions about beauty vary from country to country. In general, what we call beauty varies also among species; what we call beautiful in some species we do not consider beautiful in others. Without getting caught up in seeking out all of these varieties, we can in general say that what we call beauty is found alternatively in males and in females, depending on the species. In certain fowl, beauty is typically on the side of the males, such as roosters, peacocks, and certain songbirds. Among quadrupeds, beauty is also with the males; the lion is more beautiful than the lioness, the stag more than the doe. I have seen masculine vanity attempt to draw some advantage from the beauty of these animals’ antlers, despite the scabrous joke that accompanies this identification.210 I have known some men to indulge in the thought that the beauty of these antlers stemmed from the honor of being male, insofar as doe lack this ornamentation, and castration ostensibly deprives stags of it. Next to these animals, however, it is easy to see that both bulls and cows have horns, that each have their own beauty, and that steer retain their horns. In other species, very pretty headpieces are common to both sexes. Salamanders, for a long time thought to be fire dwellers, are rather a kind of aquatic lizard, and both males and females are born with two tufts on the head—​an adornment that is worth just as much to their species as antlers are to stags. Beauty appears equally distributed between male and female horses, 208 The German Athanasius Kircher claims that mandrakes, orchids, and satyrions emerge from places dead bodies were left to decay in Mundus subterraneus in XII libros (Amsterdam: Jan Janszoon and Elizaeus Weyerstraat, 1664), 118, 349. 209 In other words, peasants accentuate the mandrake root’s human form to enhance its magical effects, including fertility. Mandrake root features as a fertility aid in the Old Testament. See Art. 20. 210 Antlers, like horns, are the accouterments of the cuckold.

Part I: Science  93 and among the smallest quadrupeds that are familiar to us, there are no differences in beauty between the male and the female. Parrots, fire-​colored curlews from Brazil, and blue thrushes from the same country, boast the same beauty of plumage and color whether male or female. This country also has beautiful bright female flies whose husbands are a dull gray color.211 It is said that the females shine to let the males know where to find them. If true, that would make these flies the only species to which such assistance is necessary. It is difficult to see why the male would need a visual signal to locate his female, and that she does not need one to know where he is, since from whatever side the signal comes, it produces the same effect. But the assumption that females are beautiful so that males can find them is more in keeping with the mores of men, because it suggests a certain superiority in the male insect, that an explanation pertaining to his appearance would not provide. Without accumulating further examples of this phenomenon, we can in general say that modern naturalists have been quick to attribute to the animals they describe the superiority that they claim for themselves and the inferiority they associate with women. The most reasonable naturalists generally lend human mores and thoughts to animals, which they most likely do not have. Whatever our opinions may be, it is clear that one must be driven by a very determined and highly ingenious vanity—​or else by blind prejudice—​ to seek one’s fortune in this manner amidst the great variety of nature. Nature should be examined more simply, and in truth, the kind of foolish behavior we are reporting would seem entirely ridiculous, if not for our intention to convey the ridiculousness inherent in what men take it upon themselves to say no matter the species. Among humans beauty appears to alternate. There are just as many beautiful and pretty men as there are such women; it does not seem that it would be difficult to convince them of this.

Response to some commonplaces When two bitches are found fighting, one says that they fight because they are female; this is supposed to mean that their jealousy and small-​mindedness prevent them from getting along with others of their sex as male dogs do. However, male dogs fight just as often as bitches over the most trivial prize, 211 A reference to fireflies? We have not found Dupin’s source for Brazilian ornithology and entomology.

94  Louise Dupin’s Work on Women or on some other whim: and among bitches, not only do they rarely fight each other, they also sometimes display so great a friendship that one might reproach them for it, and with more reason than for their supposed difficulty in living together. How can such silliness be taken as an allusion to female nature? Two mares, ewes, or chickens—​do they typically fight? Even when it is conceded that two male animals of the same species fight, it is assumed that they have good reason to do so—​principally a kind of courage and desire for domination that legitimates their dispute. When the beef being eaten is bad, it is said that it comes from a cow, which assumes a masculine advantage in physical economy, irrespective of the fact that an exhausted old bull would make a poor meal; that the steer has been deprived of its sexual organs; and that the vital juices of cows would be as good if they were slaughtered at the same age as steer, and in the same conditions. Among other beasts that we eat, do we find the males to be tastier? If bulls provided milk, masculine vanity would no doubt claim advantage from such a useful and precious thing. Broth recipes in certain cases recommend using an old rooster; others recommend the fat of a male pig or the blood of a male ibex. We do not believe that clever people today could care about such distinctions: for how is it possible to believe that the fat of a pig or the blood of an ibex contains more useful elements than the same matter taken from females of the same species? It is well known that all the fat of the same animals is of the same quality and good for the same purposes, as are any liquids one might take from either sex at the same age. It is generally preferred that animal substances necessary for human life be taken from males, so as to reserve females for the production of the species—​not because the males are better at this or that thing. The reason for the preference for eating the meat of males is, presumably, misunderstood. All of this is of great puerility, but it is to puerilities that we have endeavored to respond, and we only glean these examples to show just how far the idea of superiority and of male preference has gone. In a word, all that has been said or written in this vein to confirm the lesser qualities on the side of women has been contradicted by anatomy, analysis, and unbiased observation. Good observation will uncover equality in animal nature, anatomies will teach us that there are no differences between males and females except those which constitute the sexes, and chemical analyses will so conflate these differences that we will not be able to find any physical property in males that is not also in females. But that does not limit biased conjecture. In following our own

Part I: Science  95 conjecture, we will say once again that if analysis were to uncover a different residue between male and female substances, we could conclude nothing from it that would counter our opinion; because even if the principles of those substances were different, this difference would not pertain to preeminence anyway.

Observations on the language of chemists Chemists of old claimed that fables were allegories of their work, and based on this pretension they called iron Mars; lead, Saturn; Copper, Venus; etc. In making such allusions, they appropriate for themselves the materials of the forge and of the blacksmith. They compare the properties of lead that facilitate the fusibility of metals to Saturn or to Timaeus, the destroyer of all things, and they compare the ease with which copper unites with other metals to the amorousness of Venus, etc. And while Cicero in a flourish of gaiety said, “As for Venus, she was so named by our countrymen as the goddess who ‘comes’ [venire] to all things,”212 an ill-​humored chemist made his own comparison of copper to Venus, loading it with the moral condemnation generally reserved for libertinage, and adding a supplemental comparison that slanders the general character of women.213 Tell me in good faith, is that not ridiculous? Chemists call gold the king of metals, and silver they call the queen. This nomenclature has no relation to the substances themselves. Nothing could lead one to suspect a marriage between these metals, which are of a different kind. But these names are clearly related to masculine vanity, which squanders no opportunity to put itself first. Couldn’t substances unrelated to humans have taken more simple names that describe them more accurately? We find these types of ideas even among men who create magic lantern shows. They say that the sun is the husband of the moon, believing themselves, apparently, to be the suns of their wives, just like those who, imbued 212 This passage reads “ad res omnes veniret, Venerum nuncupârunt” in Dupin’s draft, while the verb used by Cicero is actually nominaverunt (from nominare, “to name”). The interpolated synonym nuncupârunt (“to take a name”)—​which evokes the verb cupere, “to desire”—​indicates that Dupin accessed Cicero’s quote from an intermediary source, no doubt from the ill-​humored chemist whom we have not identified. Marcus Tullius Cicero, On the Nature of the Gods, trans. Horace Rackham (Harvard University Press, 1933), 192 [2.27]. 213 Chemical and alchemical texts of the Renaissance abound in analogies, because they posit “sympathies” between resemblant things. The alignment of metals with planets (and the Roman gods they are named for) was common, but we have not found this comment impugning copper.

96  Louise Dupin’s Work on Women with the same prejudice, are no less persuaded of their superiority, even if they refrain from making such an idiotic comparison.214 The need to limit our comments prevents us from expanding further. But after these trivial remarks, we believe that we can conclude that there are neither natural nor good reasons at the foundation of the preference that men have granted themselves at every opportunity.

214 By means of mirrors, lenses, and a candle, the magic lantern operator projected images (often of devils or other creatures associated with illusion) onto a screen in a dark room. In the epilogue to Ars magna lucis et umbrae (Amsterdam: Jan Janszoon and Elizaeus Weyerstraat, 1671), Kircher uses the reflection and refraction deployed in magic lantern projections to explain cosmic hierarchies; these include sun and moon, but as far as we know, he does not gender them. Koen Vermeir, “The Magic of the Magic Lantern (1660–​1700): An Analogical Demonstration and Visualization of the Invisible,” British Journal of the History of Science 38, no. 2 (2005): 127–​159.

Part II History and Religion Introduction In the History section of the Work on Women, Dupin “examine[s]‌whether the opinion of the inequality between men and women is ancient on this earth and whether it is or ever has been universal” (short “Preliminary Discourse”). She undermines what had been Poulain de la Barre’s starting claim: that the prejudice (préjugé—​“already judged,” and therefore not needing to be relitigated) of women’s inferiority to men and their consequent inequality in society was consistent throughout time the world over. “No one reports ever seeing women otherwise,” Poulain writes. “It is known that they have always been like that, and there is no place on earth where women are not treated as they are here.”1 The idea that women have always and everywhere already been judged inferior to men, Dupin objects, is a fiction concocted by modern historians. By excluding powerful women from their histories, they create the universality they claim to observe. Because individual actors participate in creating outcomes that benefit them, nothing is prejudged. Everything can be and is constantly being litigated. Far from being set in stone, the past is a quarry in which “anyone can endeavor to seek [ . . . ] evidence for their opinion on a subject.” Dupin mines the quarry of the past “to contest the sentence handed down to women by modern historians” (Art. 12). Through “a survey of the history of different nations” (short PD), she develops an archive of female rulers, from the Artemisias of ancient Caria (Art. 13) to Ana Nzinga, the seventeenth-​century Queen of Ndongo in the Central African Coast (Art. 20). We show that from changing ideas about what constitutes historical scholarship and a new fascination for ethnography, emerges Dupin’s “Enlightenment feminism”—​the great-​great-​grandmother of today’s white feminism (see the volume introduction). In the Religion chapters,

1 Poulain de la Barre, A Physical and Moral Discourse, in The Equality of the Sexes [1673], ed. and trans. Desmond M. Clarke (Oxford University Press, 2013), 125.

98  Louise Dupin’s Work on Women Dupin emphasizes women’s resistance to the disenfranchisement over time that she documents throughout the Work on Women.

What Is (Not) History? The History section is the roughest and least coherent section of the Work on Women. Four of the History chapters were lost (Arts. 14, 15, 19, 25); some seem to have been poised for a move (22 and 23); one can only be speculated about (24); and two seem in limbo with the law section (25 and 26). Extant materials tell us that Dupin construed history as the political history of nations, comprising the actions of (women) rulers. This section of the Work on Women has roots in the Querelle des femmes, specifically in the femmes fortes genre popular in France a century earlier during the regency of Anne d’Autriche. In Pierre Le Moyne’s Gallery of Strong Women (1647), a standard set of warrior women—​Deborah, Zenobia, Joan of Arc—​model political and/​or feminine virtues like prudence, generosity, patience, and modesty.2 Collections of illustrious women continued to be produced in the eighteenth century; Madame de Château-​ Thierry Galien’s anonymously published Defense of Ladies, Based on History (1737) is one example.3 But the Work on Women responds to the new standards of historical scholarship that the title of Château-​Thierry Galien’s book only gestures toward. In the eighteenth century, the function of history as a moral teacher (historia magistra vitae) butted up new demands for evidence: “Things that were once accepted as true were challenged, as competing views led to examination and refutation” (Art. 12). This revisionary moment provides an opening for Dupin. She aims to illuminate a blind spot of the new esprit critique, challenging “false claims or gross omissions involving women.” She targets the falsehood that Salic “law” barred women from the throne of France from time immemorial (Art. 21) and recovers for the historical record women rulers overlooked, denigrated, or not yet considered within Western narratives. Dupin’s care to distinguish history from legend is most evident in what she excluded from the Work on Women. In “On Ancient History,” the chapter in our selection whose filiation with the Querelle des femmes is most obvious, she 2 Conroy, Ruling Women, 1:59–​71. 3 Madame de Château-​Thierry Galien, Apologie des dames, appuyée sur l’histoire [1737] (Paris: Didot, 1748). Dupin cites bits from Galien’s work (unattributed) in “Women of Letters from Rome to the Modern Era.”

Part II: History and Religion  99 distilled one curt sentence—​“Among the Amazons and Gorgons, only women ruled”—​from lengthy drafts about them. In these drafts, she cites medals and monuments attesting to their exploits and claims that doubts about their existence can only flourish “among people who live in countries where the current mores are different and who have not bothered to learn about those of other peoples and other times.”4 Skepticism, her preferred stance with respect to scientific inquiry (see the introduction to Part I), is in this draft portrayed as a failure of imagination and of critical thinking: “Young people who have in their hands these shaky refutations [of the Amazons] hold them to be historical scripture.”5 She nevertheless mastecto-​sizes the central lore of the Amazons: a society without men and “the breast routinely cut or burned” are fabulous elements “very easy to cut back [retrancher].” As for the Gorgons, those “wise princesses, full of valor, who ruled their states in orderly fashion,”6 the passage of time has made them “fables,” guaranteeing “their ironical treatment and denial, like the Amazons.” Did an embarrassing incident involving the celebrated scientist-​explorer Charles Marie de la Condamine influence her terse treatment in Article 13 of the heroines of the Querelle des femmes? In the Mercure de France (July 1747), La Condamine objected to the suggestion in the Journal des sçavans (January 1746) that he had indicated in his 1745 relation of a voyage to South America that the American Amazons still lived in the mountains of Guyana. La Condamine writes: “There were likely Amazons in America; there is every appearance that they no longer exist today. There, in a nutshell, is the précis of my opinion.”7 Eighteenth-​ century readers were less interested in the deeds and deliberations of bygone sovereigns, than in the exotic beliefs, mores, and customs of far away societies. This is a category of inquiry that we might call ethnography but that still fell under the rubric of history in the eighteenth century. Dupin’s quest to find women rulers all over the world leads her to sources unknown to the Querelle des femmes: travel narratives documenting European commercial enterprises in Asia, Africa, and the 4 This and subsequent quotes from “History of the Amazons, Rearranged.” 5 Dupin downplays her source—​Pierre Petit’s 1685 Traité historique sur les Amazones (Leiden: J. A. Langerak, 1718)—​no doubt because of Pierre Bayle’s withering review of it in the August 1685 issue of Nouvelles de la république des lettres (340–​342), which she references. 6 Dupin gleaned Olaus Rudbeck’s discussion of the Gorgons in his Atlantica (1679–​1702) from Antoine Banier’s La mythologie et les fables expliquées par l’histoire, 3 vols. (Paris: Briasson, 1738–​ 1740), 3:106–​107. 7 Charles Marie de la Condamine, Relation abrégée d’un voyage fait dans l’intérieur de l’Amérique méridionale (Paris: Pissot’s widow, 1745), 91. On La Condamine’s fame as a science explorer, see Terrall, “Gendered Spaces, Gendered Audiences,” 207–​232.

100  Louise Dupin’s Work on Women Americas, including Fernão Mendes Pinto’s Peregrinations (1614); Olfert Dapper’s Description of Africa (1668); François Bernier’s History of the Recent Revolution in the States of the Great Mughal Emperor (1670); the Abbé de Choisy’s Journal of a Voyage to Siam (1687); and John Ovington’s Voyage to Surratt (1696). Capitalizing on the French reading public’s eagerness for information that could guide investments and commercial aspirations, editorial entrepreneurs gathered these into multivolume works that Dupin also cites: Jean-​Frédéric Bernard’s Ceremonies and Religious Customs of All the Peoples of the World (1723–​1743); Antoine Banier’s General History of Ceremonies, Mores, and Religious Customs of All the Peoples of the World (1741); and Antoine-​François Prevost’s General History of Voyages (1746–​ 1759). Travel narratives turned Dupin’s attention from political history to anthropological considerations. In the “Conclusion to the last six chapters” (Art. 20), she mentions ordinary work alongside sovereign rule: “We have seen more women sharing in work with men, than we have found work deemed particular to women.” Her celebration of women’s labor has particular resonance in the context of French empire.

Enlightenment Feminism and Other Countries Readers familiar with the history of European orientalism—​which projects its own fantasies onto North African and Middle Eastern cultures, usually involving the erotic space of the seraglio—​will not be surprised that “On Turkey and Persia” (Art. 18) shades into a discussion of polygamy after a brief excavation of women leaders in Islam. Dupin litigates the orientalist fantasies of French men, rejecting all forms of polygamy on moral and practical grounds (as did some of her male contemporaries). In the fragmentary “On Marriage in General” (Art. 41), she argues that the affective and societal advantages of the marriage partnership cannot be sustained in cases of multiple wives or multiple husbands. In 18, she refutes the claim that polygyny—​ multiple wives for one man—​might reverse population decline in France. This unfounded anxiety in the service of a libertine solution was popularized (though not endorsed) by Montesquieu in the Persian Letters (1721)8 and investigated by mathematicians in the burgeoning field of statistics. 8 Letter 113 presents the case for depopulation; 115 and 116 portray polygamy as a waste of male fertility (it necessitates eunuchs to guard the harem); 117 and 118 blame a low French

Part II: History and Religion  101 Montesquieu characterized polygamy as a question of arithmetic: where there are more boys born, there will be polyandry; more girls, polygamy.9 In Monogamy or Unity in Marriage (1751), the mathematician André Pierre le Guay de Prémontval not only rejected polygamy but supported the moral equality of husband and wife in marriage based on demographic “equality in number” between the two sexes.10 But perhaps it was not polygamy’s fault that no demographic advantages were to be observed in such violent nations, suggested Henri de Boulainvilliers—​the father-​in-​law of Dupin’s half brother—​in his History of the Arabs (1731).11 Debate about polygamy increasingly referenced slavery, to the extent that Montesquieu felt the need to distinguish them; he calls polygamy “domestic servitude” and associates it with despotic governments.12 Dupin could only have viewed commentary about the servitude of women in despotic governments as a distraction from the constraint endured by women in monogamous marriage under the French monarchy (see Part III). In her “Foreword on Law” (Art. 27), she deplores the indifference surrounding the “slavery” of married women in a country that views slavery “with horror.” But horror toward slavery was also inconsistent, as the Work on Women attests. Whereas polygamy was a fantasy with polemical purposes, slavery—​ an entrenched reality—​was often treated as a rhetorical situation.13 Voltaire denounces the brutality of slavery in Chapter 152 of his Essay on Mores with earnest pathos and then smugly dismisses criticism of the slave trade in Chapter 197: “A people that sells its children is all the more condemnable than the buyer; this commerce demonstrates our superiority; he who gives himself a master was born to have one.”14 Dupin’s attitude toward slavery is also situational. Slavery is “abominable wherever it exists,” she declares in her birthrate on the Catholic Church’s prohibition of divorce and remarriage and on Catholic monasticism. 9 Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws, trans. Anne M. Cohler, Basia Carolyn Miller, and Harold Samuel Stone (Cambridge University Press, 1989), 266. See also Jean-​Jacques Rousseau, Emile or On Education, trans. Allan Bloom (Basic Books, 1979), 359. 10 André Pierre le Guay de Prémontval, La monogamie ou l’unité dans le mariage, 3 vols. (The Hague: P. van Cleef, 1751). 11 Henri de Boulainvilliers, Histoire des Arabes avec la vie de Mahomed (Amsterdam: Pierre Humbert, 1731), 1:165. Dupin had a family connection to Boulainvilliers. Boulainvilliers’s second daughter, Suzanne Marie Henriette de Boulainvilliers, married Samuel Bernard’s son (Dupin’s half-​ brother), Gabriel Bernard, Comte de Rieux in 1719. 12 Montesquieu, Spirit of the Laws, 264. 13 Curran, Anatomy of Blackness, 14. 14 Voltaire, Essai sur les mœurs, in Œuvres complètes (Paris: Garnier, 1878), 12:177–​178. For other examples, see Curran, Anatomy of Blackness, 9.

102  Louise Dupin’s Work on Women “Foreword on Law,” and should not be allowed “among men capable of another form of public order” (Art. 27). This leaves open the possibility that slavery might be acceptable for people only capable of enslavement. The unique fitness of black Africans for slavery is a constant theme in travel relations hailing from the Caribbean,15 while the enslavement of Africans is a simple matter of fact in accounts based in the trading forts of the Central African Coast. Dupin’s celebration of commerce in “Education in Marriage” (Art. 42), where she models her vision of ideal marriage on trade, collides in “Other Countries” (Art. 20) with her commitment to equality. She rehearses the Enlightenment credo: Africans sell each other and even their own children; Europeans trade and transport them. The History section of the Work on Women encapsulates the contradictions of Enlightenment feminism. Dupin shines light into a historical record that engulfs women in shadows, even as she participates in inventing Europe as the global epicenter of civility and rationality. Polygamy, violence against women, and wives working like slaves for idle husbands served two purposes in her ethnographic sources: 1) to exhort French women to thank their lucky stars for having such civilized husbands and 2) to justify colonial brutality as an enterprise of civilization.16 Dupin sees through the first motive. Whereas her sources feign sympathy for women who engage in physical labor (the better to paint French women’s professional irrelevance as a privilege), she celebrates the work of women attested in travel literature as evidence of all women’s capacity for agency. Yet she remains blind to the second motive, mirroring her sources’ obfuscation of colonial coercion. Women “in the colonies” return to work immediately after giving birth (Art. 4), she notes admiringly, as if their reproductive and manual labor were not compulsory. And she expands her sources’ catalogs of “atrocious” customs that “should make reason tremble and nature too” (Art. 20). Despite being banned by the Mughal emperor Aurangzeb, few Europeans writing about India failed to mention Sati, the ritual self-​immolation of widows. Bernard Picart’s dramatic engraving of a woman flinging herself into the flames of her husband’s funeral pyre in Bernard’s Ceremonies and Religious Customs made sati the

15 Curran, Anatomy of Blackness, 51–​55. 16 A Dominican missionary to the West Indies notes that among the Caribs, “the mere suspicion of infidelity [ . . . ] suffices [ . . . ] to justify a husband in breaking his wife’s head—​a little bit savage to be sure, but a very good brake when it comes to keeping women in line with their duty.” Jean-​Baptiste Labat, Nouveau voyage aux isles de l’Amérique (Paris: Guillaume Cavelier, 1722), 4:327.

Part II: History and Religion  103 locus classicus of colonized countries’ irrationality and barbarity.17 Dupin responds to customs that prescribe brutal deaths for women by scouring the quarry of the exotic present for examples of men who willingly inflict violence on themselves. Her ideal of equality may strike readers as a bit skinny in the History section.

Religion, Recidivism, and Resistance The boundaries of the History section are fuzzy. Mathematically, the fragment called “conclusion to the last six chapters—​which seems to follow Article 20—​does not cover all of the numbered chapters preceding it. It does seem to set the stage for “On the History of France” (Art. 21), which chronicles the invention of Salic law barring women from the throne of France and has a twin in the Law Section: “Salic Law, Considered as a Law” (Art. 28). Had the two chapters on Salic law once been part of a single chapter? The position of Article 22 and “On Education” (Art. 23) seem to have been meant for the section on Education and Mores (see the introduction to Part IV). We have no information about Article 24. The liminal position of “On the Origin of Government” (Art. 25, missing) and “On the Rights That Women Possessed Naturally, Initiatives against Those Rights; On Those That Were Restored, and Then Taken Away Again by Modern Usurpations” (Art. 26, see introduction to Part III), preceding the “Foreword on Law” (Art. 27), raises a question about where history ends and law begins. Where the History chapters were meant to go with respect to the Religion chapters is not entirely clear, either. In Article 39, Dupin states, “We have shown in our chapters on religion and on the discipline of the Church that theologians have not treated women well, although they did not find these principles in the Gospel, in divine revelation, nor in the first practices of early

17 To accompany Jean-​Frédéric Bernard’s essay “Supplément à la dissertation sur la religion des Banians,” in Cérémonies et coutumes religieuses des peuples idolâtres (Amsterdam: Jean-​Frédéric, 1728), 2.1:26. These two volumes were eventually serialized within Bernard’s Cérémonies et coutumes religieuses de tous les peuples du monde as volumes 6 and 7, part 1 (8 volumes, 1723–​1743). To avoid confusion, we refer to the original titles and numbering and include part numbers, because these were separately paginated within the volumes. For a reproduction of this engraving, see Lynn Hunt and Margaret Jacob, “Introduction,” in Bernard Picart and the First Global Vision of Religion, eds. Lynn Hunt, Margaret Jacob, and Wijnand Mijnhardt (Getty Research Institute, 2010), 8–​9. On the European obsession with Sati, see Zakaria, Against White Feminism, 148–​149.

104  Louise Dupin’s Work on Women Christians.” But where? The numbers on the folders of the religion chapters as inventoried by Sénéchal (Arts. 6–​11) indicate that they were to precede “Foreword on History” (Art. 12). But this foreword makes no mention of religion and claims to follow directly on the heels of the Partie physique.18 In a shorter, messier, and presumably earlier draft of the “Foreword on History,”19 Dupin announces that after addressing all the known governments of the world, she will consider religion, beginning with the Old Testament.20 Unfortunately, the opening line of “On the Old Testament” (Art. 6) does not identify what precedes it: “The examination of religion [ . . . ] will be equally favorable to our opinion of the equality of the sexes.” This all-​purpose transition could go anywhere in the Work. We have included neither “On the Old Testament” nor “On the New Testament” (Art. 7), and so summarize them briefly here. In both, Dupin follows Poulain de la Barre’s arguments in On the Excellence of Men (1675),21 emphasizing exegetical error. Article 6: “The first religion given to our fathers from the hands of God himself established no kind of inequality. We read in Genesis that God created humans male and female; he gave equal dominion over the earth and its contents to Adam and Eve.” Some interpreters insinuate that there was “an air of authority on Adam’s side” but this “changes nothing in the text, which certainly establishes no domination of the one over the other.” Article 7: The Savior of the world, in bringing a new law to earth, prescribed nothing against the equality we uphold. He addressed his instructions and his promesses to men and to women; he carried out the same miracles for women [as he did for men]; he did not disdain their praise, their conversation, or their support.

18 As Le Bouler and Thiéry note in “Une partie retrouvée” (400, note 56). They describe the draft, sold at auction in 1980 and not seen by Sénéchal (385–​386). 19 Sénéchal, 254. 20 “On the Religion of the Pagans,” numbered 22 by Rousseau, could be a remnant of this organizational scheme—​or not. At the end of Art. 15 (on Roman history—​now inaccessible), she writes, then crosses out: “we will trace a sketch of the religion of the pagans before following the emperors to Constantinople” in “On Byzantine History” (Art. 16). Did “On the Religion of the Pagans” get its own chapter (22) after Dupin decided not to include the material at the end of Art. 15? Or had she already written “On the Religion of the Pagans” as 22, before deciding to fold its content into 15, before finally deciding (via the cross-​out) to exclude it altogether? 21 See Poulain de la Barre, On the Excellence of Men, in Three Cartesian Feminist Treatises, trans. Vivlen Bosley, ed. Marcelle Maistre Welch (University of Chicago Press: 2002), 266–​292. On Poulain’s biblical criticism, see Stuurman, François Poulain de la Barre, 223–​224.

Part II: History and Religion  105 She emphasizes that Paul has been selectively read: The way Saint Paul is cited on the subject of women could lead one to believe that he wrote a treatise expressly against them. Everyone knows by heart the verse of his Letter to the Ephesians [5:21–​25] in which he advises women to be subordinate to their husbands, while the verse in which he recommends reciprocal submission among the faithful is not so well known, despite immediately preceding it [ . . . ] Saint Paul ends his comparison of Jesus Christ and the Church to marriage by saying that husbands must love their wives as the Savior loved the Church to the point of dying for her.

Like Poulain, she names various Church fathers who spoke favorably of women, most of whom reappear in Article 8. We have placed the two religion chapters selected for inclusion—​“On the Discipline of the Church” (8) and “On the State of the Monastic Orders since the Council of Trent” (10)—​where we think they will make the most sense to our reader: as part of the History section, because they are among her best examples of historical scholarship; following “On the History of France,” because they deal with French history; and immediately preceding the Law section, because they advance a parallel argument. This order creates a coherent development through public law, canon law, and civil law. French princesses have lost access to political power as a result of the invention of Salic law (Art. 21). Church councils have outlawed the spiritual authority of individual women (Art. 8) and voided the self-​determination of communities of religious women (Art. 10). Civil law has deprived married women of previously enjoyed resources (Art. 30), responsibilities (Art. 36), and distinctions (Art. 35). Dupin thus covers religion and marriage, the only two “estates” available to women in early modern France,22 as well as the state that encompasses them. All of these changes occurred around the same time. By the time Henri IV had acceded to the throne (1594), Salic law had become synonymous with the French state and would soon become a key feature of the ideology of political absolutism. Meanwhile, “women maintained their equality” in religion “until the seventeenth century,”23 when bishops claimed authority over female monastic orders, most visibly in enforcing the enclosure of female religious within convents, as stipulated by the Council of Trent (convened 22 Gabrielle Suchon, Du célibat volontaire (Paris: Jean and Michel Guignard, 1700), “Avant-​ propos,” n.p. 23 “On the Original State of Monastic Orders” (Art. 9). Cited in Sénéchal, 237.

106  Louise Dupin’s Work on Women in response to the Protestant Reformation). That was also when new paths for social mobility century spurred efforts to grant husbands greater control over marital property, leading to the degradation of married women’s property rights (as we show in the introduction to Part III). Articles 8 and 10 are unique in the Work on Women in highlighting women’s resistance to the systemic change marking the beginning of the modern era. Individually, women resisted exclusion from roles of leadership within the Church. Collectively, they resisted the disenfranchisement of female monastic communities. In “On the Discipline of the Church,” Dupin argues that women were excluded from the priesthood when celibacy became a requirement for priests. However, she highlights women’s sacerdotal recidivism by mining canons24 and capitularies25 for repeated complaints about women administering communion and taking other leadership liberties. Most of these examples come from the 36-​volume Church History (1722–​1736) begun by Claude Fleury and finished by Jean-​Claude Fabre and Claude-​Pierre Goujet; most predate the Council of Trent. “On the State of the Monastic Orders Since the Council of Trent” highlights the resistance of entire communities to the Council’s imposition of the authority of bishops over communities of religious women. This power struggle often came to a head over the Council of Trent’s renewed emphasis on enclosure: the stipulation that nuns be cut off from the world by the walls of their convents.26 Bishops charged with enforcing enclosure were authorized to conduct impromptu inspections, diminishing the power of abbesses and undermining their communities. While many female monastic communities of the Catholic Reformation embraced enclosure,27 they fought the elimination of women’s authority to self-​govern in the Church and their subjection to bishops. Dupin observed post-​Trent resistance in legal cases. In a 1638 case, the nuns of Saint Catherine of Apt protested the interference of Modeste des Arcs, Bishop of Apt. He ordered changes to bring the convent into compliance with the new standards for enclosure: “The windows [ . . . ] shall be walled up to the level of the cross bars, and latticed with steel bars. The walls of the perimeter shall be raised by the height of two canes [ . . . ] a wall with 24 Canons: laws produced by Church councils—​meetings of bishops called to decide important matters facing the Church, ranging from ecumenical to provincial in scope. 25 Capitularies (collections of capitula or chapters): acts of legislation that included civil law, canon laws previously issued by councils of bishops, and judgments rendered for individual cases of litigation. 26 Elizabeth Rapley, A Social History of the Cloister (McGill-​Queen’s University Press, 2001), 112. 27 Diefendorf, From Penitence to Charity, 246–​247.

Part II: History and Religion  107 an iron grate shall divide the [ . . . ] parlor.” He wrote a new constitution for them (theirs had been lost) and brought in three nuns from elsewhere to implement it and keep the new keys.28 In 1653, The nuns of Saint Claire of the Reformation of Saint Colette lost their case against the bishop of Le Puy-​en-​ Velay’s right of “visitation or superiority” over their community following a forced visitation, in which the doors of the convent were broken open to allow his entry.29 The seven-​year case opposing François de Lafayette, Bishop of Limoges and the Benedictine Abbey Our Lady of the Rule in Limoges (also decided in 1653), showed exactly what was at stake. Lafayette’s lawyer derides the abbess, Jeanne de Verthamon for affecting “a kind of independence, instead of the subjection that the Canons command her to have.”30 It is important to point out that the State was not a disinterested party in adjudicating power struggles between bishops and female monasteries. Bishops were nominated by kings, and appointed by popes, while abbots and abbesses were to be elected by their communities. Louis XIV tried to circumvent these elections and papal approval of bishops. Alleging the division of labor between the Crown and the Church—​the king had control over the temporal, while the pope oversaw the spiritual—​he appointed abbots and bishops in commendam, as managers of the finances of vacant offices.31 Reinforcing the authority of bishops, whether nominated or appointed by the king, was in the interest of the monarchy. Consequently, despite the parlements’ staunch support of the French monarchy’s independence from Rome and despite their general rejection of the decrees on the Council of Trent based on this Gallican stance, they went along with its resolutions regarding nuns.32 The Parlement of Paris sided with the Bishop of Limoges against Jeanne de Verthamon and the Abbey of Our Lady of the Rule on the grounds that “common law is stronger than any title against

28 Le Merre, Recueil des actes, titres, et mémoires concernant les affaires du clergé de France, 12 vols. (Paris: widow François Muguet, 1716) 4:1717–​1721. This compilation includes canons issued by Church councils; papal declarations and bulls; capitularies, ordinances, and decrees of kings; and decisions handed down by parlements, the Private Council, and the King’s Council (Conseil d’état). See also Jean-​Claude Fabre and Claude-​Pierre Goujet, Histoire ecclésiastique (Paris: Emery, Saugrain, Pierre Martin, 1722–​1736), 34:83. 29 Le Merre, Recueil des actes, 4:1739–​1741. See also Fabre and Goujet, Histoire ecclésiastique, 34:83, and Claude Henrys, Œuvres [ . . . ] contenant son recueil d’arrêts (Paris: Michel Brunet, 1738), 1:165. 30 Le Merre, Recueil des actes, 4:1727, 1738; Fabre and Goujet, Histoire ecclésiastique, 34:83. 31 On this work-​around, see Daniella Kostroun, Feminism, Absolutism, and Jansenism: Louis XIV and the Port-​Royal Nuns (Cambridge University Press, 2011), 182–​183. 32 Some families protested the strict enclosure of their daughters. See René Pillorget, “Réforme monastique et conflits de rupture dans quelques localités de la France méridionale au XVIIe siècle,” Revue historique 253 (1975): 77–​106.

108  Louise Dupin’s Work on Women odious exemptions, always perilous, especially when it comes to nuns, who can never be happier nor more surely directed, than so long as they breathe the spirit of the Church only under ordinary authority and in the order of the hierarchy.”33 But jurists, like bishops, like historians, were rewriting history, or so Dupin argues: what had been common law—​or at least not uncommon practice—​was the independence of female religious orders; what was odious, abusive, and exceptional was the imposition of episcopal authority, as if centuries of monastic convention meant nothing.

Article 12. Foreword on History We have responded to arguments in the sciences that contradict our view of the equality between men and women.34 Now our objective is to respond to arguments taken from history. After having considered how the Ancients viewed physics, we now turn to what the Moderns insinuate about inequality in their histories. Here is the foundation on which we stand: in looking back through the centuries preceding ours, we find very different facts about women—​facts conveyed more naturally—​than we find today. We notice great change in the condition of women over the course of recent centuries. Women play a lesser part in events, and even the part they do play is commonly kept quiet. A completely stilted language is used to speak of women in cases when it really cannot be avoided. History offers a grand spectacle—​through its diversity of actions, through each century’s distinct character, and, in general, through its claim to truth. Yet our modern corps of history does not quite accomplish this. In seeking out the sources from which these histories are taken, we will find differences of fact and still further differences in the turn of mind with which these facts are presented when it comes to women. In setting aside any partiality, and with a little discernment, we may be astonished. And in examining an author’s talent, condition, and motives, our astonishment will cede to contempt and pity on more than one occasion. Granted, it is quite common for an author to lend all of the colors and opinions of his own century to the one he is painting, without even being aware of it. Yet the fact remains that the kind of reflection that ensures against this problem is the foundation of all

33 Le Merre, Recueil des actes, 4:1738.

34 Manuscript located at Musée Jean-​Jacques Rousseau (IR.2002.489.1).

Part II: History and Religion  109 good historical works. Just as we might apply this reflection to other historical matters, should we not also apply it to subjects involving women, especially when historians are bent on making past centuries serve as an example to justify all kinds of exclusions imposed on women today? The quarry of the past would be immense to traverse if we were to sift through the history of humankind and through all of the alleged facts, in order to contest the sentence handed down to women by modern historians. But anyone can endeavor to seek within it evidence for their opinion on a subject. At the very least, they would gain from this search the advantage of seeing these objects with their own eyes and of witnessing times very different from those familiar to us. Is it not amusing that modern historians refer to women’s reigns in the most ancient kingdoms as “regencies” even when these women were widows with sons who succeeded their fathers only after forty years? {Semiramis}.35 Never mind that the word “regency” probably did not exist in the time to which these authors apply it; in no period of history could a forty-​year reign have been viewed in terms of a regent safeguarding the king’s throne for the minor who was to succeed him. Everything is now written in the name of men, including the power of women rulers—​even in cases where that power has never before been an object of controversy. Everything has taken on an air of remarkable subjection; almost down to the present day we have seen women with considerable inheritances marry our kings of France {Jeanne de Navarre, Anne de Bretagne}. These princesses stand accused, it seems, of having exercised their authority in their own countries. No one speaks of them in terms of politics, morality, or reason, even—​only from the point of view of the prejudice we combat. This prejudice has cast shadows on all feminine tableaus. The worthiest female subjects are always painted with the weakest qualities and colors, while the bad ones receive an abundance of detail and the most vivid colors. Who would not laugh to see how historians play up the vices of a few sorry princesses—​not just how they characterize these women, but how they malign all women in doing so—​while they recount the misdeeds of bad princes quite simply, without drawing any conclusions about the general character of all men. In a word, it seems that historians shelter men’s dignity even when 35 Celebrated in ancient Greece as a warrior queen of Assyria, the semilegendary Semiramis was a stock character in early modern compilations of famous women. Dupin seems to have in mind Diodorus of Sicily’s claim in his Library of History (first century bce) that she ruled forty-​two years (2.20).

110  Louise Dupin’s Work on Women criticizing them. For women it is another matter entirely—​there is always room for blame, even when praise cannot be avoided. Above all, historians insist that women have always lived in idleness and dependence. A look at any age of the world would suffice to disprove this, however. In the end, history has been turned into a living tableau,36 in which only men have acted since time immemorial. Yet what we know of the past shows us that women have shared in all of the great deeds. This truth shines through despite everything done to hide it. Historians themselves sometimes let slip details that confirm what we say here. Generally, simply comparing the substance of events with the way they are recounted will affirm the truth of what we are saying: the dependence and uselessness in which women currently live was actually established quite recently. A good faith examination, along with some research, will suffice to reveal that for a long time, women held onto all of the rights that nature gave them in common with men, which were lost only little by little; that they enjoyed all of the rights established by different forms of government; and that they were only deprived of these rights gradually and by chance. We will also note that history has been infiltrated by pieces and writings that critics today have shown to be false and that those with a modicum of learning dismiss as apocryphal {certain predictions by sibyls,37 some passages about Joseph,38 the story of Alexander III stepping on Frederick Barbarossa’s neck39}. Things that were once accepted as true were challenged, as competing views led to examination and refutation. Yet no one protests false claims or gross omissions involving women. No one defends their interests. And the ignorance in which women have been raised for some time now prevents them from standing up for themselves. Thus no piece of falsified or neglected history concerning women—​nor any consequence extrapolated from that dubious historical record—​encounters any obstacle today. 36 Tableau vivant. A static scene featuring stationary, silent actors, usually imitating paintings, statues, or other works of art. Dupin characterizes history as the artful (selective) reconstruction of the past by men. 37 The sibyls were associated in medieval and sixteenth-​century books of hours with the prophets of the Old Testament because one of them—​the Tiburtine Sibyl—​had ostensibly announced Christ’s birth to Augustus. See Art. 8 on their representation in a Paris church. 38 The German classical scholar Johann Albert Fabricius published an influential collection of New Testament apocrypha in 1703, augmented in 1719, including stories about Joseph from sources like the Infancy Gospel of James and the History of Joseph the Carpenter. 39 According to legend, Pope Alexander III put his foot on the neck of the defeated German Holy Roman Emperor Frederick I (“Barbarossa” or “red beard”) at the Peace of Venice (1177) in a gesture of feudal dominance.

Part II: History and Religion  111 It has been said that novels are the histories of sentiments and that histories are the novels of facts40 {History is not a very amusing read for women, who must prefer novels}. This is quite true, especially when it comes to modern histories and novels—​and nicely supports our remarks. Our most recent histories have quite a peculiar flavor to them. They seem to be a defense of men and of their power. No longer do they recount events in which each actor plays the role he or she truly held. No longer do we find the deeds of each actor defended and prosecuted impartially. In all facts and in all moments, modern history is a defense of masculine dignity and power. As for women, it is a continual lesson in subordination—​which is comical when one knows of contrary facts and has seen the same events recounted in a simpler, less affected style.

Article 13. On Ancient History The Ethiopians contest the Egyptians’ status as the most ancient civilization, claiming that the Egyptian people comprised one of their colonies.41 Whichever came first, we know that it was the custom of the Ethiopians to be ruled by queens who marched at the head of armies while their husbands remained deep in the palace {Eusebius; Saint Irenaeus; Saint Cyril; Strabo}.42 These queens all carried the name Candace, just as the kings of Egypt bore the title Ptolemy. One of these Candaces, Queen of Ethiopia, waged war against the Romans during the reign of Augustus, and the peace was signed at Samos.43 We can conclude based on these facts that the government of the Ethiopians was gynocratic.44 It was that way from the time of Solomon,45 and it was still that way three or four hundred years after Jesus Christ {Eusebius}. 40 Dupin may have heard this quip from Claude-​Adrien Helvétius at her salon (Buon 128). See Helvétius, Pensées et réflexions extraites des manuscrits de l’auteur in Œuvres complètes, ed. Louis Lefèbvre de la Roche (Paris: Didot, 1795), 119. 41 Manuscript located at Musée Jean-​Jacques Rousseau (2000.2.1). 42 Dupin’s source is Sébastien le Nain de Tillemont, Mémoires pour servir à l’histoire ecclésiastique des six premiers siècles (Paris: Charles Robustel, 1701), 2:490–​491. Dupin takes the ensuing discussion of rule by women in Ethiopia from Tillemont, even though he casts doubt on such claims. 43 The first-​century Greek geographer Strabo recounts Queen Amanirenas’s campaigns against Gaius Petronius, the Roman Prefect of Egypt, in his Geography (17.1.54–​55). Rousseau consulted Strabonis rerum geographicarum libri XVII, trans. Wilhelm Xylander, ed. Isaac Casaubon (Paris: Frédéric Morel, 1620), 820–​821. 44 Dupin overstates the case. Pliny the Elder mentions a succession of Ethiopian queens in Book 6 of Natural History, but he also mentions kings, as does Strabo. 45 According to legend, Solomon fathered a son with the Queen of Sheba [Saba], an Ethiopian queen.

112  Louise Dupin’s Work on Women The state of the Sitones or Norwegians was governed by women {Mézeray, Origins of the French}.46 One part of the north was called Kvinnoland or Qvenland, meaning “Women’s Land.”47 Among the Agileans rule by women was the established custom {Michael Glycas}.48 Among the Amazons and Gorgons, only women ruled,49 and among the Buaens, people of Libya, a man governed the men while a woman governed the women {Stobaeus, Sermo 42}.50 Various historians and travelers mention other countries where women have governed and still govern, to the exclusion of men {Herodotus}.51 It is peculiar, despite this evidence, to insist on portraying rule by women as a philosophical abstraction.52 Still other nations offer us examples of governance to which women succeeded alternately with men, whether by election or by bloodright and birthright; for we have seen several instances in which princesses reigned despite having brothers {the Cleopatras, the Berenices, Ada Queen of Caria}.53 Several of the women occupying the throne of Egypt held it with such dignity that they were the love and admiration of their subjects and the terror of their enemies. These battle-​ready and law-​giving princesses had great military and

46 François Eudes de Mézeray, in Histoire de France avant Clovis, 3 vols. (Paris: Denys Thierry, Jean Guignard, and Claude Barbin, 1685), takes his commentary from Tacitus, Germania, c­ hapter 45. 47 Kvinnoland (Women’s Land) was a common misinterpretation of Kvenland (the land of the Kven, a Finnic people living along the Gulf of Bothnia in Old Norse times). Tacitus’s claim that Fenni (Sámi) women hunt alongside Fenni men in ­chapter 46 of Germania strengthened belief in a northern land ruled by women. 48 The twelfth-​century Byzantine historian Michael Glycas notes Agilean women’s “mastery” over their husbands in part 2 of his Annales. Dupin may have encountered Glycas’s Agileans in Samuel Pufendorf, Le droit de la nature et des gens ou système général des principes les plus importans de la morale, de la jurisprudence, et de la politique [1673], trans. Jean Barbeyrac (Basel: E. & J. R. Thourneisen, 1732), 1:157. 49 On the Amazons and the Gorgons, see the introduction to Part II. 50 The fifth-​century Byzantine encyclopedist, Joannes Stobaeus, mentions the Buaens in a section of his encyclopedic Anthology entitled “On Laws and Customs” (4.2). 51 In effect, political legitimacy is transferred through women in Herodotus’s stories. See Josine Blok, “Women in Herodotus’ Histories,” in Brill’s Companion to Herodotus, ed. Egbert Bakker, Irene de Jong, and Hans van Wees (Brill, 2002), 225–​242. 52 un être de raison, from the Latin, ens rationis. A philosophical abstraction, having no historical reality. 53 Dupin’s examples involve sibling marriages among royals, co-​regencies of brother and sister, and sisters succeeding as widows to brothers. The Cleopatras ruled Ptolemaic Egypt, ending with the death of Cleopatra VII (30 bce); the Berenices originated from the same line. Cleopatra II (ca. 185–​ 115 bce) ruled alongside her brother-​husband and another brother until she incited a rebellion to become the sole regent of Egypt. Berenice III (115–​80 bce) reigned alone for one year after the death of her father despite having several living brothers. Ada of Caria was her brother-​husband’s rightful heir, but her surviving brother expelled her. When Alexander the Great entered Caria (334 bce), Ada adopted him, naming him as her heir. In exchange, he reestablished her as the ruler of Caria. On Ada of Caria: Strabo, Geography, 14.2.17–​18; Arian, The Anabasis of Alexander, 1.23.8; and Diodorus, Library of History, 17.24.2–​3.

Part II: History and Religion  113 political success in their time {the Nitocrises}.54 Monuments to the power and dignity of women long endured among this people {the statues of Lake Moeris}.55 According to almost all of the authors of Antiquity Egyptian men worked inside the house, while women conducted business and acted outside {Herodotus, Sophocles in Oedipus at Colonus}.56 Thus, not only did princesses rule the nation; within the nation itself, women governed household matters to the exclusion of men. Among the Assyrians, several queens undertook such beautiful acts of war and legislation that men would proudly take credit for them {the Semiramises—​Vossius mentions several of them}.57 It was the same thing among the Sacae, a people of ancient Scythia,58 and among the Gaetuli {Diodorus}.59 Persian princes followed the custom, as did Egyptian princes, of marrying their own sisters the better to share in royal dignity—​and to consolidate it, because their sisters [also] inherited. This was also the practice among the Incas.60 The throne of Caria was hereditary for women, and the Carians were as content to be ruled by women as they were by men. The Artemisias gave great examples of virtue and valor.61 Around

54 The first Nitocris, ruler of Babylon, had the Euphrates River redirected to impede invasions. The second, queen of Egypt, brutally avenged the murder of her brother (Herodotus, Histories 1.185 and 2.100). 55 Herodotus describes pyramids and a grand labyrinth near Lake Moeris (Histories 2.101 and 2.148). Eusebius attributes a pyramid at Giza to a Nitocris (Chronicle, 1.47). 56 Herodotus, Histories, 2.35 and Sophocles, Oedipus at Colonus (v. 338–​340). Oedipus maligns his son for his unwillingness to help him by likening him to effeminate Egyptians, in contrast to the bravery of his daughter. 57 The Dutch classical scholar Gerrit Janszoon Voss (Vossius) mentions three Semiramises in De theologia gentili, et physiologia Christiana (Amsterdam: Johannes Blaeu, 1668), 88, 90. 58 The Sacae: nomadic Iranian peoples related to the Scythians, pastoral nomads of the steppe areas north of the Roman empire (modern-​day southern Siberia). In his Library of History, Diodorus narrates a period of Scythian history when women were sovereigns and trained for war like men (2.44.1). Herodotus (Histories 4.110–​117) and Justin in his second-​century Philippic History (1.33, 1.43–​44) affiliate the Scythians with the Amazons. Dupin consulted Justin in Nouvelle traduction de l’abrégé historique de Justin, trans. Antoine Favier (Paris: P. G. Le Mercier, 1737). 59 The Gaetuli: a nomadic Berber tribe inhabiting the desert region south of the Atlas Mountains of Maghreb. 60 In the preface to Lettres d’une péruvienne (1747), Françoise de Graffigny notes that Incas married their sisters. Graffigny’s source, and possibly Dupin’s, was the mestizo writer Inca Garcilaso de la Vega’s Royal Commentaries of the Incas. First translated into French in the early seventeenth century, Thomas-​François Dalibard published a new translation in 1744. Dalibard was the governor of Dupin’s son until May 1743. 61 Artemisia I of Caria was Queen of Halicarnassus, an independent Greek city in the district of Caria. Herodotus recounts Artemisia’s naval battle against Xerxes near the island of Salamis (480–​479 bce) in his Histories (7.99, 8.68–​69, 8.87–​88). Artemisia II ruled Caria after the death of her brother-​ husband Mausolus (353 bce), overseeing the construction of the Mausoleum at Halicarnassus in his honor.

114  Louise Dupin’s Work on Women twenty years after the second Artemisia, Alexander re-​established [her sister] Ada Queen of Caria on the throne, undoing their brother’s usurpation. Not only did women inherit empires and share in their rule, they also established them. Dido, better known in Antiquity by the name of Elissa, took refuge in Africa when fleeing her brother Pygmalion, her husband’s assassin, and there she founded the city of Carthage and the Carthaginian empire.62 Before Dido, Carmenta, the mother of Evander, brought her son to Italy and was the founder of a colony that she established among the Latins, where her memory long remained in veneration.

Article 18. On Turkey and Persia The Mahometans The Religion and Laws of Mahomet, which began in the seventh century, have made large gains in a short time: they are followed by half of Asia and in parts of Africa and Europe.63 But this progress did not occur thanks to any domination exercised by men over women.64 The seclusion and idleness in which the wives of great men and their imitators live today in Turkey did not begin with Mahomet. Cadihje, the first wife of this false Prophet, was as instrumental in spreading his religion as he was. She died after twenty years of marriage with him.65 During the four years that Mahomet survived her, he married several other women, among them two whose fathers succeeded Mahomet immediately one after the other, no doubt in large thanks to the

62 The stories of Dido and Carmenta were commonplace in Querelle des femmes literature; see Château-​Thierry Galien, Apologie des dames, 96, 114–​115. 63 Manuscript located at Musée Jean-​Jacques Rousseau (IR.2002.437.2). We use the most common eighteenth-​century romanizations for Arabic names in the body of the text, while we use modern spellings in the notes. Dupin uses both “Mahomed” and “Mahomet”; “Haïschach” for “Ayesha” (various spellings in contemporary texts, including “Aischach” in Barthélémy d’Herbelot’s Bibliothèque orientale [1697]); and “Ajaph” for “Hafsa.” 64 Dupin’s draws from Pierre Bayle’s article “Mahomet” in the Dictionaire historique et critique (1697). We cite from the fifth edition (Amsterdam: La compagnie des libraires, 1734), vol. 4. Bayle emphasizes the spread of Islam (p. 16, note A), but denies that it spread because it gave men power over (and sex with) multiple wives (p. 29, note L) and contrasts the dependance of Muslim women in the present to the influence wielded by Muhammad’s wives; Ayesha “was considered like a prophetess, and like an oracle: she was a veritable popess among the Muslims [Musulmans]” (p. 47, note PP). See Mara van der Lugt, “The Body of Mahomet: Pierre Bayle on War, Sex, and Islam,” Journal of the History of Ideas 78, no. 1 (2017): 27–​50. 65 Khadija (555–​619), daughter of Khuwaylid ibn Asad, was a widow who ran a prosperous trade business when she met Muhammad (570–​632). She supported his mission financially and spiritually.

Part II: History and Religion  115 respect given to them by the people because of their daughters. One of these wives, named Ayesha, survived Mahomet by forty-​eight years, during which time the people, both the great and the lowly, held her in the highest esteem.66 She was consulted on the election of Caliphs, the selection of generals, and on the most important matters. She was called “Mother of the Believers.” When Ali succeeded to the Caliphate—​placed there because he was the husband of Fatima, daughter of Mahomet and his first wife—​Ayesha warred against him, and her authority greatly increased the forces of the faction that several leaders had mounted against Ali. Hafsa, another wife of Mahomet, whose father reigned after Ayesha’s father, was the custodian of the Alcoran from which the Caliphs thereafter ordered every authentic copy to be made.67 We could expand on this subject, but will limit our comments instead, for although these women led wars; served as custodians of a book deemed holy par excellence by this people for containing not just divine law, but also civil law; provided counsel on the greatest matters; came and went at will; and freely received visitors in their own homes—​none of this resembles anything in the life of Turkish women today. People say that Mahomet forbade his followers to marry his widows out of jealousy; it is more likely to have been because of vanity and ambition, sentiments that are more lasting in this world than jealousy and that are more easily carried into the next. It is commonly said that Mahometans believe women will not enter their Paradise: but Monsieur Reland68 and Monsieur Chardin both refute this opinion, and the story of Roxelana69 alone proves it to be false. But since people like finding examples that promote contempt for women, they even invent them for this purpose, and the most absurd prevail. In Turkey women live sequestered lives, but that does not preclude them from exerting great influence in public matters. The Valide Sultans as well

66 Ayesha (circa 614–​678), daughter of Abu Bakr (Muhammad’s successor and first caliph). In some traditions, two of Muhammad’s daughters married Uthman and Ali (the third and fourth caliphs, respectively). 67 Hafsa (605–​665), daughter of Umar [Omar] ibn al-​Khattab (second caliph, successor of Abu Bakr). All of Muhammad’s wives were called “Mother of the Believers.” 68 Adriaan Reland, La religion des Mahométans, exposée par leurs propres docteurs [1705], trans. David Durand (The Hague: Isaac Vaillant, 1721). Reland attributes to Joseph-​Guillaume Grelot (Relation nouvelle d’un voyage à Constantinople, 1680) the report that Muslim women do not go to paradise, and to Jean Chardin (Voyages du Chevalier Chardin en Perse et autres lieux de l’Orient, [1686] 1735) the view that they do (166–​172). 69 Hurrem, also called Roxelana, was the first to bear the title Haseki Sultan (imperial consort) after she married the Ottoman Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent (ruled 1520–​1566). Kidnapped from Ruthenia (present-​day Ukraine), she joined the imperial harem, became his advisor, and was interred in a grand mausoleum.

116  Louise Dupin’s Work on Women as several women who reigned as sultans show that women have not lacked power.70 Mahomet’s descendants carry the title of Green Turban and the title of Emir; this is the only nobility they recognized. Women share and transmit this honor: they produce Emirs even when married to Turkmen who are not.71 What people commonly like to discuss are the rights of husbands over wives and the punishments that husbands can inflict for infidelity. Yet, the Alcoran condemns a husband to flogging if he accuses his wife in such a case without proof, and then the wife’s oath is believed over the husband’s.72 Among the Armenians, marriages are made entirely according to the will of mothers who sometimes do their husbands the favor of consulting them; and it is the mother of the boy who comes to the girl’s house to present a ring to her {Tournefort}.73 In the olden days, the city of Erzurum {Voyage to Persia} was traditionally called KaliKala from the name of a woman who built it and who was depicted on one of the gates to the city.74 The city of KiaKan was similarly built by a woman named Zubaidah. Mores have changed among these peoples just as they have changed everywhere and will continue to change. It is likely that in the era when women founded cities they had more authority, credit, and freedom than they do now in these countries, where common manners even now are not what we ordinarily imagine them to be based on hearsay. Sometimes European men speak about the seraglios {“harem” is the proper term, “seraglio” simply means “palace”} of the Orient with indulgence and even a tinge of regret that similar harems are not customary in their own countries. Do they not know that the sons of these harems plot for the Empire’s succession, that brother strangles brother, and that they war against each other so much that they overturn and ravage their own country? 70 Beginning in the sixteenth century with Hafsa Sultan (mother of Suleiman the Magnificent), the honorific “Valide Sultan” designated the reigning sultan’s living mother. The period from Roxelana’s marriage to Suleiman to 1656 is known as the “Sultanate of Women”; six Valide sultans reigned because of their sons’ youth or incompetence. Several concubines attained a status equivalent (or surpassing) that of a queen consort in Europe. 71 In the Ottoman Empire, descendants of Muhammad had the privilege of wearing a green turban. In his article “Emir,” D’Herbelot narrows this privilege to “the lineage of Mahomet by his daughter Fatima” (314). D’Herbelot mentions the African term for “Emir”: “Scherife”—​closer to “Sharif ” used today. On these traditions and titles, see Ruya Kilic, “Sayyids and Sharifs in the Ottoman State: On the Borders of True and False,” Muslim World 96, no. 1 (2006): 21–​35. 72 Quran 24.4–​5. 73 Joseph Pitton de Tournefort, Relation d’un voyage du Levant fait par ordre du Roi (Paris: Imprimerie Royale, 1718), 2:166. 74 Dupin evidently refers to Chardin, but he does not discuss the origins of these cities in his Voyages. Erzurum is in Eastern Turkey.

Part II: History and Religion  117 And that the women, mothers or lovers of these rebel children, exert their influence over these odious intrigues? Even a reasonable man lacking the resource of Christianity can understand the cause that produces such effects enough to condemn and detest it. They must know that sultans who dominate one hundred women are themselves subjected every bit as much as those women. And that these sultans never know the sweetness of intimate society nor much about anything else. What could possibly be the reasons for admiring a sultan’s state? If they think it would multiply their possession of something they regard as property, they are not as wise as that peasant who, considering the great wealth of his lord, said philosophically: if he’s so rich, then let him dine twice! If they imagine that it would provide a guarantee of possession, in imitation of those strange husbands, then perhaps they are unaware of the fact that what they most fear happens there more than anywhere else. It is perhaps only in the harem of the Great Sultan that this incident is a rare occurrence. Other harems, less closely guarded, are guarded just enough that not an opportunity is missed, because ingenuity works to seek them out. In these countries, indiscretions are run of the mill, and Nature—​constrained and antagonized—​actively pursues freedom and vengeance. How can it be that these jailor husbands have not learned the moral of the Arab tale about the woman who was kept in a glass box on the head of a genie? {This woman requested a ring from each of the men with whom she made the precautions of her jealous husband useless, and she collected quite a string of them}.75 We should not compare the harems of queens mentioned by some travelers to the harems of sultans.76 But among the Medes, women had at least five or six husbands; in Arabia one woman could marry all the men of an entire family; among the Iroquois, polygamy is forbidden to men and permitted for women; among the ancient Bretons a woman could have up to ten or twelve husbands; and according to a custom opposite to that of the Mahometans, Malabar women can take as many husbands as they like. 75 In the frame tale of One Thousand and One Nights, a genie (jinn) holds a beautiful woman imprisoned in a glass box to ensure her fidelity. She nevertheless has sex with two traveling sultans. She demands a ring from each of them and warns them not to constrain women if they want them to be faithful. Les mille et une nuits, contes arabes, trans. Antoine Galland, 12 vols. (Paris: Claude Barbin’s widow, 1704–​1717), 1:31–​37. 76 Dupin refutes claims that polyandry never existed. On the Medes, Arabia, and the Iroquois: Gilbert-​Charles le Gendre, marquis de Saint-​Aubin’s Traité de l’opinion ou mémoires pour servir à l’esprit humain, 6:73–​74. On the Bretons: Jean Bodin, Six livres de la république (Paris: Jacques du Puis, 1576), 683. On the Malabar custom: Charles Dellon, Relation d’un voyage aux Indes orientales (Paris: Claude Barbin, 1675), 1:227.

118  Louise Dupin’s Work on Women In Loango, the king’s [female] tutor, as well as his mother and sisters have the right to as many husbands or even as many lovers as they deem suitable without incurring scandal.77 This prerogative is all the more unusual for the tutor in that she is usually chosen at a venerable age when other advantages would be more fitting. Currently in the realm of Tibet or Bhutan, women have several husbands. Among the Sinhalese on the island of Ceylon, the same plurality is allowed. While appearing to follow nature, these practices—​whether for men or for women—​are actually contrary to it: they are contrary to reason, to politics, and to both general and individual happiness among subjects of a state.78 These facts nevertheless go to show that parity can be found between men and women in whatever place and time one looks for it. However, it makes sense that polygamy is found less often in the case we have been describing, since a plurality of wives with a single husband can produce a multitude of children, and emperors of Turkish harems often spawn an impressive number of them; whereas a plurality of husbands with a single wife, being able to multiply only with her, would not generate such a robust posterity. But it is calculated that in countries where a plurality of wives is permitted, total generation is less than in countries where it is forbidden. While this may at first seem surprising, it is after all easy to comprehend that no matter how successful one man and twenty women might be in working at [producing] posterity, they could never serve posterity in the same way as well as twenty women with twenty men.79

77 The kingdom of Loango (or Lovango) occupied the Atlantic coast from the Congo River to Cape Saint Catherine (present-​day Gabon). Olfert Dapper discusses the sexual liberty of the king’s mother, sisters, and the Macunda (whom Europeans described as a regent or governess) in Description de l’Afrique, contenant les noms, la situation, et les confins de toutes ses parties (Amsterdam: Wolfgang, Waesberge, Boom, and van Someren, 1686), 329. This account is reproduced by Bernard in vol. 2 of Cérémonies [ . . . ] idolâtres and by Prévost in vol. 13 of Histoire générale des voyages. On Tibet: Du Halde, Description géographique, historique, chronologique, politique et physique de la Chine et de la Tartarie chinoise (Paris: P. G. Le Mercier, 1735), 4:461. On Ceylon (present-​day Sri Lanka): Bernard, Cérémonies [ . . . ] idolâtres, 2.1:20 and 2.2:148. 78 The Dutch Protestant minister, Johann Leyser, upheld polygamy as consistent with natural and divine law in Polygamia triumphatrix (1682, trans. into French in 1739). See Carol Blum, “Une controverse nataliste en France au XVIIIe siècle: La polygamie,” Population 53 (1998): 93–​112. The view that polygyny conformed to natural law (while polyandry was “bad in itself ”) was common in France in the eighteenth century. See Nicolas Lenglet du Fresnoy, “Polygamie,” Encyclopédie, ou dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers, etc., eds. Denis Diderot and Jean le Rond d’Alembert. University of Chicago: ARTFL Encyclopédie Project (Autumn 2017 Edition), Robert Morrissey and Glenn Roe (eds), 12:937. http://​encyc​lope​die.uchic​ago.edu/​. 79 Dupin denies that France was losing population (see the introduction to Part II) and rejects the proposed solution: “certainly a man will have more children with twenty women than with one alone.” Prémontval, La monogamie, 2:4.

Part II: History and Religion  119 We have said that a plurality, be it of husbands or of wives, is contrary to nature. The actual practice of polygamy handily proves this. Those who live with this freedom often restrict themselves to unity of their own accord, and even those most determined to part paths with it nevertheless concentrate their vows, affection, trust, and habits in a single object. The promoters of the system we are combating do not stop to consider such things because it could prove them wrong. They think they have identified the origin of the plurality of wives by stating that polygamy is practiced in the Orient in order to take away the prodigious power that a wife has in other climates:80 Oh, such a beautiful, important reflection, and what a good plan to strip one wife’s ascendancy by redistributing it among fifty! It is certain that the plurality of wives multiplies their physical power, at least temporarily, and thus can increase any other sort of power; consequences and improprieties follow. It is certain that most official matters are worked out in harems and that they typically fail or succeed at the hands of women. In response to those who claim that polygamy involves the division of affection rather than its multiplication, one need only consider the human heart and how, even if one were in love with a person for just 24 hours, this love would be pure, tender, vivid and not only prone to all manner of indulgence, but also undivided for its brief duration, as if it were meant to last for a more respectable length of time. It is likely that each new woman strives to obtain things with as many means at her disposal as the one who preceded her, and it is likely that these women together obtain a greater number of things than a single woman could. We have so many examples in countries where a man marries only one woman of the little credit that this gives her, that we might be quite surprised by the political origin that has been imagined for the plurality of wives. Why has no one researched the origin of the plurality of husbands? Not that we are doing so either, beyond a general observation regarding all polygamy: animals provide an example [of it]; men followed animal laws before following their own and in some countries, through various turns of happenstance, the only part of the original laws that remained were those that reason could not entirely subdue.

80 Notably, Leyser exhorts husbands to reclaim by means of polygamy “the empire [ . . . ] that nature granted them over [women] and that they allowed themselves be despoiled of, becoming the vile slaves of women who should be their slaves.” Cited in Pierre Bayle, Nouvelles de la République des Lettres (April 1685), 259.

120  Louise Dupin’s Work on Women People tend to speak more willingly of the plurality of wives [than of husbands] and they do so in a way that casts a kind of magnificence and dignity on men, even on those from countries where it is not practiced, because they attribute its source to the deep intelligence of men. But if we start from the principle that we touched upon: if we add to it the supposition that some human societies began with a larger population of women than men, then quite naturally several women would have ended up with the same husband. This could have been easily perpetuated. Elsewhere, women taken prisoners of war could have given rise to this custom, and perhaps more females are born in countries where this custom prevails. Finally, if Mahomet allowed polygamy, it was less out of a desire to favor the men he sought to govern than to weaken powerful families through a greater division of inheritance and to make the people better able to bear the yoke of his haughty domination. A little reflection on these circumstances might lead us to put our finger on the origin of polygamy—​and to come closer to the truth than any current explanation does. Apparently, the peoples who practice polygamy characterize it as a reform of an older custom in which “women were held in common.” We use that expression solely to conform to common ways of speaking, for we well believe that it would be just as accurate and reasonable to say that the men were held in common since, logically, both men and women would have been—​although that would be less fitting to masculine dignity. It is certain that the rule that governs relations between men and women is the basis for all social organization, and that people have never been able to establish any reasonable society among themselves without first settling this point, however they may have done so.81 Is it not easier to imagine a loving and pure commerce founded on reason, feelings, and the interest of children between a man and a free woman in whatever country than between a Turk and all his harem?

Article 20. Other Countries Fernand Mendes Pinto and his comrades, dangerously wounded and left for dead on a rowboat at the Cape of Ligor, were crying for mercy to a boat laden



81 In both clauses, the phrase is règle de société: rule, principle, or prescription for the social order.

Part II: History and Religion  121 with salt passing nearby.82 Frightened by their cries and wounds, the sailors sailed along without heeding them. But an old lady of a serious and venerable demeanor emerged on deck, severely rebuked them for their inhumanity, and ordered them to receive the Portuguese. They obeyed her. She took great care of Mendes Pinto and his comrades during the trip to Ligor, and upon arrival, received them in her home until they were fully healed. She gave them money and a boat to carry them to Patani.83 The name of the Queen of Achem is ridiculed and as a result, many people believe her to be an imaginary character. Yet she is no more ridiculous than any other sultan, nor any less real. We read in the The Voyage of Siam {Abbé de Choisy, 1685}, “three years ago, the Queen of Achem sent a proposal to the King of Siam to form a league against the Dutch who wished to make themselves masters of all the commerce of their country and wrote him that they must renew the old alliances that long ago existed between their states.”84 We can see from this that this woman was not so occupied with amusement that she neglected political matters. Mendes Pinto recounts the events of war between the Turks and the Portuguese who arrived in the port and capital of the kingdom of Onor belonging to a vassal queen of the King of Narsingh.85 Mendes recounts in great detail the brilliant victories, and at the same time, the horrible cruelties of the King of Burma, mortal enemy of women, despite the many beautiful women he had in his states. He recounts the cruel death that this tyrant inflicted on the Queen of Martaban and 240 of the women of her court for having incited the King of Martaban to resist him; the

82 Manuscript at the Musée Jean-​ Jacques Rousseau (IR.2002.437.4). Rough draft; the final “Observations” sections represent continuous argumentation over several folios, but the middle section consists in a series of notes on discrete folios in seemingly arbitrary order. 83 Fernão Mendes Pinto, Les voyages advantureux de Fernand Mendez Pinto, trans. Bernard Figuier (Paris: Mathurin Henault, 1628), 159–​165. This episode concerns Portuguese trading on the Malay Peninsula. 84 François-​Timoléon, Abbé de Choisy, Journal du voyage de Siam fait en 1685 et 1686 (Paris: Sébastien Mabre Cramoisy, 1687), 313. The Dutch East India Company (VOC) established trading monopolies in the early seventeenth century, squeezing out the Portuguese and the English, cutting out local middlemen, and controlling trade within Southeast Asia; hence the alliance proposed by the Queen of Achem (on Sumatra in present-​day Indonesia) to the King of Siam (Thailand). 85 Mendes Pinto, Les voyages, 41–​50. The Queen of Onor agreed to expel the Turks to appease the Portuguese, after a naval battle between them in the port of Onor (Honnavar), a port town along the Malabar Coast of India strategic to the Portuguese monopoly on trade in the Indian Ocean (sixteenth century). Onor was a vassal state to the Vijayanagara Empire (or Karnata Kingdom), which the French called “Narsingue” and the English, “Narsingh,” after the late fifteenth-​century King Narasimha (or Narasingha) of the Saluva dynasty.

122  Louise Dupin’s Work on Women crueler death still he made the Queen of Prome suffer for having resisted him herself; and a thousand other cruelties that are a horror to read.86 The mother of Aurangzeb was famous for her intelligence and beauty. Aurangzeb’s sisters supported his elevation. He feared the sister who had served him best, first dissimulating in his treatment of her, and finally having her killed. Aurangzeb’s grandmother had been a highly intelligent woman, who governed the kingdom for a long time with much prudence. They called her “Light of the seraglio, Light of the world.”87 Women everywhere have partaken in titles that flattery assigns and that vanity adopts.

Africa The Abyssians, who owe their origins to the ancient Ethiopians, are generally peaceable, civilized, and religious. These people boast of having been instructed in the true religion by two of their queens, Makeda and Candace. The former under the name of the Queen of Sheba brought them the mysteries of Jewish law, and the latter, those of the Christian faith.88 A Candace, Queen of Ethiopia, waged a war with the Romans under the reign of Augustus, and peace was made in Samos. Eusebius of Caesarea who lived during the fourth century said that this government of women lasted until his time.89 We don’t know when it will end; we still read in modern accounts of these countries that the Emperor and Empress of the Abyssinians go to civil war together.90 All the great lords and the ladies of the court accompany them. It even appears that the women are not simply spectators; there are examples in these countries of women who went to war on their own—​successfully.

86 Events of the Toungoo-​Hanthawaddy War (1534–​1541) in Burma (Myanmar), as recounted by Mendes Pinto (Les voyages, 738–​766). 87 François Bernier, Histoire de la dernière révolution des États du Grand Mogol (Paris: Claude Barbin, 1670), 9–​10, 27–​28. Aurangzeb (Muhi-​ud-​Din Muhammed), the last Mughal emperor (1658–​1707), consolidated the Indian subcontinent by warring against his brothers and father, with occasional intelligence from his sister, Rauchnara-​Begum. Bernier served the Mughal court for several years as a physician. 88 Makeda: the Ethiopian name for the Queen of Sheba, who, according to legend, converted to Judaism after meeting with Solomon. An angel commanded Saint Philip the Evangelist to meet a eunuch of the court of a Candace (Ethiopian queen); the eunuch was baptized and proselytized in his country. Tillemont, Mémoire pour servir à l’histoire ecclesiastique, 2:67–​69. 89 Dupin makes the same claim in Art. 13. 90 Is Dupin referring to Sabla Wengle and Del Wanbara in the Abyssinian-​Adal War (1529–​1543) pitting Christian Ethiopians (and Portuguese allies) against Muslim Somalis (supported by the Ottomans), as related in Portuguese sources?

Part II: History and Religion  123 The King of Angola, who died in 1640, left three daughters and one nephew {Dapper}. The eldest was Ana Nzinga, whom we have spoken about.91 According to the laws of the kingdom, the crown belonged to her. The Portuguese supported his nephew against her; she was forced to take refuge in the depths of the country where almost all the nobility followed her. After that, she lost three battles against the Portuguese, yet each time returned with new troops. In the end, no longer wanting to battle against the Christians, she turned her weapons to a different front, and conquered as much or more land than she had ceded. She made peace with the Portuguese. Since the nephew who had usurped her throne had died, the Portuguese replaced him with one of his relatives who was in their graces. This prince secretly made gifts to Ana Nzinga in exchange for her protection. The religion and morals of this country have something violent and evil about them.92 Ana Nzinga shouldn’t be blamed for following these customs and practicing these detestable mysteries, since she was following established examples before her. Governed in her name, the country expanded in her hands. The slaves of the Portuguese deserted them to go be ruled by her. This princess lived more than sixty years, maintaining herself by force against her enemies. In Loango, it is a female relative of the king who is always chosen to oversee his actions {Religious Ceremonies}. It is she who determines the councils and who punishes or pardons criminals.93 We don’t know why this king is in perpetual tutelage, nor why this tutorship is always in the hands of a woman, we simply report the fact. In the kingdom of Ouidah the principal divinity is a snake whose priests and priestesses are equally esteemed and respected in the country.94 In the kingdom of Axim girls are in no hurry to marry, in order to conduct themselves more freely.95 We don’t propose to admire them more for this; we only wish to observe that there are beliefs and customs on this earth that could be used to parody those in this country.

91 From the late sixteenth century, the Portuguese fought to set up puppet governments in Africa’s central coast in order to control the slave trade. Dupin summarizes Dapper, Description de l’Afrique (369–​370), or relies on Antoine François Prévost’s paraphrase thereof in Histoire générale des voyages (Paris: Didot, 1748), 5:36–​37. Dupin does not mention Ana Nzinga elsewhere. 92 Human sacrifice and cannibalism. Dapper, Description, 369; Prévost, Histoire, 5:37. 93 On Loango and the Macunda, see Art. 18. 94 Ouidah (Fida, Juda, or Juida in French): an eighteenth-​century slave-​trading hub, in present-​day Benin. Bernard Cérémonies [ . . . ] de tous les peuples du monde (7.2:272–​273); Prévost, Histoire, 4:311. 95 Axim: on the coast of present-​day Ghana. Prévost (Histoire, 4:122) summarizes the Dutch merchant Willem Bosman’s Nauwkeurige beschryving van de Guinese Goud-​, Tand-​en Slave-​kust (Utrecht, Anthony Scouten, 1704).

124  Louise Dupin’s Work on Women Among the Canadians, marriage is not a civil contract. The husband and the wife stay together only for the time that is mutually agreed upon by them and that sympathy subsists. As soon as it ceases, they separate without any other formality. One reported convention seems extraordinary. It is that during the first two years, all the goods of the husband belong to his mother-​ in-​law, who can dispose of them as her own.96 We are not well-​informed about the morals of the Negroes in their own countries since we only trade with them on the coasts where they sell each other to nations who transport them to America. Black princes sell or have others sell their prisoners of war, sometimes even their subjects. Mothers and fathers sell their children, and children sometimes sell their parents. It appears that the ideas of these people do not revolve around subordination in marriage since, despite the religious teachings given to them in Christian colonies, a husband leaves his wife when he is bored of her to take another, and a wife takes the same liberty at whim. Since all that could be done to reduce this practice among these people proved almost useless, the decision was made to let them do as they wished on any number of points. The fact of a different [skin] color is alleged as a reason why white people should not follow this example. These black slaves, male and female, do the same work and are sold for the same price {verify this}.97 We read in [the works of] several travelers that Cafre98 women are devoted to the hunt of all kinds of animals just as men are. It is quite natural that this would be the case in countries where hunting is the principal occupation. But since this exercise demands strength and skill that men like to appropriate for themselves, only the odd traveler bothers to notice or say that the women hunt like the men. In relations from Brazil and in several others, it is reported that men and women are great swimmers.99 That is another exercise that demands a type 96 Bernard, Cérémonies [ . . . ] idolâtres, 1.1: 90, citing Claude-​Charles le Roy, Bacqueville de la Potherie, Histoire de l’Amérique septentrionale (1722). 97 In fact, women were worth half as much as men. Prévost paraphrases Captain William Snelgrave’s 1727 account of the capture of eight hundred members of the Tusso nation by the soldiers of the King of Dahomey (who controled the slave-​trading port of Ouidah). Captives who were not sacrificed were to be sold into slavery. The king paid each soldier the equivalent of twenty shillings for every man, ten for every woman and child, a difference certainly reflective of the price paid by Europeans. Snelgrave left Guinea for the Caribbean with six hundred people in chains. Histoire générale des voyages 3:521 (1747). 98 A people in what is now South Africa. We conserve the French, as the English/​Afrikaans equivalent became a racial slur in the Apartheid era. 99 Durret, Voyage de Marseille à Lima, et dans les autres lieux des Indes Occidentales (Paris: J.-​B. Coignard, 1720), 108.

Part II: History and Religion  125 of strength and courage which it has always pleased men to believe women incapable of. It is reported that in several districts in India, if a man falls ill, his best friends kill him and eat him. If it’s a woman, the other women, her best friends, do the same thing to her {Herodotus}.100 We do not know whether it’s because this disgusting cruelty implies courage in the eaten and the eaters that this nasty fact is only mentioned about the men, yet it is another thing that men and women both do. In several provinces of Peru, the men spin and card in the house while the women plow the fields {find in Tournefort}.101 This spinning—​so useful, so necessary, which has nevertheless been disparaged in all kinds of ways as the apanage of women—​this spinning is practiced by men. A traveler to the West Indies who published his relation in 1720 reports that on an island of Chile there is a large province governed by women with a queen at their head who pays a certain tribute to a king of Chile every year.102 This traveler reports that these women do not suffer men among them, except at certain times to have children, and that they send the sons back to their fathers, and keep the daughters to raise amongst themselves. This resembles the stories told of the Amazons, and we find this last part of his account very questionable because of the difficulties involved. We do accept the first part [of his story] due to its simplicity, all the more so because several authors with similar stories speak more plainly of the gynecocracies they have encountered. It has been found in accounts of various countries that in the case of divorce or separation of married people, the children are divided between the parents, the husband taking the boys, and the wife taking the girls. Or without a distinction of sex, by even or odd numbers, and the wife takes the first child, which gives her one more child [than her husband] if there is not an even number of children.103 In other countries, husbands do not keep any of the children, doubting that they are their own. Since the wife cannot have the same doubt, laws in these countries assign them to her. In Madagascar, if

100 Herodotus, Histories, 3.99. Herodotus calls these people the Padaei. 101 Tournefort’s Relation does not seem relevant here. Perhaps Dupin has in mind Charles de Rochefort’s Histoire naturelle et morale des isles Antilles de l’Amérique (Rotterdam: Arnould Leers, 1658): “Men in the province of Quito in Peru were not ashamed to subject themselves to housework, while their wives went out and about” (438). 102 Durret, Voyage de Marseille à Lima, 156. On the Amazons, see the introduction to Part II. 103 Bernard, Cérémonies [ . . . ] idolâtres, 1.1:91, based on Lahontan, Nouveaux Voyages dans l’Amérique septentrionale (1703), in reference to “Canadians.”

126  Louise Dupin’s Work on Women a woman gives birth despite being separated from her husband, that child is supposed to belong to the husband, even though he is from another father.104

Observation on the custom of lending wives to strangers We learn from different accounts from around the world that while husbands’ jealousy abounds in some countries, in others this sentiment is of so little concern to husbands that they offer their wives to visitors and strangers alike.105 We do not know why these customs are attributed to the husbands’ domination, when they might just as easily result from the freedom that wives reserve for themselves, which would perhaps be more plausible. This would in truth be a mighty strange way of receiving guests, but as nothing strange is impossible, it is as plausible as anything else. Its only flaw would be that it squares poorly with the air of masculine despotism that men are determined to seek and find everywhere. It has been reported that this custom of honoring guests with [the use of] women has subsisted in several so-​called “civilized” countries, but this must only concern simple concubines, not a wife whom one has duly married, who by her state should enter into and share in the dignity and the authority of the house. But this distinction hardly seems worth making, because it flatters masculine fancy to imply that women have always and everywhere been considered a sort of possession which men could dispose of any way they wished. Through further research we could perhaps find similar examples of women who have several husbands to offer. We have become accustomed to speaking about men’s jealousy, and even about their non-​jealousy, in a dignified manner. As for women, their jealousy is treated like a trifling thing and as the opposite of dignified—​as a criminal and contemptible [form of] self-​indulgence. Scripture, however, offers us examples that are not portrayed thus. The virtuous Sara offered Hagar to her husband herself. Rachel, having asked Leah for the mandrake root that her son had given her, offered in exchange that Jacob sleep with her.106 104 Bernard, Cérémonies [ . . . ] idolâtres, 2.3: 78. 105 John Ovington, A Voyage to Suratt (London: Jacob Tonson, 1696), 212–​213. Bernard chronicles such hospitality practices among the Sámi, “Virginians,” etc. (Cérémonies [ . . . ] idolâtres, 2.2:383 and 1.1:120). 106 Sara, who is barren, offers her maid Hagar to her husband Abraham, so that Hagar may become pregnant and act as a surrogate for Sara (Genesis 16:1–​6). Rachel, who is barren, asks Leah for some of the mandrake root (a fertility aid) that her son Reuben has gathered. She offers Leah a night

Part II: History and Religion  127 She apparently believed that what she offered was at her disposal, or at least that her consent was necessary. We will not extrapolate from there to say that wives did as they wished with their husbands and offered them to each other, even if in the thesis contrary to the one we defend there are a thousand examples of such things.

Observations on the custom of burning the living on the tombs of the dead There is still, in some parts of Asia and the Americas, a practice that should make reason tremble and nature too, and that is that wives burn themselves alive when they lose their husbands. Several modern authors, in speaking of this atrocious custom, have said that it was established on the suspicion that the husbands were poisoned by their wives,107 but is there the slightest evidence for this? How could one possibly seek to envelop thousands of innocent women in the punishment of a few guilty ones? Why would these same innocent women have consented to submit to a punishment so unjust and dishonorable? This cruel custom resembles a fanaticism of love and glory, rather than a punishment for hatred and its crimes. Moreover, this conjecture is confirmed by the rest of the ceremony; the servants of the deceased burn themselves with him and his mistresses, and they also burn a part of his riches, and some of his pets.108 What’s more, these strange funerary customs were practiced by the Tartars for women, as well as for men.109 Just recently in China, when the mother of the Emperor Kangxi died, the women who served her wanted to burn themselves with her. The Emperor prevented them from doing so, and completely abolished this barbarous custom from his state.110

with their shared husband, Jacob, in exchange. Leah agrees and is blessed with another son (Genesis 30:14–​18). 107 Notably Ovington, A Voyage to Suratt, 343. 108 Ovington alludes to Hircanus, the dog that leapt into the fire to accompany the body of his master Lysimachus (a general of Alexander the Great); he does not mention the pets of Bannians (A Voyage to Surratt, 345–​346). 109 “Tartars,” the catch-​all European name for the inhabitants of central Asia (“Tartary”). Bernard associates the burial of servants with the Tartars, Mexicans, and Peruvians in Cérémonies [ . . . ] idolâtres, 1.1: 10, 71. 110 Kangxi, emperor of the Qing dynasty (1661–​1722), reigned as Louis XIV’s contemporary. Prévost, Histoire générale, 6:391, based on Du Halde, Description géographique [ . . . ] de la Chine.

128  Louise Dupin’s Work on Women Ovington {an English author} reports that in the Indies husbands burn themselves when their wives die, in the hopes of being happy in their company.111 Why haven’t examples regarding men received as much attention in this country as those regarding women? Some Cafres cut off their pinky finger in the burial ceremony of their relatives to throw it in the tomb.112 If, by some chance, this ceremony were particular to women, it would probably be alleged that it is because wives gouge out the eyes of their husbands. What is there in common between all this and the just punishment merited by several detestable women? Many people are well aware that the monstrous fanaticism of burning oneself alive with the dead was practiced in several countries by men who were not suspected of having contributed to the death of those with whom they burned themselves. This custom was prevalent in more than one country. It was most likely the continuation of the human sacrifices that we can reproach more than one nation for. But neither its origin nor its principles are examined, and no objections are made to this alleged new origin, however easy it would be to make them, and—​because it maligns women—​such an unreasonable horror containing so little plausibility spreads and multiplies without anyone stopping it. Almost all of the people that we have just spoken about, with the exception of the Mahometans, are idolatrous; they have male and female divinities, and priests of both sexes. The least unreasonable in their cult are fire worshippers. Among the islanders of the Philippines, it is the women who perform the functions of the priesthood. On the island of Formosa, women are the leaders of the religious cult.113 It should be noted that the cult of the sacred fire was not known in Europe alone, but has been conserved and worshiped by almost every nation of the old and new world {Banier}.114 Several peoples of Asia conserved the sacred

111 Ovington, A Voyage to Surratt, 343. Ovington attributes Sati (the ritual self-​immolation of widows on husbands’ funeral pyres) to the Bannians (merchant class) of Suratt, noting that Muslims prohibited the practice and that it was by then very rare. 112 Dapper claims that among the Cafres, close family members “have to throw a finger in the grave” of the dead, but Bernard denies this in Cérémonies [ . . . ] idolâtres, 2.3:56. 113 Bernard, Cérémonies [ . . . ] idolâtres, 2.2: 269. Formosa is known as Taiwan today. 114 Antoine Banier Histoire générale des cérémonies, mœurs, & coutumes religieuses de tous les peuples du monde (Paris: Rollin, 1741), 7.1: 5, 9–​10; Bernard, Cérémonies [ . . . ] de tous les peuples du monde, 7.2: 236–​237, 240–​241; based on François Lafitau, Mœurs des sauvages américains comparées aux mœurs des premiers temps, 2 vols. (Paris: Claude Marin Saugrain and Charles Etienne Hochereau, 1724), 1:166–​170. Unlike these sources, Dupin does not emphasize virginity as the defining characteristic of these women.

Part II: History and Religion  129 fire in temples that were, for the most part, built in the shape of a rotunda, like those of the Vestals. It was also found in the Americas. We know the veneration it was given during the reign of the Incas and that the girls chosen to be the sun’s servants followed approximately the same laws as the Roman Vestals.115 The sacred fire was also respected in Mexico and entrusted to Vestals who lived a very disciplined life {look for some fire in Africa}. Even among the Savages who didn’t have temples, their council rooms served as shelter for the sacred fire, particularly among the Iroquois and Huron. Among all these Nations, the protection of this fire had always been entrusted to girls, which is very far from the modern idea of considering their sex as being incapable of fulfilling any respectable role in society.

Conclusion to the last six chapters When we research different accounts from all over the world—​setting aside the style of the travelers—​we may find as many governments and countries where women retain the liberty of their state as those where they have lost it, and more countries where women share in the authority of civil and religious functions than those where they are deprived of them. We have seen more women sharing in work with men, than we have found work deemed particular to women. Accounts of the last century mention several more countries where women govern their nations entirely, such that the more we learn about what happens in other parts of the world, the more we will want to know what has happened in our country from the outset, and the more we will be persuaded that thorough historical study of all countries confirms the claims we have made.

115 On the Incas, Graffigny or Garcilaso de la Vega. The Vestals of ancient Rome tended the sacred fire at the Temple of Vesta, goddess of the hearth. Their thirty-​year terms involved a strict vow of chastity. In “On Roman Vestals,” Dupin criticizes prurient historians for focusing on wayward Vestals: “Those who today take it upon themselves to criticize the great freedom enjoyed by the Vestals and who associate this criticism with the reprehensible conduct of a few of them forget that this order lasted eleven hundred years, inspiring consistent esteem and consideration; that it was very difficult to destroy; and that it was grieved in Rome more than any other religious monument of paganism.”

130  Louise Dupin’s Work on Women

Article 21. On the History of France Whether116 we consider the Franks in [the context of] the country they came from, or whether we consider them as the conquerors of the Gauls,117 we find equally in their origin evidence confirming what we have said about the equality of the rights of women in these two Nations. In Gaul, women succeeded to the throne and made the princes they married into kings. The fact that Gaulish women participated in the peace treaty and alliance that the Gauls made with Hannibal is proof that they took part in the most important political matters. One of its articles stipulated that if the Carthaginians should bring any complaints against the Gauls, Gaulish women would judge the case.118 A Gaulish bas-​relief carving found in Narbonne represents a Gaulish woman in the middle of an assembly of men. She occupies the most important spot in the assembly and appears to speak publicly as those in attendance listen to her in rapt attention.119 What has come down to us in the annals of the neighboring Belgic peoples, who were also part of Gaul, further confirms our opinion. Among the Belgic Gauls, we do not just see powerful queens leading their own armies; we moreover see that these armies were composed of warrior women whose courage and valor inspired fear.120 There is no group among whom women were in greater consideration than among the Germanic peoples. They even believed there to be something divine in women themselves {Tacitus}.121 Since the only thing we know about the earliest French is that they originated either from the Gauls or from the Germanic peoples, we are quite surprised to see them showing up in history books with a sword in one hand and in the other, Salic law commanding the exclusion of women from the throne.122 Providence seems to have accorded 116 Manuscript at the Harry Ransom Center (MS-​03636 IB. Art. 21). 117 Echoes of François Eudes de Mézeray: “The French nation lived long ago beyond the Rhine [River], whether it originated in that country, or whether it came from further afield.” Histoire de France depuis Faramond jusqu’au règne de Louis le Juste, notably the 2nd edition, to which he added Histoire de France avant Clovis, 1:3. 118 Plutarch, On the Bravery of Women, ­chapter 6, in Moralia, trans. Frank Cole Babbitt (Harvard University Press, 1931), 3:495. 119 Dupin no doubt refers to an engraving of this bas-​relief in plate 25 of the third Supplément volume of Bernard de Montfaucon’s L’Antiquité expliquée, et représentée en figures (Paris: F. Delaulne, 1719–​1724). 120 Dupin may have in mind the women who participated in the Revolt of the Batavi in 69–​70 ce, as narrated by Cornelius Tacitus (Histories 4.17) via Mézeray (Histoire 1:68). Batavia was north of Belgica in what is now the Netherlands. 121 Cornelius Tacitus (Germania, 8) via Mézeray (Histoire, 1:21). 122 The English historian Thomas Rymer denies the antiquity of Salic law in his compilation of treaties and alliances made by the English crowns with other states. Paul de Rapin’s French synopsis

Part II: History and Religion  131 a singular favor to almost all the princes of this nation in providing sons to succeed them, and such a long succession of males was mistaken to mean that Salic law was in force throughout this time. Salic law has been cited so enthusiastically to emphasize the proscription of women from the throne that most people believe that it contains nothing more than that and that it was in effect from the very outset of the monarchy. On the contrary, what we refer to today as Salic law or the law of the Salians—​ that small group of people who joined the Franks and more likely adopted the laws of their hosts than imposed their own—​is composed of many articles, only one of which states that Salic land belongs to males. That article, furthermore, merits serious discussion, because there is no consensus about the meaning of “Salic land.” Several authors use the term to designate only a house and its surrounding wall.123 An author {Monsieur de Montesquieu} who has just published a work on laws addresses Salic law more reasonably than anyone to date, both restricting it and explaining it. But we cannot reconcile what he says regarding the formulas that privileged the daughter over the grandson with his claim that masculine succession to the crown of France is founded on Salic law.124 {If Salic law had been the undisputed law of the land, then the usurpers who took over the provinces of Brittany, Anjou, Poitou, Guyenne, Burgundy, Champagne, the Dauphiné, Provence, Auvergne, and Flanders were surprisingly careless in not invoking it, as they allowed what they had acquired through so much effort and trouble to revert to the crown of France through the marriage of their daughters. Fiefdoms that were themselves Salic should have remained Salic regardless of who came into possession of them, yet we see on the contrary women inheriting these lands, commanding these peoples, and being cherished by them as much as the princes who

of Rymer’s compilation, published in volume 10 of the Hague edition, Fœdera, conventiones, literae, et cujuscunque generis acta publica inter reges Anglia (The Hague: Jean Neaulmes, 1745), is Dupin’s source for dating Salic law. Rymer’s thesis: “From Pharamond to the death of Louis the Quarrelsome, that is, for around nine hundred years, it was never put into practice” (Fœdera, 10:68–​69). 123 Both Mézeray (Histoire, 197) and Montesquieu (Spirit of the Laws, 298) reproduce the law, “On Alloidal Lands.” Whether a civil law concerning inheritance implied a political law of succession was the crux of the debate. 124 In other words, in citing the Salic formulary establishing priority of daughters over grandsons in inheritance, Montesquieu undermined his ensuing claim that “the personal inheritance by males of the crown of France [comes] from Salic law” (Spirit of the Laws, 301).

132  Louise Dupin’s Work on Women possessed them. We have moreover seen Navarre several times in women’s possession}.125 The origin of the popular idea of Salic law is much more modern than people want to believe. It was perhaps discussed for the first time after the death of Charles [IV] the Fair in the context of the great dispute between Philippe [VI] de Valois and Edward III, Prince of England, son of Isabelle of France (Charles’s sister): for in the dispute that took place twelve years prior opposing Jeanne, the minor daughter of Louis [X]‌the Quarrelsome and her uncle Philippe (Louis’s brother), there had been little mention of Salic law. Supporters negotiated on her behalf as if they had never heard of Salic law, and she received the queenship of Navarre, though she was denied the queenship of France.126 Her uncle Philippe V reigned instead of her, and left only daughters at his death. He was succeeded by his brother, Charles the Fair, and historians tell us that Charles did to Philippe what Philippe had done to their brother Louis: a reflection that is hardly Salic.127 But the point of perfection that we have reached on this matter today was [after all] only achieved by degrees. Upon the death of her brother Charles the Fair, Salic law in no way discouraged Isabelle of France, Queen of England, from claiming the French throne for her son Edward III, Charles’s nephew. France decided instead in favor of Philippe [VI] de Valois, the king’s first cousin, and although historians claim that this was because of Salic law, it would have been simpler and more truthful to say that the decision was the result of common sense. One would have to have been lacking in common sense to privilege a prince born and raised in another country, and to thereby expose the French nation to all the risks of a new and foreign domination.128 National interest was justification enough and provided a nobler, more solid rationale than this

125 In other words, these regions could have maintained independence from the French crown if they had barred women from inheritance. 126 Jeanne was four years old when her father, Louis X, died in 1316. Her uncle, Philippe V, claimed the throne of France and of Navarre. The fact that some men would have benefited from Salic law (had it existed) but supported Jeanne “proves that it was not yet well established, since the first princes of the blood and the first peers of the kingdom saw no difficulty in supporting a right that was directly opposed to it” (Rymer, Fœdera 10:69). 127 In other words, each man acceded to the throne by murdering his brother. 128 Isabelle, the sister of the last three Capetian kings, including Charles the Fair (died 1328), claimed that royalty could be transmitted through women, even if women could not rule as queens. This contest for rulership, based on competing interpretations of Salic law, sparked the Hundred Years War between France and England. Dupin follows Rymer in citing Edward’s status as a foreigner as the reason for excluding him (Fœdera 10:69).

Part II: History and Religion  133 so-​called law and attendant claims about women’s weakness and incapacity, which so many examples disprove. The same weapons were nevertheless brought out during France’s last succession crisis, which opposed Henri IV—​a relation to the tenth or eleventh degree to Henri III of France—​not only to the latter’s niece Isabella the Spanish Infanta, but also to his sister married to the Duke of Lorraine.129 The machinations that surrounded this affair and the wars it occasioned call to mind the [Catholic] League, whose true objective was the succession of the French crown that Spain and the Guise family wished to appropriate for themselves, seeing Henri III childless. The contestations that arose at that time surrounding Salic law, and the very injurious attacks against women with which it was defended, did not prevent the Spanish Infanta from believing that she would really become Queen of France—​and she would indeed have become so had the Guise clan been able to agree on who would be her husband. In the first and second dynasties of French kings, probably no one could have imagined that Salic law would one day serve as a pretext to deny women the crown.130 For we will not follow modern authors in accepting Chlothar’s usurpation of succession from his sister-​in-​law and nieces as proof of the existence of Salic law at that time. He put all three of them in prison and held them there until his possession of the kingdom was entirely assured. Had it been common practice in such cases for uncles of kings to inherit the throne, he would have acceded to it right away without having to imprison these princesses.131 When a law—​good or bad—​is accepted and established, there is no difficulty in applying it. Throughout the first and second dynasties, queens ordinarily shared kings’ authority with them, having a seat and a voice in all counsels and councils.132

129 Religious war exacerbated the succession crisis at the end of the Valois dynasty in 1589. Although Henri III (of France) had recognized his Protestant cousin Henri III (of Navarre) as his heir, the latter only became Henri IV of France in 1594 after besieging Paris and abjuring Protestantism. Henri de Navarre’s supporters argued that female alternatives would have put France in the hands of ultra-​Catholic Spain. 130 As Rymer argues (Fœdera 10:68–​69). 131 The kingdom of the Franks was divided between Clovis’s four sons. When Childebert died (558), Chlothar had his daughters imprisoned. Mézeray heralds this as “the first example of Salic law in favor of males” in Abrégé chronologique ou Extrait de l’histoire de France (Paris: Thomas Joly, 1668), 1:41. Rymer says the imprisonment proves the lack of any such law (Fœdera 10:69). 132 conseils (deliberative assemblies changed with advising the king) and conciles (meetings of Church delegates). Some leadership was expected from queens consort, but their authority was contingent on the good favor of the king. Jean du Four, “Le rôle des reines de France aux IXe et Xe siècles,” Comptes rendus des séances de l’Académie des inscriptions et belles lettres 142–​143 (1998): 913–​932.

134  Louise Dupin’s Work on Women The queen governed the kingdom in the king’s absence when she did not accompany him, and when he died, she retained great authority throughout the reigns of their children, even beyond their minority, which until the reign of Charles V lasted to the age of twenty-​five.133 Princesses, like princes, carried with them very considerable apanages.134 As is well known, princes became kings of their inherited land. Princesses too carried the name of queens. The state and the nation have often found themselves in a very bad way as a result of these various divisions, but that is not the question at hand. Among the first and second dynasties, we find princesses of great merit—​ courageous, battle-​ ready, and politick {Clotilda, Radegund, Brunhilda, Fredegund, Balthild, Bertha, Ogin, and Gerberga}.135 These dynasties included some usurpers who found in their wives {Bertha or Emine} support strong enough to pave their way to the throne. Towards the end of the Merovingian dynasty, when the Mayors [of the Palace] took over sovereign power, their wives shared in this usurpation {Plectrude and Itta or Iduberga}136—​more than paltry proof of the consideration given to women generally and of how accustomed people were to seeing them invested with authority and distinctions of all kinds. There is strong evidence that the coinage of the Franks, like that of the Romans, carried the impression of queens as well as kings. We do not know when or why this practice ceased. Coins imprinted with Brunhilda’s likeness have been found. With additional research, perhaps others will be found. Since no one has accused the princesses of these dynasties of abusing power, we can safely conclude that they did not. The diligence historians have shown 133 Charles the Wise (1364–​1380). Dupin refers to the age of majority for heirs of fiefs, at that time higher than that for commoners. See Louis Amiable, “Essai historique et critique sur l’âge de la majorité,” Revue historique de droit français et étranger 7 (1861): 205–​271. 134 apanage: the portion of an estate devolving to a child other than the first-​born son. It reverted to the crown if this heir lacked male descendants. 135 Mézeray, Histoire, vol. 1. Clotilda, a Burgundian princess, married Clovis in 493 and converted him to Christianity. Radegund, Princess of Thuringia, escaped her captor and husband, Chlothar I (son of Clovis), by fleeing to a convent. An ordained deaconess, she founded one of France’s first monasteries for women. Balthild, an Anglo-​Saxon slave girl, married Chlothar II, King of Neustria and Burgundy, around 648. As Regent, Balthild selected bishops, reformed monasteries, founded abbeys, and abolished the trade of Christian slaves. Gerberga of Saxony, wife of Louis IV of France (939), accompanied him on military campaigns and conducted diplomatic missions. 136 Mayors of the Palace wielded authority on behalf of Merovingian kings, whose function was increasingly ceremonial. Itta (Iduberga): wife of Pepin (I) of Landen, Mayor of the Palace of Neustria (623–​629). Plectrude: wife of Pepin (II) of Herstal, Mayor of the Palace and duke of the Franks; she acted as Regent of Neustria during her grandson’s minority (714–​718). Bertha (or Bertrada) of Laon: wife of Pepin (III) the Short, who deposed Childeric III (751), the last Merovingian king. They founded the Carolingian dynasty as the parents of Charlemagne. See Mézeray, Histoire 1:382–​383.

Part II: History and Religion  135 in attacking a few particular examples should leave no doubt as to the merit of those who have not been attacked. Fredegund and Brunhilda, who are depicted as monsters, were not really that bad, at least not in the eyes of those familiar with historical context.137 The time in which these princesses lived was characterized by violence. The only way to keep one’s seat on the throne was to exact cruelty. Almost all of the princes of this time committed acts of cruelty, and it is unjust to single out these two princesses for special blame. The violent acts they committed were the fault of their century as much as their own. They did not do all they were accused of, and to give truth its due, it must be said that both of these princesses boasted very great qualities. They received approbation and praise from the greatest lights of their century. They were each other’s sisters-​in-​law and enemies. The competing interests of their children led to war as well as to monstrous satires on both sides. These pieces—​not the actual events that inspired them—​are the source of the indecent allegations still rehearsed against these queens. One queen of the second dynasty preserved a king for the nation by fleeing to England with her son and after a few years, returning herself—​weapons in hand—​to reinstate him on the throne.138 The third dynasty of our kings which survives in glory to this day since its beginnings, reveals the same pattern of great queens alongside great kings.139 The treatise by which Hugh Capet consolidated his hold on the throne—​one that was very difficult to negotiate—​was the work of two princesses, the Empress Theophanu and Adelaide, wife of Hugh Capet.140 137 The forty-​ year feud between Brunhilda, Queen consort of Sigibert I of Austrasia and Fredegund, second wife of Sigibert’s brother Chilperic I of Neustria was the locus classicus of consort cruelty. Chroniclers like Grégoire de Tours emphasized the cruelty of queens to mask conflicts between kings and their heirs and to exculpate kings for the murders that routinely determined Merovingian succession. Sylvie Joye, “Marâtres mérovingiennes,” in Il mondo alla rovescia: il potere delle donne visto dagli uomini, ed. Silvia Luraghi (FrancoAngeli Edizioni, 2009), 39–​52. 138 Ogin: daughter of Edward I of England, third wife of Charles the Simple, King of West Francia, and mother of Louis IV d’Outremer (“from across the sea”). She fled with Louis to England when Charles died captive in 929. 139 The senior line of the Capetian dynasty lasted from 987 (the election of Hugh Capet) to 1328 (the death of Charles IV), when the minor Valois branch took over, until 1589. The Bourbon line of the Capetian dynasty began in 1594 with Henri IV. Despite the execution of Louis XVI in 1793, it was revived during the Restoration (1814–​1848). 140 Peace negotiations between Louis V (the last Carolingian), and the Ottonian dynasty preceding Hugh Capet’s election. Supported by his mother (Emma of Italy), Louis met in 987 with the Holy Roman Empress Theophanu, widow of Otto II and mother of the young Otto III. As far as we know, Hugh Capet’s wife, Adelaide of Aquitaine, played no role in these events (Mézeray, Histoire 2:15–​16). Dupin may be confusing her with Empress Adelaide, wife of Lothair II of Italy and then of Otto I, who as the grandmother of Louis V and Otto III, presumably exerted influence on both peacemaking parties. Alternatively, Dupin may have in mind Hugh Capet’s sister, Beatrice of France, who represented Hugh’s interests at this meeting according to Mézeray (Histoire, 1:907).

136  Louise Dupin’s Work on Women For a long time thereafter, we see queens in possession of a share of authority, and some who ruled alone with courage, prudence, and all the virtues indispensable to good governance. The great and immense foundations of churches, college chapters, and monasteries of both sexes made by princesses shows us the extent of their authority and the means at their disposal. We see them routinely following their husbands to war and making themselves useful during their travels. Sometimes, we see a princess at the head of an army gaining ground on her own while her husband leads another army to victory elsewhere {Jeanne de Navarre herself took the Duc de Bar prisoner}.141 Since the order of successions became more consistent under the third race, the kingdom was no longer dismembered through divided inheritance. The princesses of France no longer carried property through apanage when they married; rather, princes sought to marry the heirs and owners of countries that owed them homage. One of these marriages was made in vain because it was followed by an unjust repudiation as a result of which Guyenne had to be restituted.142 France owes its possession of Brittany to another marriage involving a remarkable and praiseworthy princess who married the successor of her first husband to better ensure the union of Brittany to France.143 This example and several others demonstrate that women inherited the greatest fiefdoms and sovereignties without resistance in France all the way up to the most recent times.

141 Sole daughter and heir of King Henri I of Navarre and Blanche d’Artois, Jeanne married Philippe IV of France in 1284 at the age of thirteen, bringing to the French crown her rights to Navarre, Champagne, and Brie. Yet “the king deferred so much to this princess, that he left the management of [Navarre and Champagne] entirely to her, such that we can say [ . . . ] that she carried the scepter as well as the crown.” Mézeray emphasizes her founding of colleges and support of religious confraternities, attributes the top spot on the king’s counsel to her, and celebrates her Amazon-​style capture of the Henri, Comte de Bar (Histoire 2:350). 142 The divorce of Eleanor of Aquitaine (Guyenne) and Louis VII of France was catastrophic for France. Guyenne had to be restituted to her, and then fell under English rule through her second marriage to Henry Plantagenet (1152), crowned Henry II of England in 1154. 143 Anne de Bretagne succeeded her father, Duc François I de Bretagne, in 1488. Seeking an alliance with Austria, she first married Maximilian of Austria by proxy (1490), but Charles VIII of France, in pursuit of rights to Brittany, forced her to break from Maximilian to marry him instead (1491). Anne’s forced marriage to Charles and then chosen marriage to Louis XII (1499) made each king of France duke consort of Brittany. In neither of these marriages was the duchy of Brittany meant to become a permanent part of the kingdom of France. It was only because a clause of the marriage contract was disregarded that the future François I, in marrying Anne’s eldest daughter Claude, claimed Brittany as a heritable asset of the French crown, beginning with their first-​born son. Dupin’s monarchical leanings obscure Anne de Bretagne’s fierce defense of Brittany’s independence. She records the story of Anne de Bretagne in “On Brittany,” a long draft in very poor condition in her hand at HRC (in Art. 17).

Part II: History and Religion  137 Princesses who brought considerable inheritances to kings through marriage continue to enjoy rights over them; moreover even when they did not bring such dowries, they entered so well into the sharing of the rights of their husbands that several acts of the fourteenth century dating from Philippe de Valois’s reign begin this way: “On the will and wish of the Queen our dear wife.”144 Those who are learned in historical details know well that this was hardly an exceptional favor. We have no idea why Mézeray says that women became established at the court of France during the reign of François I.145 There have always been women in every court, especially in France, where in former times they had more rights and enjoyed greater credit than ever since. Nor do we understand the explanation that Mézeray gives for the coronation146 of queens. After having straightforwardly described these ceremonies, which were the same for queens and kings, he takes it upon himself to explain why a particular princess was not crowned at [the cathedral of] Reims. For queens, he says, this ceremony was for honor alone and not to invest them with the power of succession. Yet some twenty queens were crowned at Reims well before the princess he singles out, and as many were crowned in the same place after.147 Mézeray doesn’t hesitate to say that Catherine de Médicis was the first queen since Blanche de Castille to govern the kingdom,148 but we know from his very history that that is not true, since all queens have always been regents at the death of kings when their children were too young to rule and even when princes were of age, we have seen sisters, aunts, and mothers hold the regency in this time period {Madame de Beaujeu; Madame de Savoie}.149 Such a careless mistake on any other subject would be called out: but apparently nothing

144 Mézeray, Histoire, 2:425. 145 Dupin attributes this claim to Fénelon in Art. 39. We have not found it in Mézeray. 146 sacre. A coronation in the French tradition was a religious ceremony, signaling the joining of the spiritual and the temporal in the person of the king. It involved anointment by sacred oil as well as coronation. We use “coronation” to encompass both crowning and anointing. Beginning in the twelfth century, this ceremony usually took place at the cathedral of Reims, the location of the Holy Ampulla (Sainte Ampoule) which held the oil used in the anointing. 147 Isabelle d’Hainaut married Philippe II (of France) in 1180; they were crowned at Saint-​Denis (a church in Paris). Mézeray Histoire 2:205. The first queen to be crowned and anointed alongside a king was Bertrada in 751 (at Soissons). Several queens were crowned alongside kings at Reims in the fourteenth century, the last one in 1364. 148 Mézeray, Histoire 2:1152. Blanche de Castille: wife of Louis VIII, mother of Louis IX, and Regent of France (1226–​1235). Catherine de Médicis: wife of Henri II, mother of François II, Charles IX, and Henri III), officially Regent of France (1560–​1563), but influential until her death (1579). 149 Madame de Beaujeu: Anne de France, sister of Charles VIII and de facto Regent of France during his minority (1483–​1491) as well as of the Duchy of Burgundy (1503–​1521). Madame de Savoie: Christine de France, Duchesse de Savoie, Regent of the Duchy of Savoy (1637–​1648).

138  Louise Dupin’s Work on Women that tends towards the exclusion of women—​even from the things they have done—​registers as inexactitude. The horrible things said about Catherine de Médicis are taken from satires of the day. We know how much trust we can give to these kinds of writings, and how unjust it is when they are incorporated wholesale into history. Wise historians therefore use them only sparingly, but the wisest, in general, have not refrained from excessively using those about women. The turbulent times during which Catherine lived and the partisan politics of the day produced excessively monstrous writings on both sides, which turned Catherine into an all-​too detestable character. This princess surely had great faults, but she also had great qualities, and an experienced man in her position and in the same circumstances may not have behaved any differently. We exclude from this the horrors of the Saint Bartholomew’s Day massacre, which happened under her reign.150 But Catherine isn’t solely to blame for it, since the Spanish and Roman courts were complicit, and didn’t hesitate to make a public celebration of their joy. Marie de Médicis managed her difficult regency as well as circumstances allowed. The horrible assassination of her husband Henri [IV] occurred during the festivities surrounding her coronation. It is very strange that historians have linked these distinct events for the sole reason that they happened a few days apart. Since there may not have been since the establishment of the monarchy a queen for whom coronation was so long deferred as for Marie, the ceremony must have been quite simple—​so simple that it is not reasonable to imagine that it could have inspired something as extraordinary and as dreadful as the murder of a king.151 Richelieu, Bishop of Luçon, elevated to honor by the Queen, became her persecutor, so much so that honorable people are still hurt by the story of what this princess suffered at the hands of her son and his minister; nor do they have any illusions regarding Richelieu’s motives. Since Louis XIII had no children and was in poor health, the alliance of the queen with her other son and the plans she made for his marriage conformed to the interest of the state.152 The marriage and posterity of the king’s brother would not imperil 150 The Saint Bartholomew’s Day Massacre (August 24, 1572) resulted in the murder of around 3,000 Protestants who were in Paris to celebrate the marriage of Henri de Navarre to Marguerite de Valois, sister of Henri III. This is as close as Dupin comes in the entire Work on Women to acknowledging the Wars of Religion. 151 Henri IV and Marie de Médicis were married in 1600; she was crowned ten years later on May 12, 1610; Henri IV was assassinated May 14 (Mézeray, Histoire 3:1290). 152 Louis XIII was eight when his father died; Marie was Regent of France (1610 to 1614), then headed the King’s Counsel (1614–​1617). Resenting her influence, in April 1617, Louis XIII had

Part II: History and Religion  139 the right to his scepter or crown, but they could ensure a natural transfer of credit through the presence of a mother and a brother, were he to provide a successor to the throne. Richelieu, less for the sake of his master’s interest than for the conservation of his own authority, plotted all of these events and brought about the woes that accompanied Marie to the end of her life. With the regency of Anne d’Autriche began the glory of the reign of her son, Louis XIV. Enacting the principles and counsel of Cardinal Richelieu, who feared the rights of wives no less than those of mothers (and who apparently maligned women in general so as not to reveal himself as the particular enemy of these princesses),153 her husband Louis XIII sought to distance Anne d’Autriche from matters of state and only granted her the regency on his deathbed when forced to do so and after having placed all of the restrictions he could think of on her power. After the death of Louis XIII, the ministers of the Regency whom he had established to serve as counsel to the Queen relinquished their authority to her and the Parlement [of Paris] made a decree through which the regency was entrusted wholly and without restriction to her authority. Though the authority of princes and of great noblemen had recently been weakened, they still had enough strength to cause the troubles that we know today under the name of “the Barricades” or “the Fronde.”154 The queen conducted herself wisely in the midst of these trials. She had placed her trust in Cardinal Mazarin, even though he had been the student of Cardinal Richelieu, of whose principles she had reason to complain and whom she knew to mistrust based on his treatment of Marie de Médicis. Believing Mazarin capable of serving the state, she chose him despite the things that could have given her pause. She governed nineteen years with

Marie’s favorite assassinated and exiled her to Blois. Armand Jean du Plessis, Cardinal de Richelieu negotiated peace between mother and son. In 1630, Louis XIII chose Richelieu as minister against his mother’s demands to oust him. She was stripped of her status and pensions. For the last ten years of her life, she lived itinerantly at various European courts. Dupin casts Marie’s allegiance with the scheming Gaston d’Orléans, her younger son, as a matter of care for the state. Louis XIII fathered a child in 1638, making this concern moot. 153 Women are lazy, indiscrete, weak, “very subject to their passions,” and “hardly amenable to reason and justice,” which “excludes them from all public administration.” Richelieu, Testament politique d’Armand du Plessis, Cardinal duc de Richelieu (Amsterdam: Henri Desbordes, 1688), 1:13. 154 Louis XIV was four years old when his father died (1643). Louis XIII had established a governing council that would curtail his widow’s power as Regent. Anne d’Autriche had his will abrogated by the Parlement of Paris. The Fronde (1648–​1653), was a revolt of the people (against increasing taxes), of the Parlement (against the devaluing of their offices), and of the highest nobility (against the centralization of power begun by Richelieu). Its most frequent target was Anne’s prime minister, the Italian Cardinal Jules Mazarin, but Louis XIV and his mother were also under threat.

140  Louise Dupin’s Work on Women much glory and wisdom,155 but the spirit of modern historians is to gloss over whatever is praiseworthy in women. It is as if historians make it their duty to discount anything a woman did that was good and to exaggerate her bad deeds, and in their political reflections, it is a maxim of theirs to attribute the woes of the state to the governance of women. Far be it from us to glorify women’s governance, for just as we believe women to be capable of the exact same virtues and good qualities as men, we believe they are prone to identical vices and bad qualities. But we believe that whoever takes the time to learn about historical events from the best sources will be firmly convinced that the division of estates among brothers; the attribution of sovereign authority to children who are too young for it; restrictions on the absolute authority of regents during the minority of kings; the excessive ambition of overly powerful high-​ranking nobles, and the injustice and self-​interest of some ministers have been the true causes of the great woes suffered by the state. They will likewise be convinced that women are very unjustly cited as their cause. Taking modern histories just as they are, and comparing the events in which women are inevitably involved to the manner in which historians recount them, reveals their partiality quite clearly and procures some amusement—​which is most welcome in the reading of history.

Article 8. On the Discipline of the Church On the marriage of priests In the first centuries of Christians, there was no question of [men] forswearing women for the greater perfection of life and salvation.156 The Apostles had been married in the simplicity of good mores; their successors married as well.157 The wife of Saint Peter, head of the Church, courageously suffered martyrdom in Rome some time before her husband. Their marriage left a 155 Anne’s regency lasted nine years until Louis attained the age of majority in 1651 (thirteen at that time for kings); however, she continued to serve on the King’s Counsel until 1661. 156 Manuscript located at Musée Jean-​ Jacques Rousseau (IR 2002.4.1). We amended some nonsequiturs in the draft by reordering folios. Claude Fleury’s Histoire ecclésiastique, continued by Jean-​Claude Fabre and Claude-​Pierre Goujet (Paris: Emery, Saugrain, Pierre Martin, 1722–​1736), is one of Dupin’s main sources here and in Art. 10. We refer to “Fleury” for the first twenty volumes and “Fabre and Goujet” for volumes 21 to 36. 157 In Matthew 8:14, Peter is said to have a mother-​in-​law. In 1 Corinthians 9.5, Paul asserts the right to bring a believing wife along with him in his ministries, as the other apostles do. Eusebius counts Peter as a married apostle in his History of the Church.

Part II: History and Religion  141 very saintly daughter named Petronilla.158 Priests and the holiest persons continued to marry, without imagining that in doing so, they acted against their state. Tertullian was married, and he dedicated several of his books to his wife.159 Saint Gregory of Nazianzus the elder owed his conversion to his wife. Saint Gregory of Nyssa and many other holy fathers were married; their marriages gave much edification to the faithful and great examples to the Church. Theosebia, wife of Gregory of Nyssa, was a very holy person. Gregory of Nazianzus left a son who bore his name and was dubbed “the Theologian.”160

On the participation of women in the ministry and honors of the Church In the first centuries of the Church, women devoted themselves simply to the liturgy just as men did. They followed the ways of instruction as they were then known, and they were equipped to engage in theological and learned conversation with the greatest men of the day. No one at the time was scandalized when women sought to enlighten their faith or communicate their insights. Women contributed to the establishment of the faith not only in the time of Jesus Christ, but after that as well. The acts of [female] saints relate actions and discourses as edifying as those found in the acts of [male] saints and are cited with appreciation and admiration by all of the Fathers of the Church. They received, published, served, and confessed their religion, and if they weren’t allowed to do so, they had to be forcibly prevented from it. The blood of holy women has attested to faith no less than the martyr of men. That should have given them an equal and constant right to ministry and to the honors of the Church, as well as to the rewards of eternal life. There 158 Petronilla, patron saint of French kings, was celebrated as a virgin martyr in Rome by the fourth century. According to legend, she was Peter’s daughter and died of a hunger strike to resist the courtship of a Roman nobleman, because she aspired to devote her life to God. 159 Tertullian, a resident of the African city of Carthage in the Roman empire, converted to Christianity (197 ce). He dedicated treatises to his wife, but praised the unmarried state as the highest and resolutely opposed second marriages, a marginal opinion at that time, even within Christianity. 160 The two Gregories lived in fourth-​century Cappadocia in Turkey. Saint Gregory of Nazianzus, archbishop of Constantinople, lauds his mother Nonna as a model of Christian virtue and narrates her role in the conversion of her husband, Saint Gregory of Nazianzus the elder (Oration 18.7–​12). See Fleury 3:169. Gregory, Bishop of Nyssa, expresses regret for not having chosen the “better way” in On Virginity, indicating that he was married. Information about Theosebia (known as diakonissa—​or “the deaconess”) comes from Gregory of Nazianzus. See Ilaria Ramelli, “Theosebia: A Presbyter of the Catholic Church,” Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion 26, no. 2 (2010): 79–​102.

142  Louise Dupin’s Work on Women is room for surprise that a right so natural and so legitimately acquired was contested and, in the end, lost. That can only have happened through imperceptible changes161 that we can trace as we read the Fathers, councils, various acts of churches, and even some histories.162

On Deaconesses It is generally accepted that there were deaconesses in the Church, but it is said that their job was to guard the doors of temples, to undress women for baptism, to distribute alms, to wash the feet of saints. The praise that Saint Paul gives to the women we have already discussed, the letters that he addresses to them along with men, and the way he recommends still other women to his correspondents seem too important just to be a reward for the simple duties assigned to deaconesses. Above all, his naming of Junia as a fellow apostle seems to us too considerable not to retain our attention, since bishops are merely the successors of the apostles.163 Furthermore, we are aware of the competition for precedence between priests and deacons in the first centuries, and of the claims of the latter, who went so far as to elevate themselves above priests and even bishops in some occasions.164 Thus when people acknowledge that there had been women deaconesses—​ because it cannot be denied—​, they do not realize the extent of what they are acknowledging.

161 progrès insensibles. Compare to Rousseau: “I cover multitudes of centuries in a flash, forced by [ . . . ] the almost imperceptible progress [progrès presque insensibles] of the beginnings.” Discourse on the Origin and Foundations of Inequality among Men, trans. and ed. Helena Rosenblatt (Bedford/​St. Martin’s, 2011), 72. 162 4 folios of Rousseau’s excerpts of Fleury (9:110–​113) are interpolated here, which Dupin evidently meant to summarize. Fleury reviews the subject of sexual abstinence as addressed by various Church councils up to the seventh century. He concludes that “it is not permitted to clerics belonging to sacred orders to marry after their ordination; bishops have to observe perfect continence, whether they had been married before or not; and priests, deacons, and subdeacons who were already married could keep their wives and live with them, except on days when they were to approach the holy mysteries.” 163 In Art. 7, Dupin signals three women mentioned by Paul in Romans 16:6–​12: “One named Mary, who he says worked hard for the faith; Junia whom he associates with Andronicus, saying ‘they were my companions in bondage and are considerable among the Apostles’; Persis who also worked hard in service to the Lord; and several others, putting them at the level of saints and persons useful to the Church.” She concludes, “the essence of all of what Saint Paul said does not support establishing the inequality that we are writing against.” 164 As noted by Charles Loyseau, Traité des ordres et simples dignitez (Paris: Abel L’Angelier, 1610), 31.

Part II: History and Religion  143 We know that baptism was received naked and at every age in the time of the progress of the Christian religion. It is more natural and more decent to suppose that women at that time baptized women than it is to believe that they only undressed them to present them to men for baptism. We read in the History of the Church that the duty of deacons was to administer the eucharist to the faithful and to carry it to the absent {Fleury}.165 It is quite natural to suppose that women deacons or deaconesses were similarly responsible for this honorable task. How can we possibly believe that the Maxedes,166 Macrinas,167 Marcellas,168 Blaesillas, Eustochiums,169 Demetrias,170 Julianas,171 Marcellina the sister of Saint Ambrose,172 and so many other women who were illustrious by their birth and by their qualities and virtues—​how, I ask, can we possibly think that these women had no other duties than to sweep the church and watch at its doors? All the more so because in the first centuries of the Church, the faithful of both sexes possessed in their homes the treasure of the Eucharist and carried it with them in their travels; this great honor is now referred to the sole person of the pope. We cannot consider this Christian custom as a practice of the times of persecution, because we see that it was common even in times when the Church was at peace. Saint Gorgonia was miraculously cured by applying to her body the sacred bread.173 Saint Augustine approvingly recounts a similar miracle effected on a young man whose mother touched him with the Holy Eucharist.174 At 165 Fleury 1:430. 166 We have found no Saint Maxede. Dupin evidently added the ensuing names from memory (they are in her hand); Blaisille is rendered “Blaisine” and Demetria, “Demetriade.” 167 Saint Gregory of Nyssa honored his older sister and first teacher, Saint Macrina the Younger (330–​379), in his Life of Macrina. She founded and led a monastic community for women. Their grandmother, Macrina the Elder, widow of a Christian martyr, had studied with Saint Gregory Thaumaturgus. 168 Jerome wrote a memoir of the life of the Roman noblewoman Marcella (325–​410) after her death. She was a leader of Christian asceticism in Rome. The Greek Orthodox Church reveres a contemporaneous Saint Marcella. 169 Blaesilla, daughter of a Roman senator, died in 384 from excessive asceticism championed by Jerome. After Blaesilla’s death, her mother, Paula, and sister, Eustochium (368–​420), traveled with Jerome to Egypt to witness the life of Christian hermits. 170 Demetria and her sister Bibiana were daughters of a Roman prefect persecuted by Julian (361–​363). 171 There were two Christian martyrs by this name—​the Juliana who along with her brother Paul was tortured by Aurelian in 270 and Juliana of Nicomedia, tortured in 304 under Diocletian. 172 Marcellina (330–​398), the daughter of the Praetorian prefect of Gaul, raised her brother in Rome after the death of their parents. He was named Bishop of Milan in 374; she assisted him in cultivating asceticism among Milanese ladies. 173 Saint Gorgonia: another sister of Gregory of Nazianzus. 174 Dupin refers perhaps to the mother who places her injured child on a shrine in Augustine, City of God against the Pagans, 22.8.

144  Louise Dupin’s Work on Women that time, it was thus not considered as profanation that women kept and touched the most precious and holy promise of Christian salvation. Since all of the faithful of both sexes were in possession of this great honor, why would women deaconesses especially devoted to the service of the Church have been deprived of it? A Council of Paris held in 828 reveals that nuns handled communion vases, administered the body and blood of Jesus Christ, sang the hallelujahs and read the lessons in Mass, gave the benediction, and bestowed the veil with priestly authority.175 The Council’s words are remarkable: “Some of us,” say the bishops, “have learned from trustworthy persons; some of us have seen for ourselves women in certain provinces [etc.]. We command that all bishops tighten the reins so that similar abuses are no longer committed in their dioceses [etc.].” If that had only happened in a few places, why make such a broad prohibition? How can an “abuse” extend all the way to the handling of the most serious and respectable things without being stopped along the way? And if this usage had actually been an “abuse,” how is it possible that several bishops have consented to witnessing it? It is true that the seventeenth article of a capitulary of Charlemagne in 789, which forbade women to approach the altar, could have made these practices less common. But doesn’t that put the term “abuse” in its place? Wouldn’t that of “disobedience to cruel laws” have been more appropriate? Article 77 of the same capitulary, just like the seventeenth, clearly proves the custom of women sharing in the holy offices of the Church, since it is an incontestable maxim that evidence of the destruction of a thing demonstrates its existence.176

175 Dupin refers to Arts. 43 and 45 of the Council of Paris of 829: “It is inadmissible that abbesses and nuns bestow the veil on widows and virgins. In almost all monasteries we find women who have received the veil in this manner . . . In some provinces, women approach the altar, touch the sacred vases, give priests their sacerdotal vestments, and even distribute to the faithful the body and blood of Jesus Christ. That is a horrid abuse and one that must no longer occur.” However, some of the outraged language that Dupin attributes to this council appears to come instead from Art. 75 in Charlemagne’s capitulary of 789: “We have learned that, against the customs of the Holy Church, certain abbesses have been giving the benediction to men through the laying of hands and marking them with the sign of the cross, and that they have been bestowing the veil on virgins with sacerdotal benedictions. Holy Fathers, you must absolutely prohibit these abuses in your parishes.” Cited in Karl Joseph von Hefele, Histoire des conciles d’après les documents, trans. H. Leclercq (Paris: Letouzey and Ané, 1911), 4:66–​67 and 3:1029, 1033. See also Fleury 10:313. 176 Charlemagne, King of the Franks and of the Lombards, crowned Emperor by Pope Leo III in 800, instituted the Roman Catholic liturgy in the territories he conquered. His “salutary exhortations” in the Capitulary of 789 included previously issued canons, including seventeen (“Women shall not approach the altar”) from the Council of Laodicea in the fourth century (Fleury 9:577–​578).

Part II: History and Religion  145 Lastly, we note that there was an interval of several centuries between the first council which thought it would be a good idea to forbid the marriage of clerics and to eradicate the offices of women in the ministry of religion, and the one that actually implemented these initiatives. It is everywhere reported that the idea of celibacy was proposed by Callixtus I at the beginning of the third century and [again] at the Council of Nicaea in 325, yet we can find married bishops still in the tenth and eleventh centuries, and later even.177 The abolition of deaconesses is mentioned in a Council of Orange in 441,178 but when Pope Leo returned to Rome in 799, in a grand entrance usually reserved for victors, the deaconesses went together as a corporation before him, like all other orders of the city,179 and we find [evidence of] deaconesses still in the twelfth century and beyond.

Recapitulation of the dates of celibacy and of the prohibition of women’s ministry in the Church Before Charlemagne, there were several attempts to impose celibacy on priests and to exclude women from the ministry. This prince himself gave express orders curtailing the rights that women had in the Church. A council held in Aix-​la-​Chapelle during the reign of Louis the Fair imposed new constraints on women in religious orders.180 They protested as persons not yet inured to the yoke. Forty years after Charlemagne, we glean from the aforementioned Council of Paris that these prohibitions were largely useless.181 The famous schism of the Greeks that occurred in the middle of the ninth century had the effect of determining the position of the Latin Church on these two points. After the Court of Rome had tried its best—​yet failed—​to keep the Greeks in the communion, the latter had to be condemned as much as possible. It is likely that celibacy was then extolled more than ever, in order to outdo the Greeks in their perfection. In any case, that was the period in

177 Celibacy was emphasized at the Council of Nicaea, but “no new law was made on this subject; each church kept its practices and freedom.” In 1074, the clergy violently resisted a renewed papal order “to uproot such an inveterate custom” as marriage (Fleury 3:141 and 13:271–​272). 178 Fleury 6:253. 179 Fleury 10:27. 180 In 817. Aix-​la-​Chapelle is the French name for the German town of Aachen. Louis the Fair was Charlemagne’s son. See Hefele, Histoire des conciles, 4:14–​16, 19. 181 The Council of Paris of 829, fifteen years after Charlemagne’s death.

146  Louise Dupin’s Work on Women which celibacy was fought for most arduously in the West. Everyone knows that Greek priests never submitted to celibacy and continued to marry freely. Small causes sometimes bring about big events; big events in turn produce little things. It strikes us as simpler to attribute the supposed use of the [pierced] chair in which popes sat for their consecration to the antipathy that the Court of Rome had towards Photios {Photios was a eunuch}182—​that pillar of the schism—​than to the story of Pope Joan.183 We readily link the condition reportedly imposed on mutilated priests for presiding at the altar to the same cause.184 It is absolutely necessary to admit an external reason for this obligatory test, since there is no possible relation between it and the sacredness of mass. We regard the barring of women from the ministry of the Church as a natural consequence of celibacy. It was one thing to share that honorable work with one’s wife, quite another to continually have within reach unrelated women from whom one was told to remain separate. In effect, these two initiatives were pursued in tandem. From their success, discourses and maxims disparaging women followed quite naturally; they were proposed and taught in a hundred ways to pupils who, summoned in turn to teach, propagated these opinions as much as they were able. Although we have found that most priests opposed these new ideas, some zealots brandished them with such excess that the Church itself had to step in to temper it. One bishop, in a Council of Macon, proposed the question of whether women had a soul. There was no choice but to mock him. The ninth canon of a Council of Rouen, held in 1074, prohibited people from refusing

182 Louis de Jaucourt designates Photios as a eunuch in the Encyclopédie (“Schism of the Greeks”), as does Voltaire in c­ hapter 31 of Essais sur les mœurs et l’esprit des nations (1756). However, this attribute may have been the result of propaganda; Photios was reviled in Rome for having usurped the patriarchal throne of Constantinople (858) and initiating a schism in the Church. 183 The “throne with a hole in the seat” at the archbasilica of Saint John Lateran in Rome was one of several pierced chairs used in papal consecration ceremonies from the eleventh to the fifteenth centuries. According to one explanation, the opening enabled verification of the manhood of the pope, to foil another cross-​dressing female usurper like Pope Joan, of the thirteenth-​century legend. Dupin’s alternative explanation—​that it was meant to mock Photios (who would not have been found intact upon examination)—​is not entirely convincing, given that he was consecrated in Constantinople, not in Rome. 184 This condition is outlined in book 8.21–​23 of the Apostolic Constitutions, a fourth-​century Syrian Christian text approved by the Council of Trullo in 692, from which Rousseau excerpted the following passages (edition unknown)—​in Latin in the left-​hand column and translated into French for Dupin on the right: “If someone has been made a eunuch through violence, whether amidst persecution [ . . . ] or because he was born thus, he shall be admitted to the episcopacy provided he is worthy. But if he has mutilated himself, he shall not be admitted to the clericature for he is a homicide of himself and enemy of God’s creation.” See also Fleury 3:138.

Part II: History and Religion  147 burial or prayers to women deceased in pregnancy or childbirth.185 Someone had thus proposed to deny last rites to such women, and surely, that is quite extraordinary. Nevertheless, the abolition of the rights of women in the Church and the opinion of their inferiority were not the work of a single century. Several proofs confirm this. Some bishops were still married in the twelfth century and even later. In our day, at the Council of Trent, the question of the marriage of priests was raised again, and the Council came very close to renouncing the rule of celibacy for them.186 We find as late as 1210 an abbess of the order of Citeaux exercising sacerdotal functions—​explaining the Gospel, stepping up to the pulpit to preach, and, in an example that we should never expect to see again, according to the author who reports it—​receiving confession from her nuns {We know that auricular confession was fairly new at the time}.187 It doesn’t matter to us that there be any subsequent examples; it suffices for the purpose of our research that there was one, and in any case, if the functions of this abbess had been a novelty, she would have been treated as a criminal or as a madwoman, and there is no trace of this. On the contrary, we read in the same author that the king tacitly approved her conduct, which obligated the superiors of her order {we will speak elsewhere of these superiors} to write about her behavior to the pope, who sent some bishops to suppress—​so he says—​the audacity of this abbess and others who sought to imitate her.188 These very words inform us that what this woman was doing was not considered so very unheard of or unique. And recidivism with respect to general prohibitions proves well enough that the practice was still fairly common. To support this opinion we will cite this passage from the History of the Church: “abbesses and chaplains prohibited nuns from confessing to anybody but them, fearing that their sins

185 Fleury does not discuss the Council of Rouen of 1074. Dupin’s source may be Louis Ellies Dupin (no relation), Nouvelle bibliothèque des auteurs ecclésiastiques (Utrecht: Jean Broedelet, 1731). 8:121. 186 The Council of Trent (see Art. 10) made the superiority of celibacy to marriage an article of faith and rigorously enforced it among the clergy. On the celibacy debate in the Catholic Church, see Thomas O’Loughlin, “Celibate Clergy: The Need for Historical Debate,” New Blackfriars 85, no. 1000 (2004): 583–​597. 187 Confession was considered voluntary until the Fourth Lateran Council (1216) made it a sacrament and mandated it once a year for all. On women hearing confession and granting absolution, see Henry Charles Lea, A History of Auricular Confession and Indulgences in the Latin Church (Lea Brothers, 1896), 217–​222. 188 Although Fleury mentions nuns who preached in thirteenth-​century Spain (16:264), he is not “the author” cited here; perhaps Dupin cites his source, Burchard of Ursperg’s Chronicon Urspergensis (ca. 1230), 13:387 (edition unknown).

148  Louise Dupin’s Work on Women would become known to virtuous priests who would subject them to penance” {Fleury, volume 16, page 310, thirteenth century}.189 We are quite persuaded that deeply learned theologians and historians know very well in their conscience that women held the same rank as men in the hierarchy, and yet we believe that they are perfectly ignorant as to how and why women then came to be imagined as unworthy of a religion that they had adopted like men, through spiritual conviction, and that they had similarly confessed at the price of their blood. We will willingly call the functions that were forbidden to women by the name of “diaconate,” as they were indeed called.190 This title alone suffices to prove that women have been stripped of honors and prerogatives they had enjoyed in the Church, and today, women are banished from the simplest things. As for the cause of this loss of status, if our adversaries were to respond to this point with criticisms that [certain] women indeed merited, we would have to cite the scandalous conduct of bad priests and bishops who were replaced by successors more worthy of their posts. The solution found for men could also have been implemented for women: punish the transgressors and choose better people.

Observations on some practices and their effects when applied more or less universally Most people today would find it peculiar were women to provide burial to the deceased—​not to mention were they to carry the deceased to the grave or even just accompany them. And that, like all the other things that women don’t do, is explained in peoples’ minds as a function of the weakness of women—​weakness in more ways than one: with respect to the burden and to the spectacle [of death]. But how is it that the habit of seeing things a certain way persuades good minds that things cannot be otherwise? And how can it be that peculiar habits of thought regarding women blind people to the ways to correct this manner of thinking? All nuns help each other at the time of death and carry their own to the earth. Only one priest is admitted for prayers and benedictions. Women 189 Fleury 16:311. 190 The duties of deaconesses included baptizing women and making pastoral visits to them. On women with sacerdotal roles, see John Wijngaards, The Ordination of Women in the Catholic Church: Unmasking a Cuckoo’s Egg Tradition (Bloomsbury, 2001).

Part II: History and Religion  149 who serve in hospitals withstand the spectacle of death and bury the dead with their hands. As care-​givers,191 women render these sad duties to humanity more generally than men do. But the simplest and most common examples do not stop the torrent of bad reasoning. A council held in Milan in 1287 forbade abbots and abbesses, monks and nuns from attending burials.192 These sad ceremonies were thus still common to men and women, and the forbidding of certain disciplines was still common between them as well. In several provinces {Flanders, Lorraine, Three Bishoprics, Aunis}193 women retained the practice of attending burials—​in some of them even, women are the ones who carry the body of women. And more recently, the residents of a certain neighborhood in Paris tried to hold on to this practice, which in 1748 ended up in a fight due to the obstinacy of the priests who opposed it. As a dead girl was carried aloft by her fellow womenfolk, the priests abandoned the convoy and sped ahead to reach the church and lock its doors. The people assembled to demand its opening, which was granted in response to their outcry—​but not without raining blows on those closest. The father of the girl was badly hurt and locked up for the night in the crypt. As a result of all that, it was ruled that the deceased would be brought as far as a certain street where the parish’s porters would take over. Be that as it may or as it could be, if women had voice in chapter on this matter, we believe that they would opine in favor of fewer burials inside churches, which harms the wholesomeness of city air—​principally around temples and surrounding neighborhoods.194 Today we are very unaccustomed to seeing women do things worth representing, and ideas, reasoning, and monuments of all sorts conform to this habit, but none of that is very old. The parish of Saint-​Séverin of Paris was founded a very long time ago, but the church such as it is today was built around 230 years ago.195 The murals decorating the interior of 191 garde-​malades. Lay or religious women who tended to the sick, often in urban hospitals for the indigent. 192 Fleury 18:491–​492. 193 Today, French Flanders is in the Nord department; Aunis is located in Charente-​Maritime; and the former provinces of Lorraine and Three Bishoprics (comprising the dioceses of Metz, Verdun, and Toul) are both located in the present-​day Lorraine region. 194 The campaign to move church cemeteries outside Paris city limits in the eighteenth century is portrayed as a woman-​led initiative by Charles Porée in Lettres sur les sépultures dans les églises (Caen: Jean-​Claude Pyron, 1745). 195 In a crossed-​out note, Dupin indicates her source: Germain Brice’s four-​volume Description de la Ville de Paris et de tout ce qu’elle contient de plus remarquable (1684). However, Brice does not indicate when the church was built. Dupin apparently knew from another source that reconstruction of Saint-​Séverin had been completed in 1520.

150  Louise Dupin’s Work on Women the church are even more recent because they are by Jacob Bunel who died during the reign of Henry IV. This painter represented twelve prophets and twelve sibyls in the choir of the church; they are placed between the arcades, and each arcade contains a sibyl and a prophet. The figures are life size and painted al fresco on a golden background, with the sibyls all placed closer to the altar.196 Is this monument not proof that at the time of its creation, the representation of women among men in churches did not lead to as many insinuations as they do now, nor to as many comments regarding their great difference in rank. Is it too temerarious to infer that ideas of parity between men and women still persisted at that time? There is a big difference between this representation and the chicanery that Santeul has been subjected to for forty years for having named the sibyls in a hymn.197 I saw two pairs of printed hours, one from 1529, the other from 1535.198 The vignettes are similarly decorated with sibyls, each one with different attributes of the priesthood and study. The same vignettes have little bas reliefs whose background represents the architecture of a church and on the right side of the page we see women who seem to be in procession, the first with a book in her hand, just like the men are on the other side. The vignette of one of these pairs of hours represents a dance of the dead, that is to say skeletons attached to figures representing each of the estates of life, from princes to artisans.199 Among the representatives of this dance who are characterized and named, we find a [female] theologian. What is today the state of a woman who answers to this title?200 We know that these sorts

196 On the presence of pagan sibyls in a Catholic church, see Art. 12. Actually, it was Bunel’s wife, Marguerite Bahuche, who painted the sibyls in Saint-​Séverin. Sandrine Lely, “Marguerite Bahuche,” SIEFAR, 2004, http://​sie​far.org/​mediaw​iki/​fr/​index.php?title=​Mar​guer​ite_​Bahu​che&stabl​eid=​9152. 197 Jean de Santeul did not name sibyls in his Hymni sacri et novi (1689). But in 1690, he violated the terms of a royal pension conditional on the production of Christian verse with a poem featuring pagan goddesses. Fabrice Preyat, Le Petit Concile de Bossuet et la christianisation des mœurs et des pratiques littéraires sous Louis XIV (Berlin: LIT Verlag, 2007), 381–​392. 198 Book of hours: illustrated devotional books allowing lay people to incorporate monastic habits into their daily lives. The development of the printing press made them more accessible. 199 The dance of the dead, or danse macabre, originated in mimed illustrations of sermons about death. Printed books of hours incorporated the danse macabre soon after Guyot Marchant printed the first woodcut engravings of it in Paris (1485). The motif flourished as a form of social satire; representatives of each social corps are mocked as they march toward death, escorted by exuberant corpses. Emile Mâle, Religious Art in France: The Late Middle Ages. A Study of Medieval Iconography and Its Sources (Princeton University Press, 1986), 324–​345. 200 Dupin supplies the answer but crosses it out: “A governess or a lover.” We have not found this image.

Part II: History and Religion  151 of books are in everybody’s hands. Consequently, everyone back then read those titles with no sense of irony and the same goes for their praise of the pictures. It is according to the sketch we have made, and the research we’ve done, that we are convinced that depriving women of honorable occupations and representations is very modern. Isn’t it rather difficult to reconcile the facts and stories contained in this chapter—​and many similar ones—​with the surprise expressed in the controversies of the learned in the last century regarding Saint Nicole’s statement that women according to natural law could not be excluded from the ministry of the Church?

Article 10. On the State of Monastic Orders since the Council of Trent The201 Council of Trent changed the case, so to speak, of ideas on women religious and from there, had accidental202 consequences for women in general {The Council of Trent began in 1543 under the papacy of Paul III and only ended in 1563 under Pious IV}.203 Young persons raised in convents are entrusted to the ignorance and idleness of their teachers there. Women of the world have lost the freedom to communicate with women in convents and gained the example of their dependence, which men have not failed to use against them.

201 The manuscript of this article is located at Musée Jean-​Jacques Rousseau (IR.2002.437.7). We significantly reordered the pages of the draft as we found it. For the resolutions of the Council of Trent, Dupin uses Rousseau’s excerpts from volume 34 of Fabre’s and Goujet’s extension of Fleury’s Histoire ecclésiastique (see Art. 8). We cite from the Brussels edition for volume 35: Histoire ecclésiastique pour servir de continuation à celle de feu Mr. l’Abbé Fleury (Brussels: Eugène-​Henri Fricx, 1739). For legal cases pertaining to the enclosure of female monasteries, Dupin uses Pierre Le Merre (father and son), Recueil des actes, titres, et mémoires concernant les affaires du clergé de France, 13 vols. (Paris: widow of François Muguet, 1716–​1750), 4:1667–​1776. Regarding lay and religious communities, Dupin draws from Pierre Hélyot, Histoire des ordres monastiques, religieux, et militaires, et des ordres séculières de l’un & de l’autre sexe, 8 vols. (Paris: J. B. Coignard, 1714–​1719), of which Rousseau made 39 folios of excerpts (Sénéchal 217–​218); some are at HRC. 202 Something accidental, in philosophy, is neither inherent nor essential to the thing at hand. 203 Planned by Pope Paul III for 1537, this council was inaugurated in 1545 in Trent (northern Italy). Concerns about the plague in 1547 caused further postponement. Pope Julius III initiated the second phase of the council (1551–​1552), cut short by a Lutheran revolt in Bavaria. Pius IV convened the final phase (1562–​1563).

152  Louise Dupin’s Work on Women

Observation on the articles of the Council of Trent that specifically concern nuns The acts of the Council of Trent, with respect to women religious, stipulate that “bishops will take care to reestablish enclosure where it has been neglected, and to maintain it where it has been conserved, without consideration for any appeal, opposition, or contradiction, even having recourse to assistance from the secular arm if necessary.”204 If enclosure had been instituted from the outset, or if its use had become common only since then, the Council would not have expressed itself thus—​anticipating so surely the appeals, oppositions, and contradictions. The appeals it did receive, moreover, would not have foregrounded enclosure, as they did, since the nuns had not committed to it with their other vows. “That monasteries of nuns outside cities and towns shall be as much as possible transferred within them, should the bishop or another superior judge it appropriate, so as not to be exposed to the predation of wicked men.” It is very easy to see that this decree was rather more meant to bring monasteries of women closer to hand and thereby to subject them to greater dependence. Several convents of women religious that stayed put and still exist today prove that they had little to fear from the predation of wicked men. “That nuns shall not leave their convents, nor anyone enter, of any condition, sex or age whatsoever, without permission of the bishop, on pain of excommunication.” In this article, the extension of authority and subjection is more evident than any motive involving good order and decency, since surely neither the former nor the latter would be hurt by the presence of persons of the same sex or children in women’s convents. “As for keeping the very holy sacrament in the inner choir or within the walls of the monastery instead of placing it in the public Church outside, the holy Council prohibits it regardless of any indult or privilege whatsoever.”205 This proves very clearly that even though women had been dispossessed of several responsibilities in the Church, a few of them had at least conserved 204 This and ensuing quotations are from ­chapter 5 of Session 25 (De regularibus & monialibus) of the Council of Trent. Dupin selects passages and splices in her own commentary. De regularibus & monialibus tightened Boniface VIII’s 1298 papal decretal Periculoso, which imposed perpetual enclosure on all nuns except in cases of grave illness. On the early history of enclosure, see Elizabeth Makowski, Canon Law and Cloistered Women: Periculoso and Its Commentators, 1298–​ 1545 (Catholic University of America Press, 1997). 205 An indult: a special dispensation granted by ecclesiastical authorities. De regularibus, ­chapter 10; Fabre and Goujet 34:84.

Part II: History and Religion  153 the admirable right of being the keepers of such a respectable and precious deposit. “No superior shall be appointed to the administration of two monasteries, and if she is found to have two or more under her direction, she shall be obligated, in keeping only one of them, to relinquish all the others within six months.”206 This appears very suitable to good order, but its execution should have been as necessary for men as for women. It proves yet again the parity [with men] that women had long had, since they enjoyed the same credit and means to augment their fortune and domination. “The monasteries of nuns that depend directly on the Holy See under the name of the chapter of Saint Peter, of Saint John, or by whatever other name they are called, will be governed by bishops as delegates to the Holy See, notwithstanding all contrary practices.” This proves what we have said: that the institution of each order of women was formed with the same rights as those of men.207 The same council determined the right of visitation of bishops in monasteries of women, notably, over that of Fontevraud. The Private Council’s August 1635 ruling decided this right in France.208 [In 1638], the Bishop of Apt ordered the reestablishment of the reform of the nuns of Saint Catherine of Apt, of the order of Saint Augustine, which the Parlement of Provence confirmed by a ruling of June 1639.209 The abbess and nuns of the rule of Saint Benedict in the diocese of Limoges were subordinated to the bishop’s visit210 and all other jurisdiction and superiority by a ruling of the Parlement of Paris in March 1653. Through its final ruling211 in August of the same year, the Private Council maintained the Bishop of Le Puy-​en-​Velay in his right to visit in that city the monastery of Saint Claire of the Reformation 206 De regularibus, ­chapter 7; Fabre and Goujet 34:79. The Council grudgingly allows men to accumulate titles and income, despite abuses (34:92). 207 De regularibus, ­chapter 9; Fabre and Goujet 34:82. In other words, some women’s religious orders had reported directly to the pope, with no interference from bishops. 208 The authority of the aristocratic abbesses of the twelfth-​century order of Fontevraud extended over male as well as female religious. Dupin cites Fontevraud as evidence “that the dignity and rights of women still went hand in hand in many ways with those of men” in “On the Original State of Monastic Orders” (Art. 9) (Sénéchal, 237). On the ruling, see Le Merre, Recueil des actes, 4:1711–​ 1712 and Fabre and Goujet 34:83. The Private Council was invested with the supreme powers of justice in the kingdom and judged cases over which different types of courts were at odds. 209 On this case, and the two following it, see the Introduction to Part II. 210 la visite. Canonical visitation, or regular inspection of constituent congregations by a bishop, originally carried out on an annual basis, but increasingly used arbitrarily to harass and intimidate rebel nuns. 211 jugement contradictoire. A judgment rendered through an adversarial procedure after a full hearing or trial.

154  Louise Dupin’s Work on Women of Saint Colette in order to enforce enclosure, regardless of their privileges and exemptions. The remonstrances that the bishops of France addressed to the king at the end of the sixteenth century prove how difficult it was to implement this council, which had already been so hard to schedule and to conclude.212 Everybody knows that it was accepted in France only for its dogma and not for its discipline, of which the articles pertaining to women were nevertheless fulfilled, as if royal authority, worn out from its other refusals to the council, had accorded its consent to those, only imagining itself to be supporting good order.

Observations on the councils of Saint Charles Borromeo and Cardinal [Charles I] de Bourbon It hardly seems possible that the Council of Trent’s severity towards women religious could be outdone. Saint Charles Borromeo nevertheless found a way to do just that in his various Councils of Milan. One of his councils determined the price of entering the convent and of the habit nuns wear at their profession.213 Another of his councils renewed yet again parlors, revolving windows, and cloisters, as well as the prohibition against women of the world visiting the convent.214 New rules governing the management of their income were also imposed.215 The council extended its prohibition against visitors of either sex to also exclude men or women who could teach the nuns how to sing and play the organ, while granting a nun already accomplished in these skills the permission to teach them. These prohibitions and even this permission reveal excessive authority in equal measure.

212 The Parlement of Paris resisted implementation of the decrees of the Council of Trent, citing the Gallican principle that the king was the ultimate authority in France, not the pope. Ultimately the full decrees were never officially accepted in France, 213 Saint Charles Borromeo organized a series of six provincial councils in Milan after the Council of Trent between 1565 and 1582. Dupin refers here to the second Council of Milan (1569), as summarized by Fabre and Goujet 34:640–​641. 214 The fifth Council of Milan (1579); Fabre and Goujet 35:290. In the parlor, inhabitants and visitors communicated across a metal grate under the surveillance of a superior. A revolving window allowed objects to be passed in and out of the convent, obviating contact. A cloister is a covered walk enclosing a courtyard. 215 Religious orders had income (temporel) from leasing real estate and from annuities, often as the result of donations. More recent and more urban religious orders, including most female religious orders, were poorer.

Part II: History and Religion  155 At the sixth council that Saint Charles held in Milan in 1582, it was declared that any nun found admitting a secular person, man or woman, to the parlor or the revolving window, to engage with and converse without permission of the bishop, would be deprived of voice [in chapter] for two years.216 This rule contained so much more rigor than reason that it wasn’t actually implemented. At a Council of Rouen, held in 1581 {by [Charles I] Cardinal de Bourbon, archbishop of the city}, the pope was asked among other things how to deal with monasteries of nuns where enclosure was not established, and where several nuns claimed to have made no vow of enclosure, insisting that they were exempt from it, that they would never had become nuns if they had been obligated to accept it, and that they would rather return to the world. To this query, the pope responded that the decrees of the Council of Trent must be implemented.217 [Thus do] we see, as we have already said, that the debates of the Council of Trent created enclosure as much or more as they re-​established it, and that they met with opposition. Almost all women’s monasteries litigated various points, in turn, and one by one, they all lost their cases.

Spirit of the councils of which we have just spoken, continued The Abbess of Montivilliers in Normandy is pleading now for the remains of her rights, which she will lose just as her peers have lost theirs.218 The founding titles of these houses, which date back further than many bishoprics, as well as their long possession and the jurisdiction they carry, 216 Fabre and Goujet 35:486. 217 The Council of Rouen of 1581 was the first attempt to use provincial councils to accept the decrees of the Council of Trent piecemeal (Fabre and Goujet 35:462). Participating bishops complained about the resistance they were facing as they tried to implement enclosure: “Some [female religious] say that their founding documents grant them the freedom to come and go from their monastery. Others as an excuse claim that they never made a vow of enclosure and that they never would have entered into the religious state had they known of the obligation to be imprisoned. Still others threaten to leave their profession and return to their parents’ home rather than to endure being constrained, and they threaten their bishops, going so far as to foment their deaths at the hands of their noblemen parents should their families be prevented from coming to see them.” Le concile provincial des diocèses de Normandie tenu à Rouen, trans. F. Claude de Sainctes (Rouen: Romain de Beauvais, 1606), 178–​179. Fabre and Goujet note that Trent’s decrees “abolish” previous norms (35:465–​466). 218 Founded in the seventh century, the Abbey of Montivilliers is the oldest female monastery mentioned in this chapter. Under special protection of the Holy See since 1192, it was ostensibly exempt from the authority of bishops (Hélyot 6:84).

156  Louise Dupin’s Work on Women have been called “exemptions,” and ecclesiastical courts have inspired the [king’s] government to “reunite” the rights of these houses to bishoprics as if those rights had been usurped from them.219 It is a matter of good order that bishops be masters in their dioceses of all that is ecclesiastical and religious. It would have been quite simple to grant bishops authority over the various orders and houses of women religious, but the pretext given of ensuring their administration was unnecessary, since abbesses and prioresses could represent them on their own as they had long done. In transferring the authority of abbesses and prioresses to bishops, was it fitting to give them—​or to let them take—​authority that is not even appropriate to exercise over ten-​year-​ old children?

Observations on the reform of Fontevraud, on the order of Our Lady of Calvary, on the establishment of the Daughters of Charity, on the Miramiones et on the Congregation of the Daughters of the Infancy of Our Lord Jesus Christ The Council of Trent opened a new path to profit for clerics working towards its implementation.220 Father Joseph, a Capuchin priest, made a name for himself at the beginning of the seventeenth century by striving to debase the order of Fontevraud. Under the auspices of Madame d’Orléans, he endeavored, through the specious pretext of reforming the order, to diminish the rights and credit of this order. He had hoped to do to the entire order what he was only able to carry out on a part of one of its houses, but his fanaticism and the credit he enjoyed furnished him with followers from whom 219 Dupin targets disingenuous word choices. An “exemption” suggests an exception to the rule, when the rule itself was a recent invention, she argues. The verb réunir indicates the reattachment of smaller fiefs to a larger entity from which they had been separated, suggesting a return to a state that had never existed, and aligning uniformization of Church discipline with nation-​building. 220 Dupin’s development about the latter two congregations in the subtitle is missing. The young, wealthy widow, Madame de Miramion, founded communities of women devoted to teaching and charity, incorporating the Daughters of Saint Genevieve into her group in 1665. The Miramiones took no vows (Hélyot 8: 222–​232). The Congregation of the Daughters of the Infancy of Our Lord Jesus Christ was founded by Madame de Mondonville, widow of a councilor in the Parlement of Toulouse, with support from the archbishop of Toulouse. Participants took a simple vow of stability, committing to the community for the remainder of their lives, where they were to teach girls recently converted to Catholicism and tend to the sick. Their tasks and dress were distinguished by rank. The congregation was approved by the pope (1662) and king (1663), but Louis XIV revoked their charter in 1686. Madame de Mondonville’s appeal to the pope earned her a lettre de cachet from Louis XIV; she lived the rest of her life in prison (Hélyot 8: 206–​211).

Part II: History and Religion  157 he created the rigorous order of Our Lady of Calvary—​an order too rigorous for humanity. Madame d’Orléans, widow of Charles de Gondi, at the time Coadjutor of Fontevraud, was the dupe of this good father, and she lent him her name and her rights to humiliate Fontevraud. On his advice, she worked to found the new establishment of Our Lady of Calvary, whose institution is nevertheless attributed more to Father Joseph than to her.221 Saint Vincent de Paul, who lived until the middle of the seventeenth century, was the friend of Louise de Marillac,222 the widow of Monsieur Le Gras, a secretary to Marie de Médicis.223 This friend—​a very virtuous and intelligent woman—​founded, by means of her own fortune and credit, the Company of the Daughters of Charity, known as the Gray Sisters.224 She also worked to establish homes for orphans, and even in her later years, made several voyages to promote these pious institutions. Her close ties with Vincent de Paul contributed to the good works of this pious woman, through both his guidance and his credit. It is impossible to read the life of Vincent or of Madame Le Gras without feeling strongly edified by the sentiments and actions of the one and the other. But it is difficult not to notice how much Vincent recommends humility to his friend, a humility to which she was strongly disposed and that she took so much to heart that she never put her own name on all of the good that she did. The excess of such virtue can have the disadvantage of suppressing the edification we should receive from the memory of very virtuous persons. Vincent de Paul, albeit not proud, nevertheless practiced humility less

221 The Capuchin provincial Joseph le Clerc du Tremblay—​son of a high-​ranking member of the Parlement of Paris and an advisor to Cardinal Richelieu—​consistently appealed to Rome to override local control in the female orders under his jurisdiction. He disenfranchised the nuns of Fontevraud by obtaining a papal bull that allowed its coadjutor (Antoinette d’Orléans-​Longueville) and abbess (Louise de Bourbon-​Lavedan) to appoint superiors without taking elections into account. He then undermined the abbess by obtaining a papal bull permitting the coadjutor and several nuns to leave Fontevraud to found a new, harsher order. The abbess unsuccessfully protested this second bull as an instance of papal overreach. Louis XIII restored her to her full jurisdiction and former privileges in 1641, but the enclosure mandated by the Private Council in 1635 remained. Hélyot, 6:101–​102, 355–​ 359, 361–​368. 222 Spiritual friendships between female penitents and male confessors were the first celebrated examples of cross-​gender friendships in France. The friendship of Louise de Marillac and Vincent de Paul was legendary, like that of Jeanne de Chantal and François de Sales. See Jodi Bilinkoff, Related Lives: Confessors and their Female Penitents, 1540–​1750 (Cornell University Press, 2005). 223 Antoine Le Gras was Marie de Médicis’s secrétaire des commandements—​her top-​ranking secretary. 224 Begun in 1633 and officialized in 1655, the Daughters of Charity served the indigent and tended the sick in hospitals and homes. Commoners carried out the work prioritized by noblewomen (Hélyot 8:105–​106, 110).

158  Louise Dupin’s Work on Women rigorously, since on the basis of his good works, he was canonized a few years ago, with nary a mention of his friend.

On the conservation of the freedom and rights of some convents of women Some convents of nuns have held fast against enclosure up until now, such as the Abbey of Our Lady of Ronceray in Angers,225 the Abbey of Our Lady of Marquette near Lille,226 and a few others. It does not appear that abbesses or nuns have abused this freedom. Some other communities of women that survive today show well enough that such establishments can exist without scandal {The Beguines of Flanders,227 the Daughters of Saint Agnès in Paris,228 the Daughters of Saint Chaumont229}. The women of the Carthusian order, too, have conserved the honor of being consecrated in the tradition laid out in ancient pontificals.230 They still receive a stole around their necks which is draped around their right arm with the same ceremonies practiced in the consecration of deacons, and this does not appear to invite a curse on the country, nor to scandalize anyone.

Conclusion Ever since the Council of Trent, which framed all of the reasons for the enclosure of nuns in terms of scandal—​and as a result, attached more scandal 225 The aristocratic nuns of the elite eleventh-​century Abbey of Notre Dame du Ronceray were never subject to enclosure. The abbess controlled the fiefs commanded by the monastery and had jurisdiction over a portion of the city of Angers (Hélyot 5:291–​92). 226 The nuns of the wealthy thirteenth-​century Abbaye du Repos de Notre Dame de Marquette resisted enclosure, asserting privileges “that they claimed were common to all female monasteries of the region.” Maurice Vanhaeck, Cartulaire de l’Abbaye de Marquette. 3 vols. (Lille: SILIC, 1937–​1940) 1: vi–​vii. 227 As of the thirteenth century, the Beguines were women in northern Europe who lived, worked, and worshiped in communities that were enclosed by walls or ditches, but open during the day (Hélyot 8:5–​6). 228 In 1636, Jeanne Biscot founded the Daughters of Saint Agnès in Arras; they cared for orphan girls (Hélyot 8:244). 229 Vincent de Paul and Marie Lumague founded the Congregation of the Christian Union of Saint Chaumond in 1652. The Holy See took this community of women under its protection in 1668. They took simple vows and devoted their lives to teaching. There were several houses in Paris and in the provinces. 230 Pontifical. A reference book indicating the order of ceremonies that a bishop should follow when administering sacraments.

Part II: History and Religion  159 to nuns’ presence in the world and that of [secular] women in convents—​, it seems that women’s persons have themselves become an object of scandal. Apparently, the Council also deemed women who were seen in books playing the role of important people or acting freely in manner to be sufficiently scandalous that it imposed a kind of reform and enclosure so to speak on women of the past. Most Church histories written since this date conform to the new discipline. When it comes to women, the details are less carefully examined than those that make up the history of men. Ordinarily, when women are not essential to the stringing together of facts, they are simply omitted. If there had been a couplet written for each of these reformations as there was about the most recent breviary of Paris—​ one great vicar, two great vicars, three great vicars together, have removed my sweet Margot from the new breviary231

—​we would have a fairly good history of pious women whose names were at least worthy of preservation. The enclosure that the Council of Trent imposed on women religious necessarily excluded them from their rights, their dignities, from all sorts of knowledge, and deprived them of the advantage of conducting their own business. This strict enclosure, and the ignorance that is its result, have gained such credit that women religious offer themselves up for the one and the other. Several communities that were created free have since aspired to the honor of shutting themselves up, and we know that almost all women in these communities want to know and learn nothing but what their [spiritual] director prescribes for them, and that even the simplest and most reasonable trust they might have had in their mother superior has been undermined. I heard one abbess—​an intelligent woman—​say that she had never managed to convince a nun of hers who was sick not to fast, until her absent confessor returned and ordered her to stop fasting. 231 A book containing each day’s prayers, lessons, and psalms, organized around the saint(s) of the day. The fourth-​century virgin martyr Saint Marguerite of Antioch was eliminated from the Breviary of Paris in the 1670s because her story, involving escaping from the belly of a dragon, garnered Protestant ridicule. Dupin cites a satirical song that accuses two vicars and one archbishop of suppressing an innocent girl. It is listed as “Sur l’office de Sainte Marguerite retranché dans le nouveau bréviaire” in the collection “Poèmes satiriques du XVIIIe siècle,” curated by the Institut Claude Longeon, Université Jean Monnet in Saint-​Etienne, 2012, https://​satire​s18.univ-​st-​etie​nne.fr.

160  Louise Dupin’s Work on Women Most establishments that women had formed for themselves have passed into the hands of men, and all others have come under their domination, to the point that we have outlined and that anyone can easily see. Entire orders of women have vanished, such as the Prémontrées.232 Of more than five hundred monasteries of women of this order, none remain in France, because abbots took their income and ceased receiving nuns. Convents belonging to other orders that had managed to subsist fell into a dependence that knew no bounds, as a result of enclosure and the rigor accompanying it.233 The Council of Trent was also the era of the principle according to which mortification sustains nuns. Its cruelty did not prevent it from being accepted and taking hold.234 In sum, we can say that since the seventeenth century, the virtues and good qualities of women religious have changed form. Nuns no longer have practical virtues or useful qualities; penitence and submission are all that is required of them, and they have been persuaded that the pinnacle of their estate consists in the perfection of humility. Such principles should characterize religious life in general, but modifications have been permitted for men that women should be allowed to adopt as well. The effect of the rigorous application of these principles is what prompts [the Peruvian woman] to say, in speaking of convents of women, that the religion “of these places requires women to renounce all of the blessings bestowed by the master of the world: the mind’s knowledge, the heart’s sentiments, and even reason.”235 We may be even more surprised that nations that have progressed in the art of politics and the sweetness [douceur] of mores allow such establishments, with no consideration for the damage done to the state when 80,000 women live under laws that make them perfectly useless to society, and without a thought for the inhumanity entailed in subjecting 80,000 innocent and 232 Women were initially included in the Order of Prémontré founded by Saint Norbert of Xanten in 1120. However, in 1137, women were no longer allowed in monasteries with men and had to be transferred elsewhere. Innocent II mandated that men’s monasteries fund their evicted sisters, but many suffered the “avarice” of abbots (Hélyot 2:176). 233 Enclosure negatively impacted fundraising and recruitment. See Elizabeth Lehfeldt, “Spatial Discipline and its Limits: Nuns and the Built Environment in Early Modern Spain,” in Architecture and the Politics of Gender in Early Modern Europe, ed. Helen Hills (Ashgate, 2003), 131–​149, 137. 234 Dupin discounts women’s involvement in shaping Catholic spirituality and asceticism following the Wars of Religion. See Diefendorf, From Penitence to Charity. 235 Letters from a Peruvian Woman (1747), first published anonymously, appeared under Françoise de Graffigny’s name in 1752. In the style of Montesquieu’s Persian Letters (1721), Graffigny criticizes French society, notably women’s limited education and possibilities. It averaged one edition per year for the next century and was translated into nine languages.

Part II: History and Religion  161 virtuous women to the same fate as those who are condemned to perpetual imprisonment for their wicked actions. Even women who aren’t nuns walk in the path of piety only in the shade of and under the discipline of directors, and since the last century, their piety is known only to these directors. These women’s lives and good works are now counted for nothing. The humility that envelops them annihilates them and everything they do. A sixty-​year-​old woman—​an abbess or superior of these houses—​does not just lack the right today to open her door to a woman relative or friend without the permission of the archbishop; she cannot even receive another abbess or nun. Even if her friend or her relative has found the means to ask this grace by some stroke of luck and has been granted permission on several occasions, she will be turned away the day she doesn’t have it. I saw this situation happen to a woman of great piety, a provincial abbess, who was in Paris for her health. She had obtained permission to enter a convent several times, yet having miscounted her limited number of authorized entries, one Friday when she arrived at the door, she was turned away and had to go to services in a public church. There were no doubt abuses that needed to be reformed in all of these constitutions, as there have always been and always will be in all human institutions, but by that very token we can hope someday to see a reform to the penitence, misery, rigor, and uselessness in which religious women live today. In sum, after having shared in the honor and advantages of religious institutions of all sorts for a long time, women ended up falling into the most puerile and rigorous dependence in which they live today, and the exceptions to this dependence and rigor have been whittled down so much that they are not even worth noting.

Part III Law Introduction In the long “Preliminary Discourse,” Dupin lists the content of the three-​ year law school curriculum to which women have no access: a first year devoted to civil law “whose main object is property [le tien et le mien] and the estate of individuals”; a second year, to canon law, or “the study of Church councils”; and a third to public law, “which is the knowledge of the law of nations and of people.”1 By the time she wrote the law chapters of the Work on Women, however, Dupin had come to see law not just as a field of study unjustly denied to women, and as a discourse rife with contempt for them, but as a dynamic system binding them in “perpetual constraint” (Art. 36). No doubt the anticipated publication of Montesquieu’s Spirit of the Laws contributed to training her attention on law. Work on the Work on Women seems to have accelerated in the months leading up to the publication of Spirit of the Laws in early December 1748.2 In October and November, Dupin borrowed from the King’s library humanist editions of the Justinian Digest (1553), Novellae (1576), and Institutes (1475), as well as a compilation of barbarian law codes that Montesquieu cites in Spirit of the Laws. From her “Critique of the Spirit of the Laws” (see the volume introduction), we know that Dupin combed through Spirit of the Laws line by line as soon as it was published, and she engages with Montesquieu in several of the chapters in the Law section, including the “Foreword on Law” (Art. 27), where she identifies Spirit of the Laws as the spirit of modern French law as it pertains to women. Yet Dupin was seeking out recent materials on the Code of Justinian—​the basis of French jurisprudence regarding Roman law—​as early as June 1746.3 Furthermore, the purview of the Law section is an entire tradition of juridical 1 Dupin’s ensuing distinction shows that by droit des nations, she means jus inter gentes—​“the law between peoples”—​rather than jus gentium, usually translated in English as “law of nations”: “The law of nations concerns different forms of government, while the law of people concerns the right that each person carries with them, whoever and wherever they may be.” 2 Marty, Louise Dupin, 236–​237. 3 Sénéchal, 246.

Part III: Law  163 interpretation and legal innovation that chipped away at women’s rights and resources, which Montesquieu sometimes explains, but mostly echoes. In the “Foreword on Law,” Dupin condemns the subordination of women to men as an example of man-​made (positive) law in violation of natural law (law discoverable by reason). However, unlike other political philosophers who use the natural law construct, she historicizes positive law and the emergence of inequality within it. In On the Equality of the Two Sexes, Poulain de la Barre had situated the subordination of women to men at the point of humankind’s exit from the state of nature—​that is, in an almost prehistoric past. In contrast, Dupin documents the way in which the successive introduction of new laws produced women’s subordination to men. Just as in Part II, where she characterizes the Council of Trent as a recent turning point in the lives of religious women, in Part III, she insists on the modernity of married women’s disenfranchisement. In this way, taking aim at the principle of consensus gentium (universal consent), she denies masculine domination the claim of universality throughout time, just as she denies its universality in cultures throughout the world. She thus underscores the contingency of the status quo and opens a breach between laws and justice. Rousseau would extend this strategy in the Discourse on the Origin and Foundations of Inequality among Men when he argued that laws legitimized and entrenched inequalities that had been merely circumstantial. While we cannot rule out the possibility that Rousseau encouraged Dupin to treat law historically, nor is there any reason to suppose that he did. Her sources on the history of French law emphasize the variability of laws over time,4 and the strategy of tracing things back to their origin to explain, decry, or justify some aspect of the present was ubiquitous by the 1740s.5 Moreover, a new genre—​ collections of arrêts, or rulings by various courts—​provided her with detailed accounts of cases.6 Through creative combination of existing resources and argumentative strategies, Dupin crafted an original claim: “The tutorship of women’s property exercised by their husbands, and the tutelage of their persons, is a masterpiece of injustice—​and, as it now stands, of a fairly modern

4 For example, Claude Fleury chronicles the fates of Roman law and customary law regimes in France from the Roman empire to the sixteenth century in Histoire du droit français (1674). 5 “It’s a generally received principle that we can hardly attain perfect knowledge of a discipline without having first studied its origins and progress.” Claude-​Joseph de Ferrière, Histoire du droit romain (Paris: Saugrain, 1743), 1. 6 Notably Pierre-​Jacques Brillon, Dictionnaire des arrêts, ou jurisprudence universelle des Parlemens de France et autres tribunaux, 6 vols. (Paris: Guillaume Cavelier, Michel Brunet, Nicolas Gosselin, 1727). On the emergence of this genre, see Hanley, “ ‘The Jurisprudence of the Arrêts’,” 1–​40.

164  Louise Dupin’s Work on Women injustice” (Art. 30). We are unaware of any author before her who sought to show how civil law evolved over a long span of time to affect a specific group of people in a systematic way.7 This introduction contextualizes the injustice that Dupin documents in the Law section. We explain now unfamiliar terms—​dowries, dowers, paraphernal goods, rentes, acquêts, moveables, immovables, propres, and lineage property—​in light of two intertwining developments that contributed to the shrinking of married women’s property rights in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries: the streamlining of an unwieldy variety of law regimes, fueled by the humanist rediscovery of Roman law; and new prospects for social mobility contingent on wealth accumulation, of which marriage was a crucial component. Jurists were at the forefront of both developments, interpreting laws to the material advantage of fathers and husbands, thereby optimizing their own families’ fortunes. Their interests aligned with those of the state, whose functioning depended on a cadre of loyal administrators. Dupin discredits these initiatives, we show, by exposing the reductive interpretations of Roman law on which French jurists base their legalization of the despoilment of women. We uplift the most interesting example of this strategy: her revisionist claim that the inequality of modern French marriage originated not from Roman marriage cum manu (in which wives were in the power or “hands” of their husbands), but from the disreputable institution of concubinage.

Marriage Law in Early Modern France Local commerce, trading companies, emerging markets, and the general financialization of the economy created opportunities for early modern entrepreneurs like Dupin’s father, Samuel Bernard (see the volume introduction). Yet even in the mid-​eighteenth century, the most important sources of capital remained the generational transfers of wealth that occurred at marriage and at death, in a system designed to keep family patrimony intact. The two main mechanisms of wealth transfer—​inheritance and dowry—​ were closely linked, and typically, a daughter received a dowry in lieu of 7 The closest thing to a precedent in France is Protestant protest literature. Pierre Bayle alludes to the flurry of royal decrees that curtailed the rights of French Protestants prior to the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes (1685) in Ce que c’est que la France toute catholique sous le règne de Louis le Grand (1685).

Part III: Law  165 inheritance. The husband managed his wife’s dowry, and might come into ownership of a portion of it if she predeceased him, but he could not alienate it. This was because his wife, legally defined as his first creditor, held the entirety of his estate in mortgage from the day of their marriage until the conventions of her widowhood had been met. These could take several forms, depending on the region or custom observed. Regions south of the Loire Valley were known as “written law countries” because they followed Roman law (the Justinian Code). In these regions, spouses’ property was kept separate, because written law privileged family patrimony handed down from generation to generation through both women and men—​what historians call “lineage property.” If the couple had children, acquêts (assets acquired or earnings accumulated in the course of the marriage) became lineage property upon inheritance. If the couple had no descendants, lineage property reverted to the wife’s or to the husband’s family of origin at their death. Because marital property was not pooled, the dowry had to be repaid in full to the wife if there were no children and she survived her husband. Dowries typically comprised moveables (cash, linens, furniture, harvests, and rentes—​see below) rather than immovables (land, buildings, or royal offices), which were reserved for the eldest son, so as to keep family patrimony intact.8 In written law countries, the male head of household (paterfamilias) had a great deal of discretionary power over family resources. He could name heirs and stipulate what they would inherit, and usually the eldest son was favored. North of the Loire River Valley, a patchwork of regional customary laws prevailed. Here, custom rather than fatherly fiat determined inheritance portions, resulting in parental property being more evenly divided among children.9 In the Custom of Paris, for example, children were to inherit equally without distinction of sex, though daughters often renounced their inheritance in exchange for dowry, leaving a greater portion of the parents’ estate to their brothers.10 Marriages created community property, meaning that (at least a portion of) the property of husband and wife was pooled and co-​owned. The establishment of community property generally privileged the new couple over the family of origin and over lineage property—​hence 8 Christine Dousset, “Femmes et héritage en France au XVIIe siècle,” Dix-​septième siècle 244, no. 3 (2009): 477–​491. 9 Suzanne Desan, “Making and Breaking Marriage: An Overview of Old Regime Marriage as a Social Practice,” in Family, Gender, and Law in Early Modern France, eds. Suzanne Desan and Jeffrey Merrick (Pennsylvania State University Press: 2009), 1–​25, p. 5. 10 Geisey, “Rules of Inheritance and Strategies of Mobility in Prerevolutionary France,” p. 274.

166  Louise Dupin’s Work on Women the expression société de mariage, or “marriage partnership.” Though only husbands were legally entitled to manage this property, wives had some leverage as a result of the mortgage they held on it, and sometimes they were granted power of attorney.11 Depending on the custom in question, the surviving spouse could inherit the entirety of the community property of the marriage, or, as was the case in Paris, half of the moveables and acquêts, the other half being divided among heirs (children, usually). Dowers were another way of handling the support of a widow in customary law regions. A dowager had usufruct rights to a portion of her husband’s propres—​the assets he owned in his name at the time of their marriage. She was not the owner of the dower but benefited from its income, and during the marriage, her husband could not alienate the assets comprising its capital. The portion of the husband’s propres to which she was entitled varied from a third in some regions to a half in Paris. Based on inheritance law and of what were in essence life insurance policies for widows, most historians identify customary law as more favorable to women than written law. While a widow in written law countries could recover a portion of the assets she had brought to the marriage and perhaps also benefit from a bequest made by her husband in his will, a widow in customary law regions was likely to take away more wealth from the marriage than her family had put in if the community property grew during the marriage—​a scenario that was especially likely among merchant families.12 Yet these advantages were increasingly muted as efforts to standardize and streamline civil law throughout France facilitated the consolidation of patriarchal power at the expense of women.

A New System In 1454, Charles VII ordered the codification (writing down) of medieval customary codes of law. Subsequent kings tasked jurists with bringing the jumble of overlapping customs into alignment, a project far from complete by the time Louis XIV set out to merge southern written law with northern 11 Élie Haddad, “Faire du mariage un acte favorable: l’utilisation des coutumes dans la noblesse française d’Ancien Régime,” Revue d’histoire moderne & contemporaine 58–​2, no. 2 (2011): 72–​ 95, p. 42. 12 Jacques Poumarède, “Mariage,” in Dictionnaire de l’Ancien Régime: Royaume de France, 16e–​18e siècle, ed. Lucien Bély (Presses Universitaires de France, 1996), 799–​800.

Part III: Law  167 customary law.13 He pursued the ideal of legal unity—​un roi, une foi, une loi—​ through the Edict of Saint-​Germain en Laye in 1679, which made the instruction of “French law” obligatory in law schools and created professorships of “French law” in universities. He also sponsored the first attempt to mesh Roman civil law with Paris customary law: the jurist Jean Domat’s Civil Law in its Natural Order (1689).14 Domat sought to reorganize French customary law according to the principles of Cartesian geometry, grounded in the spirit of Roman law, and founded on a basic distinction: “Sex [difference], which distinguishes men and women, makes between them this difference, as regards their estate, that men are capable of all kinds of engagements and functions [ . . . ] and that women are incapable, for the sole reason of their sex, of several kinds of engagements and functions.”15 Accordingly, even though jurists tended to view customary law as more authentically “French” than Roman-​inspired written law, they looked to Roman law to buttress the patriarchal aspirations of “French law.” Lamenting this evolution, Dupin evokes customary law in the past tense: “In customary law, it wouldn’t have seemed possible to despoil half of the human species and to subject it to the other half. Some good vestiges of this principle of equality endure despite the new system that seems built to destroy it.”16 The humanist revival of Roman law in the sixteenth century contributed mightily to creating the “new system” that despoiled women and subjected them to fathers and husbands. Massive editorial projects made the Corpus juris civilis (529–​534 ce) available to specialists and professors of law, while translations of and commentaries on various parts of the Justinian Code in the seventeenth century informed students and laypeople. Yet despite the generally conservative nature of law, in which novelty is suspect and precedents (préjugés) matter, the jurisconsult Jean Papon insisted they were constructing something new—​not slavishly following Roman law to the letter but modifying existing French customs through its “spirit.”17 The foundation of the new French law, fashioned from case law by judges and then made 13 There were still 144 coutûmiers (“custumals”) in force in mid-​eighteenth-​century France, according to Voltaire in his Dictionnaire philosophique (“Coutumes”). François-​Marie Arouet de Voltaire, Œuvres de Voltaire, ed. M. Beuchot (Paris: Lefèvre, Werdet, and Lequien, 1829), 28:229. 14 The unification of civil law was still on the to-​do list of the National Constituent Assembly of the French Revolution. 15 Jean Domat, Lois civiles dans leur ordre naturel (Paris: Jean-​Baptiste Coignard, 1689), 37. 16 This is from folio 7 of a series of disconnected folios categorized as “On the Origin of Government” (Art. 25) at HRC. This categorization is uncertain. 17 Jean Papon, Recueil d’arrests notables des cours souveraines de France (Paris, 1565), 16:364. Cited in Hanley, “The Jurisprudence of the Arrêts,” 12.

168  Louise Dupin’s Work on Women statutory by kings, was the establishment of parental control over marriage, inspired by Roman laws requiring paternal consent.18 This novel stipulation shifted the control of marriage from ecclesiastical courts to secular ones, and thus from the Church to the State. To be sure, the Council of Trent walked back the Church’s longstanding principle that consent of the spouses sufficed to form a valid marriage (solus consensus) in its Tametsi decree (1563), which categorized marriages between legal minors made in the absence of a parish priest and two other witnesses as “clandestine.”19 Yet Tametsi was never registered by the Parlement of Paris because it failed to meet the stricter standard set in Henri II’s Edict of 1556. Based on decades of rulings by judges such as Gilles Lemaistre, this edict authorized parents to disinherit minors marrying without their consent and increased the age of marital majority to twenty-​ five for women and thirty for men, up from twelve for girls and fourteen for boys in canon law. Only upon reaching the age of (marital) majority could couples marry without parental consent. Informed in turn by the work of jurist Jean de Coras,20 Henri III’s 1579 Ordinance of Blois extended this requirement to majors; made disinheritance automatic for those who eluded parental consent; and associated clandestine marriage with the crime of rapt (elopement by kidnapping of the bride), making it punishable by death. The latter was partly a ploy to remove such cases from ecclesiastical courts, which were not authorized to deal with capital crimes.21 As Dupin notes in “On Rape” (Art. 37), such punishments “can be eluded.” The French state gained jurisdiction of marriage thanks to jurists and judges who redefined it not as a sacrament but as a mechanism of wealth transfer from one generation to the next. This “Marital Law Compact,” as historian Sarah Hanley calls it, ensured the orderly transfer of property, the reproduction of social classes, and the maintenance of public order. But that was just the start. Dupin notes in her long “Preliminary Discourse” that civil law concerns le tien et le mien (“the yours and the mine”). As the entire Law section of the Work on Women attests, the evolution of early modern French civil law was, from the perspective of women, about the mine becoming yours. The relative advantages of customary law for women narrowed as families everywhere increasingly used marriage contracts to tailor resource 18 On consent—​by women too—​in Classical Roman law, see Treggiari, Roman Marriage, 54–​57, 146–​147; Frier and McGinn, A Casebook on Roman Family Law, 65–​69. 19 Reynolds, How Marriage Became One of the Sacraments, 43, 980. 20 On Jean de Coras, see Natalie Zemon Davis, The Return of Martin Guerre (Harvard University Press, 1983). 21 Hanley, “The Jurisprudence of the Arrêts,” 17.

Part III: Law  169 allocation to their satisfaction. As Dupin notes in “On the Power of Husbands; On the Prerogatives That the Law Grants—​and Could Grant—​to Married Women” (Art. 30), the notary drafting the marriage contract, not the priest, was the most important officiant in early modern French marriage.22 In customary law regions, elite families began to withhold a greater proportion of women’s assets from the community property of the marriage—​a reaction to increasing patrilineality in inheritance. However, the protections that elite families sought to build into marriage contracts for their daughters generally only applied if the couple had no children.23 Sons and even the husband’s kin increasingly took precedence over widows.24 By the eighteenth century, fully three quarters of Parisian marriage contracts stipulated a prefix dower—​ a lump sum potentially worth much less than the portion of the husband’s propres that would default to her by customary law.25 While Dupin laments the fading of equality in customary law, Papon’s insistence on French law’s independence from Roman law was not empty rhetoric. Even in the most faithful French vestiges of Roman law, women’s property was ripe for the picking. This is evident in Henri IV’s abrogation of what had been known in Rome as the senatus-​consult Velleianum and Louis XIV’s relaxation of one of Augustus’s laws regarding dowries. The Velleian decree of the Senate (46 ce) aimed to protect unmarried women and widows with resources from being tricked into pledging their property as surety for others.26 The law decreed that women could not be held liable for others. A woman who wanted to make herself liable for a third party had to take the extra step of officially renouncing the default protection that was “her Velleian.” The Parlement of Paris confirmed women’s “Velleian” as late as 1595 in France, but Henri IV abrogated it in an edict registered only by the Parlement of Paris in 1606. It was gradually abrogated in other regions 22 As is evident in Molière’s comedies. In Act IV, scene 2 of The School for Wives (1663), a notary explains dowering options to Arnolphe, who wishes to marry Agnes. Multiple editions of Claude-​ Joseph Ferrière’s Science parfaite des notaires (1682) in the eighteenth century reveal the cultural importance of notaries. 23 Haddad, “Faire du mariage un acte favorable,” 47–​48. 24 Christopher Corley, “Gender, Kin, and Guardianship in Early Modern Burgundy,” in Family, Gender, and Law in Early Modern France, eds. Suzanne Desan and Jeffrey Merrick (Pennsylvania State University Press, 2009), 183–​222, p. 186. 25 Antoinette Fauve-​ Chamoux, “To Remarry or Not: Well-​ Being, Female Property and Widowhood in Early-​Modern France,” in The Transmission of Well-​being: Gendered Marriage Strategies and Inheritance Systems in Europe (Peter Lang, 2009), 413–​446, p. 419. 26 Frier and McGinn, Casebook, 464–​466. On the intent of the senatus-​consult Velleianum in Rome, see Verena Halbwachs, “Women as Legal Actors,” in The Oxford Handbook of Roman Law and Society, eds., Paul du Plessis, Clifford Ando, and Kaius Tuori (Oxford University Press, 2016), 433–​ 455, p. 450.

170  Louise Dupin’s Work on Women of France. By Dupin’s time, women’s pledges of surety were considered valid. In 1664, Louis XIV in turn lifted the portion of Augustus’s Lex Julia de maritandis ordinibus (18 bce) that barred a married woman from consenting to the sale of immovables in her dowry in four written law regions (Lyonnais, Forez, Mâconnais, Beaujolais).27 The purpose of this law was to keep the property of the wife’s family of origin off-​limits from spendthrift husbands and their creditors, as well as to ensure that the wife’s dowry remained intact to support her in widowhood. Thanks to these abrogations, husbands could now leverage for credit their wives’ non–​dotal property and—​in some regions of France—​even the land and buildings included in their dowry. The greatest beneficiaries, though, were the creditors who could finally seize a wife’s property should the husband default on his debts. All a husband had to do to sell his wife’s property was obtain her consent. The consequences of the abrogation of laws intended to prevent the coercion of women are not hard to guess. There was some recourse before the law. In the case of a husband’s gross mismanagement of marital assets, a wife could obtain a séparations de biens (separation of property) allowing her to reclaim some of the property she had contributed to the marriage and to control property inherited or earned after the separation. Such separations were more commonly sought and granted among the working-​class families than among bourgeois or aristocratic families. A married woman could obtain a séparation de corps (separation of persons) from her husband only in cases of extreme domestic brutality. These were particularly rare among elite families.28 Sadly, Dupin’s chapter on “Divorces and Separations” (34) is missing.

27 This change in law can be found in Edict et déclaration des roys Henry IV & Louys XIV des mois d’aoust 1606 et avril 1664 (Michel Talebard, 1664), 6. On the reception of SC Velleianum and of Augustus’s law in French jurisprudence, see Antoine-​Gaspard Boucher d’Argis, “Velléien,” Encyclopédie, ou dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers, etc., eds. Denis Diderot and Jean le Rond d’Alembert. University of Chicago: ARTFL Encyclopédie Project (Autumn 2017 Edition), eds. Robert Morrissey and Glenn Roe, 16:880–​882. http://​encyc​lope​die.uchic​ago.edu/​; and Poumarède, “Mariage,” 800–​801. Several arrêts in Lyon confirmed Augustus’s law as late as the 1650s, even as detractors objected that it was bad for business. Œuvres de M. Claude Henrys, ed. B. J. Bretonnier (Paris: Pierre-​François Emery, 1738), 772–​786. 28 Hardwick, Family Business, 16.

Part III: Law  171

New Prospects If the “spirit” of Roman law—​as selectively interpreted by French jurists—​ provided building blocks for the “new system” despoiling women, what motivated its creation were early modern circumstances: newfound prospects for social mobility, the capital investments they required, and an expanding state infrastructure. In this regard, French women’s property rights were not the targets of humanistic recovery of the Corpus juris civilis (after all, women could own property in Roman law). Rather, these rights were the collateral damage of multigenerational family wealth strategies. And though wives as a legal category lost out, individual women could benefit, through the newfound prestige of their husbands, or the advantageous marriages of their children. The early modern family was a corporate endeavor, whose first step was to build capital. This often began with rentes. These could be rentes foncières, perpetual annuities received in exchange for alienated real estate that began to be practiced in the late Middle Ages. More likely, they were rentes constituées, perpetual annuities received in exchange for a capital sum, which became popular in the sixteenth century, and by the mid-​eighteenth, were the largest portion of the patrimony of many families. Both of these forms of rentes were heritable and like all acquêts, converted into lineage property upon inheritance. Rentes were thus investments for the long term; their accumulation over several generations might enable a family to purchase an office in the magistracy.29 Purchasing the privilege to be paid a salary (what historians call “the venality of offices”) might sound odd to us—​indeed it was a French oddity unique in Europe—​but it was an investment that became even more attractive to ambitious families after Henry IV introduced the Paulette tax in 1604. By paying this annual tax, office-​holders secured the right to pass the office they had purchased along to a son or a nephew. Purchased, taxable, heritable offices were profitable assets and social distinctions, and families that held offices in the judiciary for three generations could attain nobility.30 With such prizes in reach, strategic marriage alliances became ever more critical, as did ensuring the husband’s ability to leverage the assets his wife brought to the marriage toward future gain. Hence the institution of parental control over marriage, the permission granted



29 Geisey, “Rules of Inheritance,” 279–​280. 30 Geisey, “Rules of Inheritance,” 274, 284.

172  Louise Dupin’s Work on Women husbands to alienate their wives’ assets, and in general, the monarchy’s increasingly exclusive recognition of patrilineality. The venality of offices reinforced patrilineal inheritance by creating a new point of entry to the nobility through offices that could only pass from father to son (or from uncle to nephew), and the monarchy privileged patrilineal transmission among the nobility at every opportunity. In “On Nobility and Titles” (Art. 35), which we have not included in our selection, Dupin rues the crown’s devaluation of maternal nobility: “In the past [ . . . ], no one was reputed noble, nor eligible for knighthood if not born of a noble father and mother. Today, as practice would have it, the nobility of mothers hardly matters. In the few occasions where maternal nobility remains necessary, dispensations are so easy to get, that the lack of nobility at birth is hardly considered an impediment.”31 It was the same for other social distinctions. To be a peer, one had to own the fief to which the peerage was attached, and to have descended from the first person to whom the office had been attributed. “The ancient peerages of the kingdom of France were inherited by females as well as by males, and women exercised the responsibilities associated with them,” she explains. “They held seat in Parlement where they opined in deliberations, and they were solemnly called to attend criminal trials implicating peers, of which Du Tillet gives several examples {Loyseau, On the Rights of Great Seigneuries, Article 44, page 133}.”32 However, Dupin cites a 1567 case that was a turning point. The Prince of Mantua was the husband of Henriette de Clèves, who had inherited the peerage of her father, the Duc de Nivernois—​heir to one of the oldest peerages of France. Claiming this peerage for himself, the Prince of Mantua put himself before the Duc de Montmorency, who had only been made a peer in 1551. The Duc de Montmorency objected that the Prince of Mantua was not even a descendant of the Duc de Nivernois. By affirming on the one hand that the peerage could be held by a woman, but ruling on the other that it was “real” (transmissible) rather than “personal” (beginning and ending in the individual—​or perhaps

31 Dupin’s main source (unacknowledged) in Art. 35 is Gilles-​André de la Roque de la Lontière, Traité de la Noblesse (Paris: Etienne Michallet, 1678). 32 The reference to Jean du Tillet is from Charles Loyseau, Traité des Seigneuries (Paris: Abel L’Angelier, 1608), 133–​134. She omits Loyseau’s ensuing commentary: “Women holding peerages should neither be called nor admitted to Parlement to have voice in proceedings, given that they don’t take an oath there, as do the [male] Peers of France as a condition of admittance . . . And there is no drawback to depriving women of this exercise [of the privileges granted by the peerage], just as males are deprived of it when they are minors.”

Part III: Law  173 in this case, in the lineage), the Parlement of Paris treated the privilege of peerage like marital property.33 “Today,” Dupin remarks, it is not even a question as to whether female peerages exist as an office, and several duchies that have remained feminine only lend women the advantage of transferring their duchies to their husbands through their dowries. To better establish that women only half-​own their duchies, a husband can obtain a permission from the king allowing him to enjoy the rights of his wife’s peerage.

Given the visible role Kings played in establishing the “new system” that deprived women of previously held rights and dignities, Dupin had good reason to worry about the vulnerability of civil law to political ideology. One of her prime concerns is that the founding principles of succession in the French monarchy—​masculine primogeniture (the eldest son takes all) and Salic “law” (which bars women from the throne)—​are seeping into civil law to deprive ordinary French women of inheritance. Picking up on Montesquieu’s distinction between civil laws concerning inheritance and political laws of succession,34 Dupin objects in Article 26: “But if there are many occasions in which the sovereign should be an example to his subjects, [inheritance] is not one of them. In elective monarchies, are the inheritances of individuals elective?” Salic law was almost universally recognized to be a legal fiction (as she shows in 21), established for purely pragmatic purposes (whose necessity she challenges in 28). And yet this Salic “idea” (she crosses out “law”), an imaginary thing, has real consequences, influencing inheritance norms among private citizens.35 Similarly, in Article 30, Dupin laments the realization of the ideology of political absolutism: “Monarchical power since Cardinal Richelieu [Louis XIII’s chief minister] has been copied all the way into the home.” In pointing out that the social imitation of monarchical power has concretized the abstract parallel between obedient wives (with respect to husbands) and subjects (with respect to sovereigns) at the heart of absolutist ideology,36 Dupin updates the commonplace comparison of husbands to tyrants with the figure of marital absolutism. 33 Brillon, Dictionnaire des arrêts, 5:4–​5. 34 Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws, trans. Anne M. Cohler, Basia Carolyn Miller, Harold Samuel Stone (Cambridge University Press, 1989), 512. 35 Ruud and Wilkin, “The Real Consequences of Imaginary Things.” 36 As articulated by Jean Bodin in book 1 of Six Books of the Republic (1576).

174  Louise Dupin’s Work on Women

A New Strategy French jurisprudence incorporated the “spirit” of Roman law to maximize the authority and resources of fathers and husbands for the sake of advancing the corporate entity that was the early modern family. However, similar to Joachim du Bellay in his Defense and Illustration of the French Language (1549) against Latin, French jurists were keen to craft a new tradition independent of Roman law. This gap between Roman law and French law provided Dupin her opening. Her strategy in the Law section is to show that French jurists have been opportunistic in their interpretation of Roman law, and thus that French law truly is an invention, based on questionable claims of precedent, just like the Salic “idea” in the History section. Throughout the Law section, Dupin disparages the truism that the Romans wanted women, because of their weakness, “to be in perpetual tutelage.”37 This provision of The Law of the Twelve Tables (449 bce) did not last, and so, “If the first French jurist who proposed this was deeply schooled in Roman law, then he betrayed his conscience,” while others who repeat his words “in good faith” nevertheless do so “in ignorance” (Art. 26). Dupin emphasizes that complacency only endures in the face of historical inaccuracy because the inaccuracy serves a crucial purpose in the present: justifying “the slavery in which women live today in France.” Not surprisingly, Dupin’s most sustained critique of early modern French interpretations of Roman law concerns marriage. Throughout “On Different Forms of Roman Marriage, on the Property Married Women Enjoyed, and on Marriage Today” (Art. 29), she questions French jurists’ emphasis on marriage cum manu, an early form of Roman marriage in which a woman and all her property entering the manus (literally “hand”) or control of her husband. Marriage cum manu was common among elite Roman families in the early Republic. But in marriage “by usus,” a woman could evade the manus of her husband by returning to the home of her family of origin three consecutive nights of the year. By the waning years of the Republic, few women 37 Jean Gillet, Nouveau traité des tutelles et curatelles (Paris: Michel Bobin, 1656), 19, alluding to a speech by Cato (195 bce) cited in Book 34 of Livy’s History of Rome (27–​9 bce). Table 5.1 of The Twelve Tables exempted Vestal Virgins from tutela, implying that it applied to all other women at that time. Michael Crawford, Roman Statutes (Institute of Classical Studies, 1996), 2: 634. See also Frier and McGinn, Casebook, 448–​456. In her “Notes on the Critique of the Spirit of the Laws” (see the volume introduction), Dupin denies Montesquieu’s claim that “women among the first Germanic peoples were also in perpetual tutelage.” She finds “no expression that signifies the perpetual tutelage of women” in barbarian law codes, which Rousseau parsed in Codex Legum antiquarum, ed. Friedrich Lindenbrog (Frankfurt: J. and A. Marnios, 1613).

Part III: Law  175 entered manus upon marrying.38 The imperial Roman jurist Gaius, whose Institutes were a model for Justinian’s, speaks of manus marriage as a thing of the past.39 In classical Rome, most wives either remained under their fathers’ legal authority (which might be limited in practice if they no longer lived in the paternal household) or were sui iuris (legally independent, but still assigned a tutor) by the time of their marriage. In Article 26, Dupin cites a jurist who does acknowledge this: An expert on Roman jurisprudence, the foundation of all jurisprudence today, said in no uncertain terms that to understand marriage contracts one must know that in Roman law, husband and wife did not enter into any society or community of property as a result of marriage, but rather that each remained the owner of what belonged to them, to have free management of it, except for special arrangements determined through individual marriage contracts {Sir Colombet, third edition, page 137, in 1663}.40

She furthermore insists on reciprocity in Roman marriage by underscoring Justinian’s instructions that “the donatio propter nuptias donation [gift on account of marriage] [should] always to be equal to the wife’s dowry and [ . . . ] the conventions for each should be stipulated in the same way {Novellae Constitutiones 90, article 340}.”41 Dupin leads her reader to imagine that far from being “shackled under the authority of tutors,” Roman woman who married sine manu enjoyed a degree of freedom that an early modern French wife could only hope to enjoy in widowhood. The marriages of classical Rome contracted between free-​born citizens are clearly the inspiration for the equitable marriages founded on separate—​and separately managed—​ property that Dupin imagines in “On Education in Marriage” (Art. 42). If modern jurists seek to justify French women’s legal incapacity by linking it to Roman marriage cum manu, Dupin argues instead that the origin of modern marriage and its gross inequality was the most illicit kind of Roman marriage—​one not deemed worthy of mention by modern jurists. These were the marriages of noblemen with (freed) slaves, which developed from the institution of concubinage and that were characterized as disreputable 38 Treggiari, 17–​21, 34. 39 Frier and McGinn, Casebook, 54. 40 Claude Colombet, Abrégé de la jurisprudence romaine, 3rd ed. (Paris: Jacques Le Gras, 1663), 137. 41 Imp. Justiani Novellae Constitutiones, ed. Louis Miré (Basel: Pietro Perna, 1576), 116. Dupin borrowed this book from the King’s library (Le Bouler and Lafarge, “Les emprunts,” 127).

176  Louise Dupin’s Work on Women at best in almost every body of law she might have drawn on. Augustus’s Lex Julia de maritandis ordinibus voided them, and Constantine prohibited men of a distinguished social rank from marrying morally “abject” women—​prostitutes and actresses who may or may not have been slaves—​ in 366 (Theodosian Code 4.6.3).42 Such wives brought no dowry to a marriage. Majorian, reversing Theodosius II’s 428 abrogation of a longstanding law that made dowry a condition for marriage, decreed in 458 that couples marrying without a dowry “must be so branded with the stigma of infamy that neither will the union be adjudged a marriage, nor will legitimate children be procreated by such persons.”43 The purpose of mandating dowry was to prevent individuals from marrying without parental consent, a concern shared by early modern French civil law, as we have seen. But it also discouraged unequal marriages. Without a dowry, Dupin explains, a wife could not expect to enjoy “the privileges that a female citizen, born free and equal to the man she married, possessed” (Art. 29).44 These materially minimalist unions anticipated morganatic marriage, in which a widower of a higher rank lived with a woman of a lower rank. The contracts of morganatic marriages specified that neither the wife nor any of her children would share in the husband/​father’s social rank, or make any claim on his inheritance. The social function of morganatic marriage was therefore to limit claims to a noble family’s property by multiple wives and children.45 The unencumbered husbands of morganatic wives, Dupin claims, are jurists’ inspiration for modern French marriage. The implication of Dupin’s alternative genealogy of modern marriage is that had French marriage law truly modeled itself on Roman marriage, married Frenchwomen would be legally independent and the managers of their own property. Instead, she claims, modern marriage is based on the unequal marriages barely tolerated in Rome, and to mask that fact, French 42 On this law and on sex and marriage in relation to social status, see Thomas McGinn, Prostitution, Sexuality, and the Law in Ancient Rome (Oxford University Press, 1998), 70–​71, 100–​ 102, 105–​107, 129–​135. 43 Cited in Mathew Kuefler, “The Marriage Revolution in Late Antiquity: The Theodosian Code and Later Roman Marriage Law,” Journal of Family History 32 (2007): 343–​370, p. 351. 44 One of Dupin’s contemporaries suggests that dowries made wives independent (in attitude if not in fact): “The practice of taking wives without dowry contributed to [the dependence of women]; and perhaps the ancient Germans, smarter and less greedy than those who today call them barbarians, wisely considered this privation of dowry in their wives as a counterweight necessary to their pride. Perhaps they preferred a poor and docile slave to a rich and imperious mistress, too often a domestic tyrant.” Joseph Barre, Histoire générale d’Allemagne (Paris: Charles J. B. Delespine, 1748), 17. 45 Max Radin, “Legal History of the Morganatic Marriage,” University of Chicago Law Review 4, no. 4 (1937): 597–​617, pp. 599, 608–​610.

Part III: Law  177 jurists have declared marriage cum manu the origin of modern marriage (ignoring the intervening institution of sine manu marriage). Through this historical sleight of hand, they locate a reputable origin for modern marriage inequality. Fascinatingly, Dupin traces French wives’ despoilment to Roman men’s flouting of class distinctions. She thereby implies that the maintenance of a rank-​based hierarchy would have been foundational for women’s equality with men—​a different hierarchy, clearly, than the one that founded Roman men’s status on the subjugation of women and slaves. Dupin’s emphasis on the illegitimacy of unequal marriage conveys her commitment to a society of orders in which gender equality within rank participates in social stratification. The other chapter in which Dupin explicitly addresses the variability of Roman law over time is Article 26 (not included in our selection) in a section in which she shows Romans’ investment in their daughters’ right to inherit. The middle two clauses of the lengthy chapter title—​“On the Rights That Women Possessed Naturally, Initiatives against Those Rights; On Those That Were Restored, and Then Taken Away Again by Modern Usurpations”—​ appear to correspond to her interpretation of Justinian’s “restoration” of equality: The Law of the Twelve Tables that Justinian reintroduced, and that he surely knew better than we do today, established the inheritance of children with no distinction of sex. We know that the decemvirs adapted the tables from laws gathered in Greece, some of which were no doubt incorporated into the Roman government. Citing [the third-​century jurist] Julius Paulus, who had written against the injustice of unequal inheritance, Justinian literally says that since posterity has diverged from [Rome’s original] equality by an outrageous sleight of hand, he wants to reestablish it. He thus began by extending the inheritance of women by one degree and then established inheritance without distinction of sex {Code, Amsterdam edition, 1663, book 6, title 58, article 14}.46

46 Corpus juris civilis, pandectis ad Florentinum archetypum expressis, institutionibus, codice et novellis, eds. Denys Godefroy and Simon van Leeuwen, with notes by Jacques Cujas and Antoni Anselmo, 2 vols. (Amsterdam and Leiden: Joan Blaeu, Louis and Daniel Elzevir, and Frans Hacke, 1663), 2:222–​223. Dupin’s use of this law is confusing, as Justinian wants to put agnatic relatives (male and female) in the same position as sons and daughters, whereas the oldest form of intestate inheritance only allowed agnates to inherit if there were no sons and daughters (who, in effect, inherited equal portions).

178  Louise Dupin’s Work on Women Justinian’s fiery rhetoric about a return to original equality forms a mise-​ en-​ abyme of Dupin’s narrative that French law has deviated from an earlier, more egalitarian standard. She also highlights the Romans’ consistent efforts to elude a law that prohibited testators of the very wealthiest census class from naming women as heirs. She notes that the Voconian law (169–​168 bce) “had never been fully implemented {Cicero, second Verrine Oration}”47 and names its detractors: “Saint Augustine protested against [its] injustice [ . . . ]; Marculf called it impious; and Justinian abrogated it as barbarous.”48 Then she singles out her source: “A modern author who cites these authorities disagrees with them” and concludes “that it is none of these things {On the Spirit of the Laws}.” Montesquieu shrugs at the Voconian law because he does not view inheritance as a natural right.49 Then again, he also says that “the Romans’ institutions put women under perpetual [tutelage], unless they were under the authority of a husband.”50 Wishful thinking abounds in Dupin’s Law section, but it is hard to argue with her claim that people well served by laws are unlikely to question their justice.

Structure and Missing Pieces Dupin’s engagement with the history and content of French civil law forms the argumentative core of the Work on Women. “On Salic Law, Considered as a Law” (28) exposes the converging spirit of public law and private law, as we saw above, while “On Different Forms of Roman Marriage” (29) and “On the Power of Husbands” (30) document the role of modern French marriage law in ensuring the material inequality of men and women. Dupin then uses each 47 As Montesquieu points out in Spirit of the Laws, 530. In the Verrine Orations (70 bce), Cicero protested an edict by the governor Verres that posthumously invalidated the will of Annius Asellius, a wealthy man who had willed his entire estate to his daughter. On the flouting of Voconian law, see Suzanne Dixon, “Breaking the Law to Do the Right Thing: The Gradual Erosion of Voconian Law in Ancient Rome,” Adelaide Law Review 9 (1985): 519–​534, p. 525, 532. 48 Dupin condenses Montesquieu, Spirit of the Laws, 498–​499. Augustine, The City of God against the Pagans, ed. and trans. R.W. Dyson (Cambridge University Press, 1998), 130 (3.21). Marculf ’s formulary (ca. 650–​655) does not mention the Voconian law, but an “impious custom” according to which “sisters may not share of their father’s land along with their brothers.” Alice Rio, The Formularies of Angers and Marculf: Two Merovingian Legal Handbooks (Liverpool University Press, 2008), 195–​196. What Justinian deems “barbarous” in Novella 21 (Montesquieu’s reference), is actually a package of Armenian customs which included barring women from inheritance but also bride price. 49 “feeding one’s children is an obligation of natural right; giving them one’s inheritance is an obligation of civil or political right.” Montesquieu Spirit of the Laws, 500. 50 Montesquieu Spirit of the Laws, 107.

Part III: Law  179 of the following chapters to develop particular aspects of French marriage law. Several of these, inventoried by Sénéchal, subsequently disappeared from public access: “On the Benefits That Custom Allows a Large Portion of Married Women to Enjoy” (31); “Names, Mourning, Second Marriage” (33); and “Divorces and Separations” (34). The structural mystery of the Law section concerns the numbering of the first three chapters. The “Foreword on Law” (27) follows two chapters that were assuredly meant to be part of the Law section: “On the Origin of Government” (25) and “On the Rights That Women Possessed Naturally” (26). Was she undecided as to whether to place them in the History or Law section? Or whether to include them at all? Sénéchal lists “On the Origin of Government” (25) in his inventory, but its location is now unknown. To save space, we excluded from our selection Article 26 and another chapter that is accessible—​“On Nobility and Titles” (35)—​instead integrating material from these chapters in the development above. In the last chapter of the law section, “On Rape” (37), Dupin addresses criminal law. Rape relates to marriage in that the abduction of women (rapt de violence) and elopement (rapt de séduction) were prosecuted as forms of rape (viol), more narrowly defined as sexual violence inflicted on women or girls. Given the importance of marriage to family wealth strategies, the physical removal of a woman or girl from her family for the alleged purpose of marriage brought “injury to a whole family.”51 The Ordinance of 1579 thus charged any man guilty of rapt with the punishment stipulated for rape: the death penalty. Dupin approves these punishments but deplores the failure to enforce them. She gestures to the consequences of this failure in a fragment in the collection of drafts called “On Mores.” There, she reflects on the freedom of mobility denied to elite women based on the real or imagined threat of rape. “Women are constantly warned that they are exposed when they go out alone,” she complains, even though the daughters and wives “of artisans and commoners [ . . . ] come and go at all hours and ages.” While it is normal, she concedes, that “the daughter or wife of a nobleman, or of a bourgeois” moves about less than a working-​class woman because of her station, “it is useless to make a bogeyman from non-​existent chimeras; and since laws owe equal protection to all citizens, who include women, they should, in this respect, be put in the greatest safety by the laws themselves.” In calling for equal protection for all citizens, Dupin emphasizes the responsibility of the law in

51 Hanley, “The Jurisprudence of the Arrêts,” 8.

180  Louise Dupin’s Work on Women conditioning freedom. Instead, just as French civil law ensures women’s material and legal dependence on men, French criminal law neglects women except as representatives of family interests. Consequently, despite rape’s status as a capital crime, women are made to understand that they enjoy bodily autonomy at their own risk.

Article 27. Foreword on Laws The most learned men are not the wisest

Those52 who define right and laws purely and simply as a matter of human convention do not generally attract many followers.53 That would be a good way to define fashion, certainly, but right and the motive for laws derive from a more independent, noble, and more necessary principle. Both natural law—​from which the law of nations was formed54—​and civil law have their origin in nature itself, taken in its most perfect form, which is to say that intelligent beings sought amongst themselves to make the best possible use of their reason.55 Can the laws emanating from such inclinations the world over be anything other than the very definition of equity, have any source apart from natural law, aspire to any end beyond human happiness achieved through the means of justice? Could any possible definition of justice and equity be used to show that women are meant to be subjected to men? The only natural dependence that exists in the world is that of children with respect to their fathers and mothers. Even then, the dependence of children only seems just because it is founded on the needs of the weakest, and does not exceed a certain age, after which men can do as they will, because they are assumed to have become reasonable.56 52 This separately bound manuscript is found at the Harry Ransom Center (MS-​03636, I.B.art.27). The epigraph is a medieval Latin proverb in François Rabelais, Gargantua (1.39) and in Michel de Montaigne, “On Pedantry” (Essays 1.24). Mathurin Régnier popularized the French version—​“les plus grands clercs ne sont pas les plus fins”—​in Les satyres du sieur Régnier (Paris: Toussaint du Bray, 1609). 53 Aristotle distinguishes between nature and convention as bases for political justice in Nicomachean Ethics (5.7). 54 Ius civile, Roman private law, applied to Roman citizens. Ius gentium were laws common to most ancient states. 55 The Hellenistic Stoics and their Latin heir Cicero (De Legibus, book 1) held that human reason discerns natural law. 56 John Locke emphasizes the natural but temporary character of children’s dependence on fathers and mothers in ­chapter 6, “Of Paternal Power” in the second of his Two Treatises of Government (1689) to establish the contractual nature of political authority, as will Rousseau in c­ hapter 2 of Du

Part III: Law  181 Independence and freedom are a natural right belonging to women as well as to men. Right does not belong to any particular kind of person; it belongs to all. Each person receives it equally at birth, develops it along with reason as they grow up, and cherishes it as much as the next person. However, in men and women in every country, this sentiment has always yielded57 to those who exercise disciplinary authority justly and for the common good. There is nothing wiser nor more necessary than the authority of Princes or Republics. It has the same purpose and objective as the authority of parents over their children—​support of the weakest—​, yet it is all the more respectable in that it maintains social order and civil peace. As for the personal authority of men over women, however, we see no necessity, foundation, or end that could be considered reasonable, and wherever modern jurists attribute this authority to men, they should be condemned according to their own principles. The axiom that dependence goes against the order of nature is constantly invoked. How then has dependence become the norm in the case of women? Although we can easily grasp that subordination among the various estates forming a body politic is inevitable for the common good, subordination is not conceivable, just, or useful among peers within each estate.58 After the fate of the first wars introduced slavery among men, some laws were made in favor of the enslaved, and emancipation was invented to restore to some of these men their natural rights. Slavery, which is almost abolished in Europe, is abominable wherever it exists, since it produces tyrants and wretches. Although it may once have seemed reasonable for a few barbarous countries to tolerate slavery, and although that primitive tolerance for slavery subsists today in otherwise orderly nations,59 it is neither just nor reasonable to allow slavery among men capable of another form of public order.60 Yet surprisingly, in a country where slavery is viewed with horror, we have gotten contrat social (1762). By comparing rulers to parents (below), Dupin blurs Locke’s distinction between natural and political authority. 57 Dupin also uses this verb, céder, to talk about women giving up their property to their husbands (Art. 30). Here, she seems to rewrite Thomas Hobbes’s version of the social contract (individuals give up the right to all in the name of security and peace) with the affective language of absolutism (the “sentiment” of freedom “yields” to authority). 58 An addition in Dupin’s hand, this sentence distills the tension between equality (of the sexes) and hierarchy (of rank) at the heart of her political thought. 59 The manuscript reveals that Dupin rectifies her initial denial of the existence of slavery in Europe through the addition of these qualifying clauses. See Sue Peabody, There Are No Slaves in France: The Political Culture of Race and Slavery in the Ancien Régime (Oxford University Press, 1997). 60 police. Are some people incapable of a form of social organization other than slavery? See the introduction to Part II. Dupin’s ambivalence echoes Montesquieu’s in Spirit of the Laws, 251.

182  Louise Dupin’s Work on Women used to seeing married women—​their freedom constrained in every imaginable way—​without even the hope of emancipation.61 Has anything beautiful or great ever been said about individual right and about liberty that did not apply to women as well as men? No one can deny that women have an equal right to real justice; how can it be that distributive justice seems to have ignored this truth?62 How is it that today women have been totally forgotten in discussions of natural law—​the basis of all forms of right—​and in the justice of civil law? Do people really believe that locating the advent of an injustice in an earlier time makes it just? Especially recently, jurists have gone looking in various countries and eras for specific points and occasions involving particular kinds of women. Taking these laws indiscriminately from different forms of government, whether legitimate or tyrannical, they have derived from them universal principles. Some laws, which may have been good in certain countries during a given period of time and in specific circumstances, may cease to be appropriate as times and circumstances change. {The senatus-​consult Silanianum condemned to death all the slaves—​men and women alike—​of any man who was killed, however he was killed, and treated as a murderer any person who provided shelter to individuals whose innocence in such cases was incontestable.}63 Everyone knows that laws themselves have erred on occasion, even if the only proof we had of this fact were on the one hand, the Greek laws that established the death penalty for any kind of crime, and on the other hand, those later laws—​practiced even in France—​that reversed them, by imposing a fine for any and all crimes instead. We read in the Spirit of the Laws that fines were meant to put an end to hatred and vengeance.64 We suspect that there was another way of limiting these destructive passions than to sanction injustice.65 With no consideration for variation in governments, eras, or legislators; without regard for equality as it was primitively established or for its considerable duration, jurists have cited anything and everything that could be taken to undermine the rights of women, with no explanation as to the 61 On the comparison of marriage to slavery in feminist writing of the seventeenth century, see Green, “The Rights of Woman and the Equal Rights of Men,” 403–​420. 62 Distributive justice: the distribution of benefits (and burdens) in a given society resulting from its social, political, and juridical structures. 63 On the senatus-​consult Silanianum (10 ce), see Montesquieu, Spirit of the Laws, 258. 64 Montesquieu describes a Frankish law wherein a murderer pays a fredum (price of peace) to the family of the murdered person in order to avoid retribution (Spirit of the Laws, 651). 65 Literally, “to put a tau on injustice”—​a heraldic cross in the shape of a “T” referencing the seal inscribed on the forehead of the redeemed in Revelation 7:1–​8.

Part III: Law  183 purpose, modification, non-​ implementation or even abrogation of the laws they cite. Little wonder that we are now in the dark not only about natural right that is common to women and men, but also about the socially instituted rights that women possessed for so long. Just because men do everything and have everything today, jurists have endeavored to establish that it has always been so. Examination reveals the opposite. Nevertheless, almost all modern commentators of laws have approached the matter in this spirit, to the extent that we can say that today, dispossessing women is the spirit of the law,66 just as we can say that it is not the spirit of justice. Thus are women are excluded by law from all civil functions and denied the management of their estate, and we might embarrass the cleverest jurist, were we to request an explanation of the origin of each of these exclusions. That men took over everything purely and simply: all well and good! But it is a gross imposture to base this usurpation on the incapacity of women, on nature, and on customs from time immemorial; we can quite easily disprove it in any case. What most surprises us in the works of jurists, however, are their gratuitous barbs against women. We naturally expect jurists to know everything relating to justice and to develop it in their works. Their books should serve as a depository of public reason, which people who lack knowledge (for whatever accident or cause) can consult to understand their duties towards others and to grasp what others owe them, so that each has his due equitably. Unfortunately, that is not generally what we find in the many compilations of laws and in commentators’ even more numerous interpretations of them. Do the insults and satires against women in these books fulfill the objective that we should find in them? If men are unjust in administering justice—​if they are unjust in speaking of justice and in her name—​. . . when will they ever be just?67

66 Dupin plays on the title of Montesquieu’s Spirit of the Laws, while also calling out his sexism. 67 Dupin wrote next and then crossed out: “We often hear it said that laws are perfectly beautiful. Women aren’t treated by them in a manner that would lead them to see all laws in that light. But still we must agree that laws have hardly treated women as badly as the reflections and commentaries of jurists have. There are few jurists who haven’t let loose on women with infinitely reproachable rhetoric for all sorts of reasons.”

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Article 28. On Salic Law, Considered as a Law Contrariety of the law to its purpose We have spoken historically of Salic law to refute the supposed venerability of its origin as well as to discredit cases to which jurists have attempted to apply it.68 We will consider it here according to its political effects, examining it as a law with respect to its stated purpose and in terms of the benefits it is said to produce.69 The principal purpose of Salic law, as it is understood by modern scholars, is to perpetuate the governance of the kingdom by princes of a particular line. The goal is wise and just, but the means—​a law that excludes women—​ are neither wise nor just and even counteract the intention of the law. Don’t princesses hail from the same house as the princes who are their brothers? How would we judge a father, who, to enrich his children, deprived them of half of their succession? What would we think of a ship captain embarking on a long voyage who threw half of his provisions overboard as soon as he was at sea, for fear of lack? The legitimate successors of a prince ensure his tranquility, make his people safe, are the surest promise of his power and of peace. How could any­ body have thought it a good idea to reduce such a great good by half? How did Nature manage to accustom herself to hearing the father of twelve girls lament his lack of children and inheritors?70 Such complaints are as inappropriate and harmful as the practice that deprives these daughters of inheritance is unjust and odious. The principle of not allowing a foreign prince to govern a nation should be upheld as fundamental to that nation. Its justice is such that it can and should be declared loudly and freely, without superfluous support from vain reasons and pretexts. But how can we reasonably square the exclusion of women from the crown with this principle?71 How can we look on coldly as princesses are made strangers in their own nation, when they might prove worthy 68 Manuscript from the Osborn Collection of the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University (GEN MSS VOL 225). 69 Dupin debunks Salic law as an invention in Art. 21. Here she contends with its practical function: averting control of France by a foreign prince. 70 Possibly an allusion to “The Twelve Dancing Princesses.” In this folk tale, the father promises his kingdom (through marriage to one of his twelve daughters) to the suitor who discovers how and where they wear out their dancing shoes every night. One man succeeds, becoming the king’s heir. 71 exclusion. A formal declaration that bars a person from an honor, rank, or claim.

Part III: Law  185 of governing and when they could ensure the nation’s happiness as its most steadfast support?

Insufficiency of the law In barring women and sanctioning an infinite succession of males, Salic law doesn’t sufficiently preclude the domination of foreign princes. Several times, the royal house of France has supplied princes to other nations, and their descendants—​having become truly foreign by their birth and their upbringing in another country—​could still end up in line to succeed to the throne were France to find herself without princes. We know all too well that in such cases, renunciations cannot be trusted.72

A more certain supplement A national law declaring that a prince neither born nor raised in the nation could never govern it, together with a law stipulating that princesses must choose their husbands among princes of the blood73—​as long as there were some—​, would better preclude the domination of foreign princes and would be more just than a law instituting the exclusion of these princesses. In the absence of princes of the blood, what disadvantage could there possibly be in selecting a young prince without children or other heirs from a foreign court, just as we select princesses today? In any case, this precaution would sufficiently obviate the foreign domination we fear without resorting to an unjust recourse that contradicts the goal to preserve power and peace and undermines the true interests of the nation. Impartial readers, we know, will not give pause to the frivolous objections that the marriage of reigning princesses could be a cause of a war, or that foreign princes might object to leaving their fathers’ states to establish themselves in a country where they could never reign. With regard to the first point, nobody wishes passionately to marry someone from afar. Any 72 Dupin’s comment may reflect French anxiety surrounding the Bourbon line in Spain. In 1700, Philippe d’Anjou, grandson of Louis XIV, succeeded to the throne of Spain. Phillip V of Spain renounced his (and his descendants’) right to the crown of France in 1713 at the Peace of Utrecht that concluded the Spanish War of Succession. Accordingly, when he died in 1746, his son, Ferdinand VI of Spain, made no moves on the French crown, to the great relief of the French. 73 Descendants, through males, of grandsons of the kings of France.

186  Louise Dupin’s Work on Women sovereign who declared war on a reigning princess based on this pretext would infallibly allege another pretext to declare war on a reigning prince. As for the second point, the fate of a prince with brothers ahead of him in line for the throne would be even less desirable in the land of his birth than in the foreign country in which he might find himself husband to a queen.

Response to possible objections Isn’t this a case of inventing a monster in order to combat it to suppose that a princess inflicts a formidable master on her nation by marrying? Does sovereign power really have a master to fear? Doesn’t the nation ensure its own indivisibility when it is in the hands of a legitimate sovereign?

The principle of equality, continued The principle of equality that we uphold in this work commits us to more than the position that princesses should enjoy the right of succession. We moreover say that the law, in its exact justice, should impartially select the oldest child to reign, whether male or female.74 Even if this would spare us just one regency in four centuries, it would be worth it for that reason alone.75 It is true that beforehand, princesses would need to receive the same instruction as that given to princes, but there are no downsides to educating princesses, and there are to the contrary great drawbacks to raising them in ignorance. No one has dared to do the latter, given the disasters that would result were princesses deprived of tutelage and considering that they become regents, even in states where succession is regulated according to Salic law.76

74 Substituting gender-​neutral birthright for masculine primogeniture may strike the reader as a weak endorsement of the principle of equality. 75 A regency involves a family member acting as a placeholder for a king not yet of age to rule. Regencies were reputed to bring instability within France and thus vulnerability to foreign designs. The regent Philippe d’Orléans (1715–​1723), nephew of Louis XIV and great uncle of Louis XV (5 years old at the death of his great-​grandfather), experimented with government and finances. See Art. 21 for Dupin’s defense of France’s female regents. 76 Dupin likely refers to Maria Theresa, Holy Roman Empress, Queen of Hungary and Bohemia, and Archduchess of Austria (1717–​1780). Charles VI neglected his daughter’s instruction even though, circumventing Salic law, he declared her heir to the Habsburg hereditary possessions (see below). Edward Crankshaw, Maria Theresa (Longman Publishers 1969), 20.

Part III: Law  187 It is strange that this law emerged in a country surrounded by peoples who never put forth this idea—​such as Spain, Portugal, Naples and Sicily, England, Denmark, Switzerland to this day, Russia, Hungary—​and that politesse and gallantry are the distinguishing characteristics of the people who invented this law.77

Remarks on the legend of the great pavilion of France Isn’t it amusing that the great pavilion on the French coat of arms was inscribed with a device supposedly related to Salic law: Lilies neither toil nor spin?78 This motto was taken from the words of the Gospel where Jesus Christ advises his disciples not to worry about the future and to trust in Providence.79 What could these precepts possibly have in common with the device on the coat of arms of a nation composed of orders, a nation that must remain vigilant about the future as well as the present? The device supposedly alludes to women, as destined to spin and to work—​not to reign. The futility of this interpretation merits no reply. Still, we might point out that men engage in all sorts of manual labor just as women do. Moreover, spinning is a very useful occupation. Is it really more scornful than all other kinds of work? Must all women do it? And are women with rights to rule kingdoms obliged to spin as well?

77 The ethos of refined sociability was forged in the salons of Catherine de Vivonne, Marquise de Rambouillet and Madeleine de Scudéry. During the reign of Louis XIV, the French celebrated cross-​ gender interaction as the hallmark of a distinctly French form of freedom. Dupin underscores the discrepancy between the prominence of women in France’s cultural prestige and their exclusion from political power. 78 The Jesuit Claude-​François Ménestrier relates this device to Salic law in his Abregé méthodique des principes héraldiques, ou du véritable art du blason (Lyon: Benoist Coral, & Antoine Du Perier, 1661), “Des armoiries,” section XI. Most editions of this work, considered authoritative in the eighteenth century, include an engraving of the French coat of arms with the pavilion that Dupin describes. 79 Luke 12:27 and Matthew 6:28. “Consider how the lilies of the field grow. They do not labor or spin. Yet I tell you, not even Solomon in all his splendor was dressed like one of these.” But Dupin gleaned this from Voltaire: “People have always sought to fortify their opinions, whatever they might be, with the authority of sacred books (gospel); supporters of Salic law cited the passage lilies neither work nor spin; and from there they concluded that girls, who must spin, should not reign in the kingdom of lilies. However, lilies don’t work, and a prince must work; the leopards of England and the towers of Castile don’t spin any more than the lilies of France, and girls can reign in Castile and England.” Voltaire, Essai sur les mœurs et l’esprit des nations et sur les principaux faits de l’histoire depuis Charlemagne jusqu’à Louis XIII, in Œuvres complètes, vol. 12 (Paris: Garnier Frères, 1878), 15. This work was not published in its entirety until 1756 but Voltaire started working on it in 1741. He circulated parts of it in the Mercure de France beginning in 1745 and undoubtedly shared more of it with Dupin. See Marty, Louise Dupin, 64–​65.

188  Louise Dupin’s Work on Women People also pretend to understand the word “labor” in this device to mean “childbearing,” but we must acknowledge that all of these interpretations, which are so far removed from the meaning that Christ gave these words, are even further removed from common sense. It is moreover clear that the pretty device that now adorns Salic law is a modern invention, if we consider that fleurs de lys only began to appear on the escutcheon and seal of France around 1200.80 There is consensus neither about the origin nor about the content of the figure that filled the space of the escutcheon prior to that: bees and toads,81 some say, but in any case, the device is more recent than the lilies it accompanies, and likewise, the pretty meanings assigned to the device can only be more recent than it. Surely the most uncouth mind, imbued with an opinion similar to the one expressed in the current interpretation of the device, would have easily found more appropriate words with which to express the conviction that women were made for work alone. And isn’t it remarkable that this beautiful device has acquired so much credit that every prince who fancies himself a jurist imagines himself to be a pillar of monarchy when he cites it and congratulates himself for having cluttered his mind with it? Emperors have practiced Salic law more simply without inventing allegorical legends to justify it. Recently, however, Charles VI has felt the inconvenience of this supposed law and promulgated the Pragmatic Sanction to allow his daughter to reign today as the queen of Hungary.82 The Stadtholder would have felt less secure in his power if that power had not been not confirmed in his male and female posterity.83 80 Ménestrier argued that coats of arms originated during the crusades of the eleventh and twelfth centuries, contesting a more traditional view that they were of ancient origin. See Guy Mayaud, “L’érudition héraldique au XVIIe siècle: la question des origines des armoiries,” École nationale des chartres, 2013. http://​www.char​tes.psl.eu/​fr/​positi​ons-​these/​erudit​ion-​her​aldi​que-​au-​xviie-​sie​cle. 81 Claude Malingre recounts the legend that Clovis, King of the Franks (481–​511), exchanged toads for fleurs de lys on his coat of arms following his conversion to Christianity and reproduces a coat of arms featuring three toads in his Traicté de la loi salique, armes, blasons, & devises des François (Paris: Claude Collet, 1614), 73–​76. 82 Charles VI was by 1711 the sole surviving male member of the house of Habsburg. He had no sons. In the Pragmatic Sanction (1713), he designated his daughters as legitimate successors to the Habsburg hereditary possessions, including lands in Austria, Hungary, Croatia, Italy, and the Netherlands. He imposed the Sanction by making major concessions to other states, which reneged as soon as he died. His eldest daughter, Maria Theresa, therefore had to fight for her inheritance throughout the War of the Austrian Succession (1740–​1748). Maria Theresa was crowned Queen of Hungary in June 1741; by 1743 she had reconquered Bohemia, and by 1745, she had secured, through her husband, the title of Holy Roman Empress. 83 William IV, Prince of Orange-​Nassau, was made the first hereditary Stadtholder of all the Provinces of the Dutch Republic in November 1747 following the French invasion. He had four daughters before he had a son in 1748. Though William designated female as well as male progeny as potential heirs, this son was appointed Stadtholder at his death in 1751.

Part III: Law  189

Influences of Salic Law If Salic law is good in itself—​if it is the only means of preventing a foreign prince from dominating the nation—​, must a bad pretext support a good principle? Should we deny women a hereditary claim to the French crown based on paltry excuses that enable injustice on a daily basis and that perpetuate contempt against half of the universe? If the current policy of France wisely decrees that kings attain their majority when they turn fourteen and that from that moment on, everything is done in their name, the same policy, if it is good, should prevent private citizens from adopting this royal practice. However, now a fifteen-​or sixteen-​ year old husband authorizes the actions of his twenty-​five-​year old wife!84 Isn’t that a ridiculous play of masculine despotism borrowed from the Salic idea?85 The primacy of age being uncontroversially much more natural and reasonable than that of the sexes, custom will always resist that an eighteen-​ year old man, having lost his father, should govern his mother, his older sisters, and his wife, if by chance she were older than him. If this form of government had been the intention of the Creator, he would have made it so that males mature earlier than females, and would have granted them recognizable superiority of reason and mind, whereas their supposed superiority is so invisible, that it is difficult to imagine how anyone even came up with the idea. The respect that a people owes its prince has so little proportion with the respect that private individuals owe to one another that there can be no comparison between them. In our day, a great man appeared quite small when he insisted on letting his nephew pass before him through doors because this nephew was the son of the eldest of his family. The idea of a prince’s sovereign dignity didn’t save him from ridicule. Isn’t it a kind of Salic law that the custom of certain provinces defers everything to the eldest son, almost nothing to the younger ones, and nothing at all to daughters? The intimate union of provinces and inheritances that comprise the kingdom is respectable and necessary to sustain the duration and the majesty of the throne of kings. It is wise that the possessions of great lords, whose conservation is precious to the state, are governed in the same fashion. But the law would be just, instead of being unjust, if it were 84 Dupin redeploys a reference to Antoine Séguier’s 1608 judgment establishing this precedent, crossed out here, in Art. 30. 85 Dupin crosses out “Salic law” and writes “Salic idea.”

190  Louise Dupin’s Work on Women attributed to the firstborn, male or female. When there is a female inheritor of a noble family, she carries her name, her coat of arms and her possessions into a family where she is well-​received. It is amusing that what seems simple and necessary in such cases doesn’t seem so when considered in terms of justice. I once heard it said in conversation that Salic law could very well have been extended to all inheritances among private citizens. That seemed to me the pinnacle of injustice and of folly. A few fans of Salic law added coldly that it wouldn’t change much. Yet those who expect great benefits from their maternal line probably wouldn’t make the same judgment, and those who consult equity and whose views rise above prejudices would no doubt be disgusted by such a proposition if it were made seriously.

Influences of the principle of equality If the principles of equality we believe to have proven in this work were recognized in each circumstance of life, instead of being subverted with contrary principles, as has been the case; if the laws of inheritance were equal, men, in truth, would have no reason to believe that they were better than women. Yet we can imagine that this wouldn’t cause them to be any less happy in general, and that fathers and mothers of great families, beginning with princes, would be spared the sad worry of engendering a daughter rather than a son. The mothers of these children, concerned only with bringing them into the world, wouldn’t be distraught to give birth to beings like themselves; they wouldn’t be vulnerable to the revolution86 caused by the joy of engendering a son or the sorrow of having only produced a daughter. The milk of wet-​nurses wouldn’t tarry as a result of hope or fear, feelings instilled in them by the promise of higher or lower wages. Even the people, who also have been trained to prefer princes to princesses, based on the greater or lesser quantity of fireworks set off at festivities celebrating royal births and the relative amount of wine poured there, would gain by the idea of equality, and would soon be accustomed to it. Furthermore, in the months leading up to these events, the conversations of an entire nation wouldn’t circle around the useless desire for the birth of a prince when Providence87 wishes to grant

86 révolution. Here, emotional upheaval. 87 ciel. Literally “heavens.”

Part III: Law  191 the world a princess. Noble families and those who imitate them would abandon their usual expressions of jubilation and their same vain laments. Families of a lower rank, who seek out protection for their children in the form of godparents, either wouldn’t have to apologize for only being able to give them a girl to hold, or wouldn’t imagine that presenting them with a boy occupies them with a more dignified task. The only concern, when children come into the world, would be to wish them and their mothers’ good health, and after the birth, to inquire as to how both parties were doing, and to thank Providence for whatever human creature is born, which would surely be more reasonable than the ordinary—​or rather extraordinary—​compliments rehearsed upon these occasions.

Article 29. On Different Forms of Roman Marriage, on the Property Rights That Married Women Enjoyed, and on Marriage Today Foreword The88 Romans, who borrowed their laws and customs from the nations that preceded them, practiced several sorts of marriages: those they called by confarreatio, those enacted by coemptio, and those established by usus.89 We will discuss these types of marriage in what follows. We can assume that these different kinds of marriage existed in France at least until the second dynasty, since we see that Pepin the Short married a woman with whom he fathered several children, and then married another woman from whom he had more children, sharing his assets with them just as he had with the first.90 We’ve come across further examples of the same sort. 88 Between its sale at auction in 1958 and its purchase by the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, this incomplete chapter (Osborn c403) lost its title cover and nine other folios, which are now located at the Abbaye de Chaalis (S. 5623). According to Frédéric Marty, those folios are not advanced drafts. The Beinecke folios were glued to bound tabs in an order different from that recorded by Anicet Sénéchal before the sale. We have done our best to restore the order viewed by Sénéchal. The final folio (in our ordering) shows a layering of three hands: Dupin adding to what Rousseau added to a flowing third script. In a different draft of parts of this chapter titled “Marriage and Feminine Instruction,” Dupin crossed out what appears to be its thesis: “In keeping to [the study of] laws, we can affirm that the general forms of marriage were not originally what they are today.” 89 Dupin orders these forms of marriage following Claude Colombet in Paratitla in quinquaginta libros pandectarum [1657] (Paris: Jean Jombert, 1685), 200. The standard ordering—​by usus, confarreatio, coemptio—​was established by Gaius (Institutes 1.110), ca. 161 ce. Treggiari, 16–​17. 90 According to a thirteenth-​century legend, Pepin the Short, first Carolingian King of the Franks (751–​768), repudiated a first wife, Leutberga, to marry Bertrada of Laon. Dupin contrasts Pepin’s

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Customs in Athens In Athens, a fiancé’s head was covered with figs, palm fruits, vegetables, and little copper coins. The same thing was done to servants entering into the service of a master for the first time {Montfaucon, Antiquity Explained and Represented in Images, volume 6, page 214}. If this practice had concerned the fiancée instead of the groom, those reporting this fact would certainly have taken care to point out that the ceremony was meant to instruct her that she was entering under her husband’s domination. We will not trifle with such interpretations. They derive too little from reason and too much from vain partiality.

Marriage by confarreatio It is not true, as some have said, that marriage by confarreatio was practiced only among pontiffs, but it is true that pontiffs were required to marry in this manner.91 Marriage by confarreatio was the most respected kind among Romans; these contracts were forged through special ceremonies. Bride and groom came together, heads veiled. They sat on a sheepskin and ate cakes. It was with respect to these marriages that the law of Romulus decreed that those who married by sacred laws entered together into a community of property, sacrifices, and authority in the home and in the family. If the husband were to die, the wife inherited his property in equal portion with any children they might have, and if they had no children, then she inherited all of it.92 We find in The History of French Law that in ancient Roman law, the husband was sole heir to his wife, which seems unjust with respect to the children, mainly.93 We read in the same History that as time went on, husbands generosity with Bertrada to the meager benefits of second wives in Rome—​the “unequal” marriages addressed below. 91 Confarreatio marriages, named for the spelt grain in the ritually consumed bread, involved the sacrifice of a sheep. Pontiffs were the highest-​ranking priests in the early Roman republic, selected from patrician families. The custom of confarreatio continued until the end of paganism though it no longer created real manus after 11 bce. Treggiari, 25–​26. 92 Manus marriage put the wife in the same legal position as a daughter; hence her equal share with children in intestate succession. Treggiari, 29. 93 Not in Claude Fleury’s Histoire du droit françois (1674). On inheritance between spouses in Rome, see Treggiari, 379–​386; Frier and McGinn, Casebook, 337–​338.

Part III: Law  193 and wives were designated as each other’s heirs in certain cases, even when the deceased had other family relations. Subsequently, this inheritance of the husband’s property by the wife and of the wife’s property by the husband was abrogated. Husband and wife nevertheless retained the freedom to bequeath to one another, a right that continues to exist in regions with written law.

Marriage by coemptio Boethius relates the phrase used in marriage by coemptio. Roughly comparable to the consent that a priest asks of bride and groom today, husband and wife asked each other the same question—​“Do you want to be a materfamilias?” or “Do you want to be a paterfamilias?”—​and answered each other in the same way, each giving their consent.94 We can infer from this formula how the words were to be understood: the expression paterfamilias designates a man who is in his own power (sui juris), while that of materfamilias designates a woman with the same status—​as even a modern jurist’s interpretation indicates {Domat, Legum delectus, page 4, column 1}.95 We believe that this coemptio phrase was the general and constant format for marriage between equals. Adhering to the meaning of the word coemptio, which signifies “mutual purchase,” and associating with that meaning what we know about the reciprocity of nuptial gifts, words, and ceremonies in the oldest nations, confirms to us that all was equal in this necessary alliance between men and women. These are our reasons for challenging96 the jurists of our time who say that coemptio simply meant that a husband purchased his wife. They describe marriage by coemptio as an ancient form of Roman marriage adopted by the French and represented by the gift of a few coins. This ceremony signified, according to them, that the entirety of the bride’s property comprised her dowry and thereby passed into the hands of her husband {Monsieur 94 The sixth-​century Roman philosopher Anicius Manlius Severinus Boethius describes the obsolete practice of marriage by coemptio in In Ciceronis Topica (2.3.14). On coemptio, see Treggiari, 25–​28. 95 Ulpian uses materfamilias to designate a woman who is legally independent and equivalent in this way to a paterfamilias (Dig. 1.6.4 pr Ulp.). However, a materfamilias did not hold power over other free individuals, as a man does when he is paterfamilias, so she lacked authority within the family. She was the head of a family “that begins and ends with herself.” The Digest of Justinian, translated by Alan Watson (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1985) vol. I, page 18. On materfamilias, see McGinn Prostitution, 147–​156; Treggiari, 34–​35. Domat cites Ulpian in Les lois civiles dans leur ordre naturel, le droit public, et legum delectus (Paris: Pierre-​François Emery, 1713). 96 récuser: to reject the judgment or testimony of a person whose impartiality is at issue.

194  Louise Dupin’s Work on Women Colombet}.97 A law enabling a man to purchase a woman and her 100,000 écus for more or less the price of a few coins: what a beautiful semblance of justice—​and so very legitimately conceived in Italy and France! For we have already said that among the Romans, each of the two spouses remained in possession of his or her own property, benefiting from it, with the exception of particular items that passed from one to the other, via a specific marriage contract.98

By usum marriages One author claims that in the form of marriage that Romans called by usus—​ which was, according to him, the basis of common law marriage—​a husband received from his wife (or from her family) a sum called a dowry, but a wife also had assets called parapherna that she left—​or didn’t leave—​at her husband’s disposal as she deemed appropriate {Loyseau}.99 Married women had, besides that, assets called res receptitia that they reserved for themselves. This passage in Cicero’s Topica is well worth disputing: “When a woman comes under the manus (legal control) of her husband, all her property goes to the husband under the designation of dowry.”100 In response to this passage, we would first like to point out that the Emperors Severus and Antoninus issued an ordinance allowing a husband who was designated as curator to his wife to decline101 this responsibility as any stranger might do. [If he declined curatorship of his wife,] it would serve no purpose to object to him that he had on occasion handled her business or even [to insist] that he 97 In support of this claim, Colombet glosses Ulpian: “Sometimes, through a sale, the daughter is bought again by the father as the husband’s wife, thus becoming twice the property of the husband.” In other words, the father has purchased the status of wife for his daughter (by means of a dowry), while the husband has purchased the wife (symbolically through coins). On dowry: “the whole sum of [the goods included in the dowry] passes to the husband as by right of purchase, although it naturally remains the wife’s property.” Colombet conveniently ignores the second clause of the sentence. Colombet, Paratitla, 200, 202 (23.2 and 23.3). 98 In Art. 26, cited in the introduction to Part III. 99 Loyseau addresses the three categories of property a wife could possess—​dowry, parapherna, and res receptitiae—​in Traicté du déguerpissement et délaissement par hypothèque (1597), 2.4.4. Res receptitiae was a gift to the bride from someone other than a male ascendant to be included in her dowry; it had to be returned to the donor upon her death. Treggiari, 351. In a crossed-​out passage, Dupin doubts Loyseau’s claim in Traicté du déguerpissement (2.3.8) that parapherna consisted only in a few utensils in Normandy, and that Roman husbands had possession of their wives’ paraphernal property. 100 It is not clear where Dupin meant to place this sentence from Cicero’s Topica (23), which she cites in Latin. On this passage, see Treggiari, 29. 101 The verb is se dispenser, to grant oneself permission to act against common law.

Part III: Law  195 appeared to be in charge of administering her assets. For what he may have done out of affection should not count against him; he acted as a husband, not as a curator {Pellisson, On the Institutions of Justinian, p. 255, 19}.102 If perpetual tutelage was as well-​established back then as it is now, would declining the responsibility of curatorship to one’s wife even have been an option? If curatorship had been given as a sign of the superior capacity of men and of the incapacity of women, would the law have spoken in this way, allowing men the means to elude it?

Unequal marriages To this we add unequal marriages, even though modern authors do not discuss them. We are inclined to believe that they were considered marriages by usus. The name doesn’t matter. What is certain, in any case, is that the Romans tolerated marriages between free men and slave women or freed slave women. Evidently, Romans also tolerated marriages between noblewomen and their male slaves, since Theodosius issued a decree barring noblewomen from contracting such marriages. Not that unequal marriages were admired when men made them. It was even considered shameful for a man to marry a girl who carried no dowry {Cujas}.103 This shame was no doubt thought to serve as a deterrent. Yet whether the practice of unequal marriage was borrowed from nations where it was acceptable for a man to marry several times [successively] and to grant lesser privileges to a second or third wife than he had to the first, or whether unequal marriages were tolerated because they removed the scandal of illicit commerce, such marriages did exist in Rome. It was not considered unjust to deny to a woman inferior to oneself—​ usually a slave or freed slave—​the privileges that a female citizen, born free and equal to the man she married, possessed. Unequal marriages were thus permitted. However, the husband had to ensure his wife’s subsistence should he die before her, regardless of her negligible contribution to the marriage. 102 Justinian confirmed an ordinance issued by Antoninus Pius (138–​161 ce) and Septimius Severus (193–​211 ce) excusing husbands from acting as curators for their own wives. Such exceptions are necessary because the duty of a curator involves “much pain without any profit.” Paul Pellisson-​ Fontanier, Paraphrase des Institutions de l’empereur Justinien (Paris: La compagnie des libraires du Palais, 1664), 235. On curatorship, see Art. 36. 103 Dupin refers to the Codicis Theodosiani (Lyon: Guillaume Rouillé, 1566) edited by French jurist Jacques Cujas. Roman law discouraged cross-​rank marriage and the Theodosian Code reinforced these prohibitions. Treggiari, 43–​54 and 57–​66. Dupin appears to be conflating two laws by Constantine and Majorian (see the introduction to Part III).

196  Louise Dupin’s Work on Women And, after her husband’s death, she received a pension assessed on the value of his property—​the origin, apparently, of today’s dowers {We will speak of dowers in the following article}.104 Morganatic marriage in Germany certainly mirrors the unequal marriages we are talking about more precisely than ordinary marriage does.105 Nevertheless, marriage in France today entails such unequal conditions for husband and wife that we cannot doubt that the practices surrounding second marriages—​or otherwise very unequal marriages—​were its source rather than marriage by coemptio.106 Unequal marriage was nevertheless able to flourish between men and women and even to make them happy, mostly thanks to the Christian religion’s perfection of morals; this practice seems to have been adopted by the very first centuries of the Church. Other, more ceremonious forms of marriage were abandoned around the same time, rejected as pagan ideas and practices.

Observation on dowries and on dowers We shall set aside modern interpretations of marriage practices. Modern jurists are, on this point, too eccentric to listen to or even to answer in detail. The best critique we can offer is to recommend reading the passages of their work where they discuss marriage and women. We think that dowries and dowers are of the same origin and nature, that they were equivalent to one another at the outset—​namely, as a gift of mutual advantage that bride and groom made to one another.107 It would take a strong tincture of newfangled interpretations and a very weak understanding of the practice of ancient law to support the contrary. We have reported the articles of law that serve to prove our opinion.

104 Justinian stipulated that poor women lacking a dowry had a right to a quarter of the husband’s net worth upon his death. Some historians trace dowers to bridewealth practices among the barbarian kingdoms. 105 Morganatic marriage developed from the Roman (and then feudal) institution of concubinage in which a man of a higher rank—​often a widower—​lived with a woman of a lower rank. 106 Dupin traces French married women’s disenfranchisement to Roman men’s flouting of class distinctions. See the introduction to Part III. 107 In an addition subsequently crossed out, Dupin clarifies what she has in mind: the donatio propter nuptias of the later Roman Empire, addressed in Art. 26 (see introduction to Part III). This was a marriage gift from the husband or his family to the wife, equal to the value of the dowry. It was to be managed by him, but he could not alienate it.

Part III: Law  197 The modern meaning of pretium virginitatis, which some have wished to conflate with “dower,” is absurd, given that a dower can apply to a woman marrying for the tenth time.108 The claim that a “dowry” designates all of the property that has come or may come into a woman’s possession and that is therefore eligible to pass into the hands of her husband, is also absurd, considering: —​ that among the Greeks, married women had their reserved property,109 as they did in Rome as well, and that among the Gauls, wives had their own savings110 that were not at their husband’s disposal; —​ that in the laws governing Poland, which recall in many ways those of France in the tenth and eleventh centuries, the wife maintains possession of most of her property, relinquishing only a certain amount of it to her husband in the guise of a dowry;111 —​ that in Genoa, a woman with inheritance, together with her family, is free to divide her property between dotal and non-​dotal goods when she marries, that is, to pay a sum to her husband while reserving another for herself, to dispose of as she wishes; and should she inherit property in the course of the marriage, she remains its natural owner and that it does not come under her husband’s control;112 —​ that in certain French provinces, there still exists a kind of property that a woman not only continues to own but also manages after

108 Pretium virginitatis: literally, the price of virginity. Since a woman’s virginity can be taken only once, her family can only receive such compensation once. In contrast, a widow can receive a dower from her new husband upon remarrying. 109 Reserved property was administered by a married woman as her own in the context of communal marital property managed by the husband. Though a married woman in classical Athens did not manage her dowry, she took it with her if she left her husband to return to her kin, giving her leverage over financial decisions facing the household. Lin Foxhall, “Household, Gender, and Property in Classical Athens,” The Classical Quarterly 39 (1989): 22–​44. 110 pécule, from the Latin peculium, which designates a sum of money that a person in the power of another—​in Rome, slaves—​had earned and could use. The term was not usually used for women’s property in Roman law. See Max Kaser, Das römische privatrecht, 2nd. ed. (Beck, 1971), 287–​288. 111 Dupin’s claim that married women of the Polish-​Lithuanian Commonwealth (1569–​1795) managed extradotal assets does not appear accurate. See Maria Bogucka, “Gender in the Economy of a Traditional Agrarian Society: The Case of Poland in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries,” Acta Poloniae Historia 74 (1996), 5–​19. The comparison of Poland to medieval France comes from a summary of one of Jean-​Baptiste de la Curne de Sainte-​Palaye’s Mémoires sur l’ancienne chevalerie in the November 1746 issue of the Mercure de France. 112 While on paper, Genoese wives had extrados, or separate property, laws and notarial records reveal restrictions to their financial agency over time. Denise Bezzina, “Married Women, Law, and Wealth in Fourteenth Century Genoa,” Mélanges de l’école française de Rome: Moyen Age 130 (2018): 121–​135.

198  Louise Dupin’s Work on Women marriage—​what jurists call parapherna113 and we might call a relic of fouage.114 Following our comparison of dowries to dowers, we must infer from the foregoing that just as a dowry was paid straight away to the husband, the wife entered into immediate possession of the dower. In France, it is noteworthy that Chilperic, the day after his wedding to Fredegund, gifted her several cities to rule singlehandedly—​a practice that endured long after.115 Such that we may be quite surprised to read the comments of jurists who insist in their works that men must control the property of women, that such has been the practice among all nations, that women are incapable of managing their own affairs, and that they have always been in this tutelage, in comparing these claims to the facts we have reported.

Observations on marriage today Marriage is ordinarily defined as a sacrament between two free people, of which the bride and groom are themselves the ministers, and the priest, just the witness.116 But what a ministry and what ministers! The groom and the bride arrive equal and free at the altar; one leaves with the property and freedom of the other, who leaves destitute and subjected.117 Meanwhile, the priest, as minister and witness, makes this strange transaction solemn and binding by uttering a few words here and there, none of which even hint at what is actually happening.

113 biens paraphernaux. The property of the wife not included in the dowry, from the Greek phernê (dowry). In Roman law, as in several regions in France, wives could dispose of paraphernal property without their husbands’ authorization. 114 fouage: a medieval tax paid per hearth (feu) or household by commoners to feudal lords. 115 Dupin confuses Fredegund, the concubine and third wife of Chilperic I, King (567–​584) of Neustria, with his second wife, Galswintha, whom he had murdered within a year of the marriage (to marry Fredegund). From Chilperic, Galswintha received as a morgengabe (morning after gift) the Aquitanian cities of Limoges, Bordeaux, Cahors, Béarn, and Bigorre. François Eudes de Mézeray, Histoire de France avant Clovis, 3 vols. (Paris: Denys Thierry, Jean Guignard, and Claude Barbin, 1685), 1:69. Among the Merovingian nobility, wives generally had free use of gifts received from husbands as part of marriage negotiations. Agathe Baroin, “Le couple en droit au haut Moyen Âge: autour de l’affectio maritalis et des relations patrimoniales,” Médiévales, 65 (2013): 93–​107. 116 The Council of Trent cast the priest as a witness to an act accomplished by the bride and groom, even though it made officiation by a priest a condition for valid marriage. Reynolds, “Marrying and Its Documentation,” 17. 117 Dupin’s sarcasm about the marriage contract anticipates Rousseau’s regarding the social contract in On the Social Contract (1761). See Wilkin, “Réformez vos contrats!”

Part III: Law  199 According to reason, equity, and the facts whose developments we have just represented, it is plausible to suppose that the society of marriage, founded on the purest and most tender sentiment of the human heart, was practiced between individuals seeking equality of condition and fortune—​ young people equally dear to their parents, who desired for them an equally happy fate, as is just and reasonable. It is plausible, I say, to assume and recognize between husband and wife an institution of equal advantages, just as it is difficult to suppose and establish that such an association could ever have been instituted through contracts that subjected and enchained the wife while leaving the husband, not only free, but in possession of her property and freedom. From all that we have said, we conclude that the marriage practices of today are true usurpations that were arrived at only by degrees.118

Article 30. On the Power of Husbands; On the Prerogatives That the Law Grants—​and Could Grant—​to Married Women Reflections on the husband’s power To be deprived of the management of one’s property and of the possession of certain rights is hardly the worst of it.119 Today in France, in ensuring the transfer of a dowry from wife to husband and granting him in advance all the inheritance that might come into her possession, the law also requires the husband’s property to back hers up. Yet this security is not set up like ordinary security, where an amount beyond what would be proportional [to the original sum] is fairly rigorously required. For, in marriage, however small the husband’s property might be, it suffices to back up the wife’s—​however large—​, and even if he has nothing at all, his surety is still considered good. Behold the admirable effect of the power of husbands! It is true that a husband cannot sell his wife’s fixed property120

118 Dupin makes a note to herself: “Here, the reflections that despite all this, marriages can still be happy but . . .” On measures to improve marriage, see Art. 42. 119 Manuscript at the Illinois Rare Book and Manuscript Library (Post-​1650 MS 0111). The title matches Sénéchal’s description. However, he lists 23 folios whereas the Illinois manuscript only numbers 15. The draft is fairly polished, with some evidence of reorganization. It has been edited by Sylvie Dangeville, in “Deux articles inédits de l’Ouvrage sur les femmes de Mme Dupin,” Études Jean-​Jacques Rousseau 7 (1995): 183–​204. 120 biens fonds: real estate.

200  Louise Dupin’s Work on Women without receiving her consent, but he has so many ways to make her consent that this formality barely puts a brake on [any transaction]. Alternatively, he can let her property go to waste and sell the totality of her moveables.121 In marriages involving an equality [of assets] or even a surplus on the man’s side, the husband’s assets could serve as security for the wife’s. But if a husband were to dissipate his [lineage] property122 along with hers, what would she have left to live on? Do we lack examples of this case? The temptation can be great, for a newly married husband with almost nothing to his name, to squander the grand fortune that has just fallen into his hands—​and his wife has no recourse against him. True, a woman when she marries is free to stipulate a separation of property that would allow her to use what belongs to her,123 but that only extends to income, and whether to make or receive the smallest loan or the paltriest replacement,124 a married woman must obtain her husband’s authorization. If that law existed solely for the purpose of protecting the children’s assets, why is authorization not also required for transactions involving the husband’s assets? Women rarely invoke the right to reserve [a portion of] their property in their hands;125 the prevailing practice is to give it up, perhaps in hopes of benefiting the community property [of the marriage]. This recalls in every way the craftiness of that captain who persuaded the soldiers he enrolled to forgo their signing bonuses by promising them a share of the booty. Not only is the wife’s wealth126 at the disposal of her husband; the rights and distinctions that accompany any inheritances she possesses become his own. We will not go into detail here about how civil law has contravened canon law, which recognizes a woman’s right of patronage even in marriage {Loyseau};127 civil law has refused to concede this point. We will simply note 121 mobilier. Moveable assets, including but not limited to furniture. 122 propres. Assets distinct from the community property of the marriage that revert to the birth family should the couple produce no heirs, or “lineage property.” Dupin argues that the distinction between lineage property and community property is theoretical when in practice husbands control both. This obscures the fact that a married woman’s family of origin was usually involved in the oversight of her lineage property. 123 A wife could also obtain a séparation de biens in the case of a husband’s gross mismanagement. See the Introduction to Part III. 124 remplacement. Money resulting from the sale of an asset, reinvested elsewhere. 125 réserver leur bien entre leurs mains. In customary law regimes, reserved property was the portion of the dowry of which the wife had custody. The remainder went toward the community property of the marriage. The husband typically controlled all the marital property, including his wife’s reserved property, but could not sell, hypothecate (i.e., use as collateral for credit), bequeath, or destroy the latter. 126 fortune pécuniaire. Money, savings, fungible assets. 127 patronage. The hereditary right to name the clergyman of one’s choice to a vacant church office based on an ancestor’s donation of funds to found and construct the church. Loyseau in his Traité des

Part III: Law  201 that it was decided several times through canon law that in the case of two men presented for a vacant church post and its income—​one by the husband and the other by the wife who had inherited the right of patronage—​the individual presented by the wife prevailed. At the very least, these verdicts demonstrate the gradual expansion128 of husbands’ rights over their wives’ property and prove that these rights were established only recently, because we all know that the dates of these disputes are not remote. Just how much complication has been created in French jurisprudence for the sake of unjustly placing women’s property under their husband’s control? What a Daedalus’s maze fashioned by all of these questions and decisions and by the different judgments on the debt contracted by husband, wife, or both in common; on the acquittal of these debts; on the pledging of dowers and property; on the reprises129 of wives; on the property of husbands backing up the property of wives! What an ever-​renewing hydra is created from authorizing one injustice and chopping back all the injustices that spring from it, when the basic principle of equity could simplify laws and their consequences, making them what they ought to be: just. One reads everywhere that Roman and Gaulish husbands had the power of life and death over their children and their wives.130 Evidently, jurists take care to repeat these passages to remind women to appreciate their good fortune at not having to fear the same fate. This law may have been established at the birth of Rome—​for a reason we will not take the trouble to investigate—​ and does not seem to have lasted long. We know that Numa reformed Romulus’s law concerning the excessive power of fathers over their children, limiting it to unmarried children, on the rationale that it was unjust for a free woman to find herself the wife of a slave.131 Had Numa pursued the spirit of seigneuries (Paris: Abel L’Angelier, 1608) mentions the wives of patrons; he does not mention women inheriting rights to patronage (269). 128 gradation. “The [social] elevation that a man acquires little by little, by moving up degree by degree.” Furetière, Dictionnaire universel (The Hague and Rotterdam: Arnoud et Reinier Leers, 1690). Change over time and change in social status go hand-​in-​hand in Dupin’s analysis. 129 reprise. In customary law regimes, the wife’s (re)claiming of her dowry, lineage property, dower, and preciput in the event of separation or widowhood by an express clause in the marriage contract, usually on condition of her renunciation of the community property of the marriage. 130 Such as in André Favyn, Le théâtre d’honneur et de la chevalerie ou l’histoire des ordres militaires (Paris: Robert Foüet, 1620), 213 and Joseph Barre, Histoire générale de l’Allemagne, 11 vols. (Paris: Charles J. B. Delespine, Jean-​Thomas Herissant, and Claude Thiboust, 1748), 1:16. According to Barre, “German” (e.g., Frankish) husbands exerted “absolute authority”; they were “masters of the lives of their wives,” who observed “perfect subordination.” 131 On the basis of oral histories, Romans in classical times ascribed laws to their forebears to sanction traditional customs. To Romulus, semilegendary founder of Rome, they ascribed a law granting the father absolute power over the son: to imprison him, put him to death, or sell him and profit from

202  Louise Dupin’s Work on Women his argument, it might have occurred to him that it was much more unjust to make the free woman a slave to the man who was to become her husband. There is something revolting about the right to life and death granted to a husband over his wife and children. Is there any way to understand the blind rationale for granting it over either of these, or further for conflating these two sorts of creatures? Paternal tenderness might be relied upon to temper the rigor of such a law because it is inspired by a helpless age, and small children are incapable of committing the kinds of misdeeds susceptible to provoking this rigor. But the law would have been too manifestly temerarious and unjust if it had had to rely upon conjugal tenderness, which has neither the same rights nor the same resources as paternal tenderness. How can one dare advance the claim that such a barbarous law could have found its way into the body of laws of a wise and civilized nation? An author reputed to be one of the most judicious and wisest of modern jurists {Domat} protested loudly against the spirit of Roman laws that granted freedmen the right to life and death over their children and slaves.132 He made no mention of their wives. Is it a coincidence that we encounter the same silence so frequently in the works of so many others? It is coolly stated that a woman is in the power of her husband, which not only means that none of her civil actions have any validity without the authorization of her husband, but also that she is entirely in his dependence. This dependence is explained in so many places and with such a wealth of detail that we might well infer from these explanations—​almost all of them, modern—​that we were for a long time in the dark about the extent of her duties. It must be observed that modern jurists all defer to the will of the husband, whom they call the “master” and “head” of the marriage partnership, while disbarring133 the wife from her own rights over herself and her property on the pretext of her weakness and inequality. If the incapacity of women were real, why would they be left in charge of their property as widows? Isn’t his labor. To Numa Pompilius, his successor, they ascribed a law forbidding fathers from selling sons they had allowed to marry. The Avalon Project: Laws of the Kings, 753–​510 BC, Yale School of Law, Lillian Goldman Law Library, 2008, https://​ava​lon.law.yale.edu/​medie​val/​laws_​of_​t​heki​ngs.asp 132 “The Romans, who cultivated civil law more than any other nation, and who made such a great number of very just laws, gave themselves [ . . . ] the freedom to take the life of their slaves and of their own children—​as if the power given by the quality of father and master could excuse one from the laws of humanity.” Jean Domat, “Le traitté des loix,” in Les loix civiles dans leur ordre naturel (Paris: J. B. Coignard, 1689), ii. Romans did not grant husbands the right to kill wives. Treggiari, 268–​270. 133 exclure. To deny someone’s claims so strongly as to make them lose the right or dignity in question, often pertaining to inheritance.

Part III: Law  203 it amusing that at the age of fifty, a married woman is said to be powerless and incapable of the least civil act while a widow of twenty-​five deprived of her late husband’s counsel can validly carry out civil responsibilities? Isn’t it quaint that in a country where women are said to be too old at the age of thirty to dance and to dress in pink, they are found too young at the age of seventy to enact the least of their desires or to use any portion of their property as they see fit? And these opinions have been so preached and pontificated134 that they prevail over common sense and over old ways so different from today’s. In 1608, President Séguier judged that a husband, albeit still a minor, could authorize his wife in her financial dealings even though they didn’t concern him.135 If these authorizations had been as established then as they are today, his ruling would have been superfluous.

Reflections on the power of husbands, continued We attribute the culmination of the enslavement of wives to the principles of Cardinal Richelieu.136 He made monarchy absolute and in that, he served the State and merited the applause he received. But couldn’t we say that certain human deliberations follow fashion, just as fashion is followed in certain opinions? Eloquence is not the same from one century to another; in medicine, certain remedies are adopted just for a time; the style of clothing varies according to reason and whim. Monarchical power since Cardinal Richelieu has been copied all the way into the home. A husband believes himself to be the monarch in his house; the wife doesn’t even always have the privileges of first subject. Wouldn’t republican ideas better accommodate the union of two people who are not only created equal, but who commit to making their interests as well as their good and bad fortune equal and common between 134 Molière, The School for Wives (Act I, scene 1): “Prêchez et patrocinez tant qu’il vous plaira.” 135 Antoine Séguier, président à mortier of the Parlement of Paris. This arrêt is under the entry “Autorisation” in Brillon, Dictionnaire des arrêts, 1:387. 136 In a draft of “Particular observations on the style of some authors” (Art. 38), Dupin reveals her source for Richelieu’s comments about women: Nicolas Amelot de la Houssaie’s notes to Cornelius Tacitus, [Œuvres de] Tacite avec des notes politiques et historiques (The Hague: Henry van Bulderer, 1692), 2:489. While Richelieu scorns women in his posthumously published Testament politique (Amsterdam: H. Desbordes, 1688), he does not describe the husband as king in his home. The parallel between the power of the king over his subjects and of the husband over his wife as foundational to political and social order comes from the first book of Jean Bodin’s Six livres de la république (Paris: Jacques du Puis, 1576), which provided the principles of political absolutism that Richelieu sought to implement as chief minister to Louis XIII.

204  Louise Dupin’s Work on Women them? Couldn’t we say that the extension of the principles of this minister resembles the plan of that madman who wanted to make all the coasts of France into ports?137 What can monarchical power produce that is good, beautiful and useful between a husband and a wife? We see enough of its effects today to judge for ourselves. Is it not tempting to think that Themis has become the enemy of her sex? Or that the blindfold that prevents her from seeing prevents her also from hearing?138 And that some of her ministers have tricked her139 into consenting to things so contrary to her name and essence? The courts are continually hearing the just complaints of those who have entered into disadvantageous marriages even after their majority, and they have often broken the sorts of partnerships known as “leonine.”140 Doesn’t marriage now have enough of the character of leonine partnerships to merit the name? And if women bound in marriage—​as minors, naturally—​, earnestly demanded justice for the dual reasons of minority and lesion,141 how could the courts deny them? What would we reply to unmarried women who said: “We would be very upset to forgo unions with men, who appear to be our friends; such unions are necessary to give them and us children whom we can love and raise as good citizens. We would moreover like for these unions to be made through respectable conventions, as determined by law. However, we do not want any of these advantages if they can only be had in the form of ordinary marriage, as it is too manifestly disadvantageous for us. As a sacrament, marriage leaves us our natural equality. As a civil contract, it contemptuously deprives us of it. Reform your contracts!”

137 This madman is Ormin in Molière’s comédie-​ballet The Bores (1661). Observing the profit made from port-​based commerce, Ormin proposes to turn the entire French coastline into ports. Analogously, generalizing the monarch’s power to all French husbands is a waste of resources. 138 Themis: an ancient Greek Titaness, personifying divine order, natural law, and custom. The Oxford Classical Dictionary, eds. Simon Hornblower and Antony Spawforth (Oxford University Press, 2003), 1496–​1497. The blindfold became an attribute of Lady Justice (Justitia), often conflated with Themis, in the mid-​sixteenth century. 139 ont surpris sa religion. Literally, “to surprise someone’s religion”—​legal jargon used when normal court proceedings or legal precedents were upended. The entity being “surprised” was the one whose norms were being flouted—​the court, the chancellor, etc. Here, justice, allegorized as a woman, finds herself upended. 140 société léonine. A partnership in which one partner is barred from sharing in profits, while also bearing liability for losses—​from the lion’s tendency to take “the lion’s share,” based on a fable: the lion claims the spoils of the hunt while also eating one of his hunting partners, the ass; seeing this, the other hunting partner, the fox, contents himself with a tiny portion to elude the fate of the ass. 141 lésion. Injury suffered as the result of another’s failure to deliver on a contract. Successfully proving a lésion énorme—​over half of the value of whatever had been promised—​was sufficient grounds for voiding the contract.

Part III: Law  205

Possible solutions, that not only seem to have no downsides, but that also appear capable of producing great advantages The law could enjoin the richer party in a marriage to equalize in some way the other’s fortune with his or her own, by ceding some of his or her income until reaching par142 with respect to an amount agreed upon by the two parties—​not counting obligations143 and non-​valeurs,144 collateral,145 rights, and emoluments that each might have accrued through any offices146 or employs,147 which would not be included in this division. Alternatively, if the wealth consisted only in monies resulting from offices or employs, a pension would be established through the arbitration of kinsmen they select together, as is done in the case of marriages among the high nobility where great fortunes are at play. This pension, in one way or another, would diminish in the case of widowhood until reaching par with a prefix dower148 or reciprocal preciput.149 Thus the survivor possessing a small income would be equally committed to gratitude [before and after their spouse’s death]. In this way, beyond the natural reasons that lead to marriage, rich people would marry for the pleasure of sharing their wealth with someone they had chosen and whom they loved, while those who were not rich would marry to augment their wealth, and each would work to ensure the longevity of the marriage, fearing the end of so advantageous and profitable a union. The law could entrust each spouse to dispose of his or her share of the revenue, while reserving the management of the capital to their natural guardians until they turned twenty-​one—​the situation of most people who get married.

142 concurrence. Equality in privileges or assets or the amount one must have paid up to be free of a contracted debt. 143 charges. Financial obligations, such as debts incurred to a creditor or pensions or annuities owed. 144 non-​valeurs. Assets without value, such as a debt that has come due but won’t be repaid because of the financial insolvency of the debtors or land that produces no income or has depreciated in value due to neglect. 145 gages. Security given to secure a loan, such as household objects pawned for money; less commonly, assets anticipated in inheritance. 146 charge. An office or honor that grants authority to an individual over others. 147 place. A job known to turn a nice profit that a family purchases from the Crown as an investment. 148 A dower: the capital that a husband, at the time of marriage, designated for his wife in the event of his death; she was to live off of its income. On prefix dowers replacing customary dowers, see the introduction to Part III. 149 preciput: part of the inheritance designated for a particular heir (most commonly the surviving spouse) and taken out of the total estate before partition. The widowed spouse receives the preciput on top of the share of the estate devolving to all co-​heirs.

206  Louise Dupin’s Work on Women The law could require either that each spouse authorize the other in actions that warrant it, or that they equally forgo this check on their dealings, trusting instead in each other’s honor and in one another’s interest in managing their property as a good head of household.150 The law could require married people to stay together only for a set number of years. Couples who at the end of that time had lived well together, could choose to spend the rest of their lives together. And this would surely be the best thing they could do. But the tutorship of women’s property exercised by their husbands and the tutelage of their persons is a masterpiece of injustice—​and, as it now stands, of a fairly modern injustice—​, as can be seen by the facts we have related. The disposition of women’s property can have no foundation in justice or reason, and perpetual constraint is something so inconceivable that the law could have never intended to establish it as it is. Practices shaped only by goodwill must have step by step become the norm, until the highly inappropriate step was taken to turn some of them into laws at the time when customary laws were being codified.151 Don’t written law countries152 offer proof of what we are saying? Wives there are mistresses of their property, and not just for their personal use; they are also free to make use of it for the benefit of whatever child they wish, for their husband, even for non-​relatives, as they see fit. A judgment about whether most things that we call for153 would produce good or evil is therefore in reach. After having examined the wrong that jurists do to married women, it is right to examine the prerogatives they grant them—​first among these, the freedom to make a testament. In Rome, girls could make their testament at the age of twelve, boys at fourteen, which in no way indicates perpetual bondage under guardians. If anything, it meant being free of the authority of tutelage at too young an age, and it is much more reasonable to acquire the right to establish a testament upon reaching the age of majority,154 as is 150 père de famille. Though materfamilias exists in Latin (see Art. 29), it did not have the same connotation as paterfamilias. In Latin and still in modern French, “mère de famille” conjures the mothering of children, not the husbanding of finances. Hence Dupin’s choice to imagine both husband and wife as pères de famille. 151 On the codification of customary law beginning with Charles VII, see the introduction to Part III. 152 pays de droit écrit. Written law countries (the south of France), where “women don’t need to have the authorization of their husbands, not being in their power.” Brillon, Dictionnaire des arrêts, 1:387. Brillon lists some decisions where only paraphernal property was subject to this freedom and some that include the dowry. 153 The verb is requérir—​to request or demand, usually in a legal context. 154 In Dupin’s time, the age of civil majority was twenty-​five years of age for both sexes in most regions of France.

Part III: Law  207 the case now. [In Rome], a married woman could create a testament and dispose of all her property as she saw fit. Today, a woman whose husband is still alive can make a testament155—​in this way, so they say, she dies free. Oh, what a great privilege, after having lived her entire life in the most puerile dependence! The right to make a testament is not however to be scorned, for it offers a means of paying off debts one has incurred—​sometimes as a result of the poverty in which one has lived relative to one’s estate, sometimes due to the miserliness of one’s husband. Making a testament provides a way to depart this world without leaving [the reputation of] a bankrupt in one’s wake, which could happen for 20,000 francs to a wife leaving behind 100,000 livres of rentes,156 should the tutorship council headed up by the father determine that the minor would suffer no disadvantage from it157—​the mother’s debts having been contracted “under the power of the husband,” and as a result, without the authorization that would have made it possible for legitimate creditors to be paid and for a respectable woman to pay off incurred debts.158

Article 32. On Adultery and Its Punishment Laws merit our respect and obedience, principally when they induce good mores, and we notice imperfection in them when they fail to produce that

155 Strict rules about the distribution of the property of the deceased constrained women’s ability to bequeath property through testaments. A woman’s dowry was divided into communal property and lineage property; her widower (or his heirs) kept the communal property portion, while the lineage property portion returned to her family of origin. She could freely bequeath paraphernal goods and acquêts (acquired assets)—​the latter only if a clause in the marriage contract reserved her earnings for her. 156 rentes. Income-​producing assets in the form of perpetual annuities. 157 désavantage. The deprivation of an asset to which one has a rightful claim, usually in relation to inheritance. 158 What we understand from this compact passage is that the father, the guardian of the minor, manages the property devolving to the child from his deceased wife. His wife contracted debts, but he refuses to pay the money owed to her creditors from her accounts, on the pretext that she contracted those debts illegitimately, that is, without his knowledge or consent. He thus keeps the money and profits from its income until the child reaches the age of majority and can inherit. As a result, the deceased woman’s reputation suffers; because of her husband’s refusal to pay her debts, others malign her as a bankrupt. Bankruptcy was a grave crime, and calling someone a “bankrupt” was a terrible insult. Dupin’s point seems to be that getting the reputation of a bankrupt is especially galling when it could easily have been averted. 100,000 livres of rentes, at a return rate of 5 percent, could produce an annual income of 20,000 livres (livres and francs were interchangeable denominations in the eighteenth century). In other words, the amount she owes her creditors is relatively small: the equivalent of the annual income from her rentes. See Julie Hardwick, “Banqueroute: La faillite, le crime, et la transition vers le capitalisme dans la France moderne,” Histoire, économie, et société 30 (2011): 79–​93.

208  Louise Dupin’s Work on Women effect.159 All laws that punish infidelity in women alone do just half of what they should do, and by a consequence that we will examine when we discuss mores, this half amounts to nothing. In enjoining women to behave well, and even in punishing them severely in the event of the contrary, the law does what it is supposed to do. But the law should be equal and reciprocal in all regards; otherwise, it is unjust and does not merit the respect we owe to laws founded on equity. The word “adulterer” has always been commonly applied to married men and women engaging in liaisons beyond what marriage allows. Today, however, this ugly name seems to pertain only to women, as if the crime were particular to them. Whether for this crime or for libertinage in general, now only women are punished.160 Laws have always taken care to advance good mores. Thus has the punishment of adultery existed since the time of Moses. Then, however, it was shared; women’s accomplices were punished with them. The punishment for this capital crime was lapidation.161 Among several other nations adultery was punished with death—​for men as for women {the Parthians, the Lydians, the Arabs, the Lombards}. Other nations {the Egyptians} modified the punishments for this crime, but always applied them equally to the guilty. Based on historical fragments rather than on positive law, it has been claimed that Romulus established “by law” that a woman who had been unfaithful to her husband would have no other judge than he. Yet we find in other fragments that the parents of the guilty woman assisted the husband, and that if she were convicted of poisoning, adultery, etc., they imposed the punishment together.162 Can the first part of this citation be taken to convey 159 This manuscript at the Harry Ransom Center (MS-​0363, I.B.Art.37). It contains few cross-​outs or additions. We eliminated a second mention of Antoninus Pius (a reading excerpt that remained with the draft after Dupin had summarized its contents). 160 Accusations against adulterous husbands were not received in court. A cheated wife “could only express her resentment in tears.” [Anonymous], Dictionnaire civil & canonique contenant les etimologies, divisions, & principes du droit françois conféré avec le droit romain (Paris: Augustin Besoigne & Jérôme Bobin, 1687), 32. Following Justinian’s Novella 134, the husband of a woman convicted of adultery won her dowry, her paraphernal goods, and/​or the usufruct rights to her dower. He could also have her shut away in a convent for life. 161 Dictionnaire civil & canonique, 32. Lapidation is mentioned as punishment for adultery in John 8:11, where Jesus challenges any person free of sin to cast the first stone. Dupin suggests that men and women are equal before the law because both the adulterous wife and her male lover are punished, but the real issue is whether the adulterous husband receives the same punishment as the adulterous wife. 162 The most frequently cited “fragment” about how Romulan law dealt with adultery is Dionysius of Halicarnassus, Antiquities of Rome, 2.25.5–​6. See for example Gilbert-​Charles le Gendre, Marquis de Saint-​Aubin, Traité de l’opinion, 6:62. In addition, the wife and her father lost all rights to her dowry (Plutarch, Romulus. 22.3). In the opposing situation of an unfaithful husband, the wife had no method of recourse. Treggiari, 268–​270.

Part III: Law  209 a serious and complete meaning that wasn’t modified, since the second part explains the considerable crimes that the wife’s parents punished. For what crimes could a husband serve as both judge and avenger? Based on a fragment in which it appears that Romulus pardoned a husband who had killed his adulterous wife in the initial throes of grief and anger, jurists have claimed that [Roman] husbands could kill their wives with impunity in certain cases such as this one and in drunkenness.163 Yet the zealots who insist on this point overlook that the absolution itself proves that the “right” did not exist. And how could one ever imagine that it would be just for a husband to be judge and litigant164 in any case, least of all in this one? Among the Germanic tribes, the crime of adultery was punished with death whether committed by a man or a woman, and the husband was handed over to his wife for her to carry out the sentence, just as the wife was to him {Father Barre, History of Germany}.165 In the time of the Republic, it seems that the punishment of adultery softened considerably, consisting only in a fine determined at the discretion of the judge {Dictionary of Law}.166 The Julia law made by Augustus was the first to enable public accusation against seducers of married women, virgins, or widows of respectable standing and to establish punishment for them. The punishment consisted in banishment and apparently applied to women as well as to men.167 Other 163 The standard example was Egnatius Mecennius, who bludgeoned his wife to death for drunkenness (Valerius Maximus, Memorable Sayings and Doings, 6.3.9). See Treggiari, 269; and Saint-​Aubin, Traité de l’opinion, 6:61. In eighteenth-​century France, it was illegal for a husband who caught his wife in the act of adultery to kill her, but he almost always received a royal pardon (lettre de rémission) if he did. Still, he lost all rights to her property and could not inherit from her. Claude-​Joseph de Ferrière, Dictionnaire de droit et de pratique 2 vols. (Paris: Brunet, 1749), 1:80. 164 juge et partie, from the Latin non potest esse judex et pars. “One should be suspicious of everything that men have said about women because they are both judges and litigants.” Poulain, A Physical and Moral Discourse Concerning the Equality of Both Sexes, in The Equality of the Sexes: Three Feminist Texts of the Seventeenth Century, trans. and ed. Desmond Clarke (Oxford University Press, 2013), 151. 165 “The Germans [i.e., Franks] punished adultery with great rigor, whether it was the man or the woman who committed it.” Dupin omits a difference emphasized by her source: an adulterous wife was placed in the hands of her husband to be executed, while wives could choose to pardon adulterous husbands. Barre, Histoire générale de l’Allemagne, 1:17–​18. Dupin includes Rousseau’s excerpt of this passage in “Particular Observations on the Style of Some Authors” (Art. 38). 166 “In the time of the Republic, the punishment [of adultery] became arbitrary, and laws imposed none.” Dictionnaire civil & canonique, 32. On fines imposed on adulterous women, see McGinn, Prostitution, 142, 151, 202. 167 Julia law refers to any law by the Julian clan (mainly Julius Caesar/​Augustus). By Lex Julia, Dupin refers to Lex Julia de adulteriis coercendis enacted by Augustus in 17 bce which dealt with adultery. Dupin does not mention that this law was used to banish Augustus’s own daughter, Julia, in 2 bce, or that it granted permission for a father to kill an adulterous daughter. The law Dupin glosses as originating from Augustus is actually part of sixth-​century updates to the Lex Julia on adultery under Byzantine Emperor Justinian I, which specifically introduced protections for married women, virgins, and respectable widows (Institutiones Justiniani 18.4).

210  Louise Dupin’s Work on Women emperors increased the punishment, and men apparently sought to elude any punishment for themselves, since around 130 years later, Antoninus Pius made that famous edict cited by Ulpian, and so lauded by Saint Augustine, that barred husbands from accusing their wives of adultery when they themselves were guilty of it.168 He decreed the same punishment for an unfaithful husband as for an unfaithful wife. Those convicted of having lain with the Vestals were sentenced to death by whipping. We are well aware of the punishment reserved for the Vestals.169 The emperor Macrinus went a step further to have adulterers burned together.170 To explain why tolerance for men’s infidelity does not extend to women, one might attempt to allege here that a husband’s infidelity has fewer repercussions than that of a wife. This can only be argued based on the children’s status, insofar as the law, in determining this status, has wisely declared all of the wife’s children to belong to her husband, without having been able to declare that all of the husband’s children belong to the wife. This alone has weighed heavily in determining women’s prudence​—​not to mention all the other reasons that motivate their fidelity. But should that excuse husbands from good conduct? If we are pressed on this point, we will have to respond that, in relation to the state and to general society, the birth of a citizen is neither more nor less advantageous no matter who his father or mother is. If we examine what comes from this, here’s what we will find. In relation to a family’s interest, a woman who gives an illegitimate brother to her other children commits a great fault against her honor and against the tenderness she owes them, for this alien brother diminishes the portion of their inheritance. If this wife gives illegitimate children to a husband with whom she has none, she can in this way deprive her husband’s natural heirs of the property that was supposed to belong to them in the future.171 But when a

168 Some Julia laws on marriage reported by Ulpian in the third century (Epitome 13–​14). Dupin likely had an intermediary source. 169 The infraction of the Vestals’ vow of chastity “was punished in proportion to the honors they received so long as they upheld it: that is, excessively. Those who failed were buried alive. These horrible executions were done in [ . . . ] the ‘execrable field’ [ . . . ], an apt name because innocent women perished there.” Dupin, “On the Roman Vestals.” See also Art. 20. 170 Marcus Opellius Severus Macrinus Augustus (emperor 217–​218). This law is referenced in Historia Augusta, a late Roman collection of information about Roman emperors. Dupin likely had an intermediary source. 171 This was the crux of the matter: “adultery committed by a wife leads to doubt as to whether children are her husband’s, and [ . . . ] usurps his property from legitimate heirs,” Ferrière, Dictionnaire de droit, 1:76. Rousseau pities the “unhappy father [ . . . ] who wonders, in embracing his children whether he is embracing another’s, the token of his dishonor, the plunderer of his own children’s property” in Emile or On Education, trans. and ed. Allan Bloom (Basic Books, 1979), 361.

Part III: Law  211 man brings children into the world with a woman who is not his wife, does it really cost his legitimate children nothing? If it came to actual calculations, we might find on more than one occasion that these sorts of children cost more to their brothers than do the illegitimate children of mothers. And when it comes to a man who has no legitimate children: don’t such men often find ways to deprive their heirs in favor of an illegitimate child? The more we weigh the opinion of inequality between men and women, the lighter we will find it.

Article 36. On Tutorships and Testimony On tutorships In all written histories from the oldest times to ours, we see the wives of emperors, kings, and princes acting as tutors to the heir to the crown.172 But ordinary tutorships didn’t confer many benefits on those who exercised them, and so they have been considered onerous for anyone besides the children they served to support.173 The Romans and the French sought exemptions from this social responsibility as much as they could.174 Nevertheless, there is no indication that mothers or grandmothers have ever refused this charge for their children, nor that any law has ever had the injustice to require them to do so. Thus we find them in possession of this right in the Justinian Code and still so today.175 172 This manuscript is at Bibliothèque de Genève (Ms. fr. 215 f. 94–​109). We made a small change to the order of the pages as they were preserved, moving Dupin’s commentary on Jean Gillet’s Nouveau traité des tutelles et curatelles (Paris: Michel Bobin, 1656) from the middle of the section on tutorships to the end, following the order indicated by an earlier draft. In the section on testimony, Dupin strings together pages taken from Rousseau’s reading excerpts; each paragraph occupies a separate page with nothing on the verso. Scholars often translate tutelle in English as “guardianship.” We chose “tutorship” for its proximity to tutela, the Roman institution that shaped French law on the matter. 173 Hence the distinction between the tuteur onéraire (from the Latin “onus”)—​an individual with fiduciary responsibilities toward the minor—​and tuteur honoraire, who acted more as an advisor. 174 Situations warranting an exemption from tutorship in Dupin’s time mirrored those stipulated in Roman law: parenting five or more living children or already serving as a tutor to another minor; being old, destitute, infirm, illiterate, or a minor; exercising a military profession, the magistracy, or one of the liberal arts (lawyer, medical doctor); being involved in litigation against the minor. Antoine-​Gaspard Boucher-​d’Argis, “Tutele,” Encyclopédie 16:764. 175 Mothers (like fathers) were considered natural tutors to their children, but they still had to make a juridical request for tutorship; this involved asking others to nominate them to the judge. For Montesquieu’s interpretation of the shift from agnatic tutorship (in the Twelve Tables) to maternal tutorship in Justinian’s time, see Spirit of the Laws, 323.

212  Louise Dupin’s Work on Women Roman law recognized another form of legal tutorship: that of patrons over their freed slaves.176 Since women were patrons just as men were, they must also have been in possession of this tutorship. We read in the Digest {page 634} that if several patrons freed the same slaves, they would share tutorship of them, unless a woman were among these patrons, in which case only the males would be tutors.177 But it does not say that a woman patron couldn’t be a tutor on her own. This turn of the law, like the one that restricts women’s tutorship to their children and grandchildren {Novella 118, ­chapter 5; Novella 94, c­ hapter 2},178 seems to have resulted from the Velleian decree. The senatus-​consult Velleianum was surely the principle behind these exclusions, since it excused women from pledging surety for others, making them even less suited to a responsibility requiring the commitment of personal resources.179 The juridical renunciation that they had to make of their Velleian in order to become tutors of their own children and grandchildren is apparently the origin of what we find in law after [the implementation of] Velleian: that women cannot be tutors of their children; rather, they obtain tutorship of them only by special fiat of the prince.180 It is a thing so natural and so naturally advantageous for children to be under the tutelage of their mother, that even today, no one contests this principle. Any other tutor would always be a stranger compared to a mother, and much less concerned than she would be with children’s well-​being. Apparently, though, less trust was placed in the preceding generation when it came to administering tutelages. Grandparents had to name a joint party in tutorship, as the law explains:

176 In the Roman Republic and Empire, a former master inherited the estate of his manumitted slave if the latter died childless and intestate; since tutorship followed inheritance, he was also the freedman’s tutor. 177 Rousseau actually writes that the manumitting persons would share tutorship “of the children.” Given the close spelling of enfants and esclaves, we believe his interpolation to be a manuscript “typo.” Dupin consulted Digestorum seu pandectarum libri quinquaginta, ed. Francesco Torelli (Florence: Lorenzo Torrentino, 1553). 178 In Novella 118, Justinian forbade women from acting as tutors (this was not new), except mothers and grandmothers whom he prioritized over all collaterals (this was new), but not over testamentary tutors (those designated by the father). To assume tutorship of their (grand)children, women had to renounce remarriage along with “their Velleian.” Based on a presumption of maternal affection, Novella 94 made an exception for mothers from a law preventing the debtors and creditors of minors from assuming tutorship of them. A folio of Rousseau’s excerpts reveals that Dupin draws this reference to the Novellae from Domat, Legum delectus, 81. 179 On the Velleian decree of the Senate (46 ce), see the introduction to Part III. 180 Gillet, Traité des tutelles, 23.

Part III: Law  213 Grandfathers and grandmothers on the paternal and maternal side are involved in providing tutors to grandchildren; they are even obligated [to do so] on pain of losing the inheritance that would come into their possession were the children to die {Theodosian Code, book 3, ­chapter 18, article 1, p. 58.}.181

This not only admits equality [between grandmothers and grandfathers, and between the mother’s side and the father’s side] but conserves it, yet who would deny that we find equality more commonly in the text of the law than in its interpretation? When we find turns of law that seem to diverge from the equality that we have just observed, we ask: What is the spirit of the law? What advantage does it have for society? And what kind of utility can result from something that offends equity? We might ask this last question of the following twist: A father can assign a tutor for his son through his will, regardless of whether he leaves the child his property or disinherits him. But the mother can only assign her son a tutor by making that person the heir to her child. For here, tutorship concerns property more than the person. Witnesses must make depositions on behalf of a tutor named by the mother. But a tutor named by the father can be confirmed without any investigation, even when admissible objections are presented, unless the attribute for which he had chosen that person had changed—​if once a friend, he had become an enemy, or once rich, had become poor {Digest, page 628}.182

We ask whether these last restrictions suffice to make the disposition of this law just and useful, and we suspect that it was with regard to similar such articles that the probity of Tribonian, redactor of Justinian’s laws, came under scrutiny. {He was accused of having taken bribes to insert laws at the will of those who paid him. Suidas and Budé}.183 181 Codicis Theodosiani, 58. This passage, occupying its own folio, is an excerpt by Rousseau, in a translation that may not be accurate. The Theodosian Code, a collection of decisions promulgated in 438 by Theodosius II, is one of several imperial codes included in the Justinian Code. 182 Digestorum seu pandectarum, 2:628 (26.2.4). Another excerpt to which Dupin adds commentary. 183 Guillaume Budé, founder of the philological study of law and secretary to Charles VIII, faults Tribonian for corrupting the Pandectes (Justinian Digest) based on the sketch of Tribonian as a conman in “the writings of Suidas”—​the Suda or tenth-​century Byzantine encyclopedia of ancient Mediterranean world—​in his Annotationes in XXIV pandectarum libros [1508] (Lyon: Gryphe, 1551), 681.

214  Louise Dupin’s Work on Women The Romans made an important distinction between tutorships and curatorships that we apparently no longer make today, even though it is still relevant in some cases.184 In general, both a tutorship and a curatorship were considered a burden to the person to whom it was attributed, as a result of the duties and cares that it required one to commit to.185 Soldiers were exempt from tutorships and curatorships, on the grounds that they were charged more particularly with the defense of the state. A number of rhetoricians, grammarians, and doctors, considered as employees in the service of the Republic, were similarly exempt. According to Roman law, people over the age of sixty186 were exempt from this responsibility as well. By a special privilege, so was the family of the Gordians.187 The Greeks viewed these responsibilities in the same light, because exemption from tutorship and curatorship was offered as a reward for the families of Harmodius and Aristogeiton.188 There is no point mentioning that one could only be a tutor or curator after the age of twenty-​five, because it is sufficiently implied.189 There is every appearance that the laws that exempted women from tutorship and curatorship only did so out of consideration [for their limited means], and not at all out of some opinion of their incapacity. For we have seen in all times mothers and grandmothers acting as tutors of their children and grandchildren. As for the subjection and obedience in which children are put by tutelage, Roman jurists consistently followed the maxim that wards should exit tutelage as soon as they reached the age of puberty, which the law set at the end of the fourteenth year for males and for females at the end of the twelfth year. This means that then they were no longer under tutelage for their persons 184 In Rome, the curator took over from the tutor at the age of fourteen (boys) or twelve (girls), a legal approximation of puberty. “But presently that theory is no longer in use, because tutors who were first established continue their responsibility until the minor’s age of majority” (Gillet, Nouveau traité des tutelles, 12). 185 The ensuing is a summary of Justinian’s Institutes, Title 25, “On the excuses of tutors and curators.” Dupin may have found them translated into French and explained in Pellisson-​Fontanier, Paraphrase, 235–​249. By Justinian’s time, tutorship had become less of a family safety net than a social responsibility subject to the same kinds of exemptions as other public service. Emmanuelle Chevreau, “L’évolution de la tutelle romaine à travers le mécanisme de l’excusatio tutela,” Fundamina 20 (2014): 139–​149. 186 Justinian had specified the age of seventy, but “sixty-​year-​olds now enjoy that privilege, for our strength [ . . . ] declines from century to century.” Gillet, Nouveau traité des tutelles, 27. 187 The exemption honored the heroism and loss of a family of third-​century Roman emperors. Gordian I and II ruled for less than a month, together, and died in a rebellion; declared Emperor by the Senate, Gordian III died in battle at the age of nineteen. 188 The ancient Athenian lovers Harmodius and Aristogeiton were celebrated as symbols of Athenian freedom for having assassinated the tyrant Hipparchus. 189 The age of legal majority. Pelisson, Paraphrase, 247.

Part III: Law  215 and that they had a curator whose responsibilities regarded their property alone {Institutes of Justinian, [In what ways] tutorships [come to an end], Title 22}.190 Although we see that even married Roman women could be assigned curators, what the law explains does not confirm what we read in modern jurists’ work—​that women were in perpetual tutelage.191 We see in the spirit of Roman laws that tutorship of a ward was assigned ordinarily to someone who could benefit from the ward’s inheritance {Pellisson, Paraphrase of the Institutes of Justinian, page 183}.192 This rule entailed several exceptions nevertheless. For example, when a woman emancipated a slave under the age of fourteen, the child received a tutor, but the woman retained the right to inherit from the child, because her sex, although it deprived her of tutorship, did not prevent her from inheriting {ibid}.193 The curatorship of women having reached the age of majority apparently became so light a responsibility that compensation wasn’t sought for it. The curator was then only regarded as counsel for a woman, less educated and less experienced in financial matters than a man, as is practiced in Genoa today. There is no mention that when a Roman woman emancipated a slave, she did not have the right to do so. Slaves were a portion of property, and because a woman could do as she wished with this portion she could do as she wished with the rest [of her property]. The right to emancipate another person is the most beautiful right one can have.194 Even though garde noble [noble guardianship] is often confused with tutorship, in that it is in the hands of fathers and mothers, it doesn’t have the same origin. Noble guardianship comes from the old tradition of [a lord] managing a fief [coming into the hands of a minor who was his vassal]: the lord enjoyed profits from the fief in exchange for his service to the ward.195 190 Pellisson-​Fontanier, Paraphrase, 209. 191 See introduction to Part III. 192 “It was in effect the intention of these laws [that] the advantages and disadvantages be balanced, that there should be no reason to hope without reason to fear; in a word, that tutorship of the ward was assigned ordinarily to those who could benefit from his inheritance.” Pellisson-​Fontanier, Paraphrase, 183. 193 Pellisson-​Fontanier, Paraphrase, 183. 194 One would think that the right to be free was the most beautiful right. 195 garde noble. The management of a fief in exchange for feudal profits. Originally, when a minor inherited a fief, the lord managed the fief and garnered its income to offset the expense of servicing the fief and of caring for the minor. The Establishments of Saint Louis entitled parents to claim this right. While a father had guardianship of both the person and fief of his child, an orphaned heir of a fief was subject to dual guardianship. The agnate in line to inherit the fief managed the property, while another individual ensured the guardianship of the minor’s person. Dual guardianship persisted beyond the thirteenth century in baillisterie, or tutorship among nobles. Widows could be baillistres, and unlike non-​noble mothers who were tutors, did not have to provide accounts to

216  Louise Dupin’s Work on Women This [arrangement] was [later] ceded to fathers and mothers on condition of rendering the same service [to the minor], by which we learn that women apparently had as much capacity as men. We know what garde noble means today. Women and men hold it with the same advantages and the same obligations, following the implementation of the Establishments [of Saint Louis].196 Here’s what we read in a modern treatise on tutorships: women, says the author “will allow me to tell them that they would do well not to go curiously seeking out tutorships; the law says to deny them everything flat out, insofar as tutorship is a man’s duty” {Jean Gillet in 1656}.197 What a lovely, reasonable conclusion drawn from such an intelligible principle! At least he doesn’t include mothers and grandmothers in it. Regardless, before and after this author, we can name several examples of tutorships held by women who were neither the mothers nor grandmothers of their wards. After the death of Madame de Longueville, the curatorship of the Abbé d’Orleans was shared between Monsieur le Prince [de Condé] and Madame de Nemours.198 their children and heirs at the conclusion of their tutorship. Corley, “Gender, Kin, and Guardianship,” 187–​188. 196 The Establishments of Saint Louis: a thirteenth-​century compilation melding the customs of Orléans and Paris with the decrees of Louis IX and Roman and canon law. Dupin refers to this passage: “A noblewoman, after the death of her husband, will have the guardianship of her male child while he is a minor, until he has reached the age of twenty, and of her daughter until the age of fifteen. She will keep up all the property; and if there are woods that the husband would have sold, she can sell them.” Eusèbe-​Jacques de Laurière, Ordonnances des rois de France de la troisième race (Paris: Imprimerie royale, 1723), 1:120–​121. 197 Gillet cites the Justinian Code, 5.35.1. Gillet nevertheless compliments Anne d’Autriche, Regent of France (1643–​1651) during her son Louis XIV’s minority: “I would not even want to exclude women from this number” of capable tutors, “for the condition of this sex is not so fragile, that we don’t find among them good minds capable of important business, as the regencies and government of great princesses prove well enough” (16–​17). 198 Louis XIV’s intervention in the curatorship of Jean-​Louis-​Charles d’Orléans exemplifies the state’s investment in maintaining the munus virile of tutorship. Jean-​Louis-​Charles was seventeen when his father, Henri II d’Orléans, Duc de Longueville, died in 1663. He and his younger brother came under the tutelage of their mother, Anne-​Geneviève de Bourbon, Duchesse de Longueville. Her tutorship continued as a curatorship beyond the Abbé d’Orléans’s majority, because he was mad. When Madame de Longueville died in 1679, the Princes of Condé (her brother Louis II de Bourbon-​ Condé and her nephew from a different brother, Louis-​Armand de Bourbon-​Conti), were assigned curatorship of maternal property, while Marie de Nemours, the Abbé’s half sister through his father’s first marriage, was made curator of his paternal property and Regent of Neuchâtel. Louis XIV revoked Marie de Nemours’s tutorship and regency in 1682 and had the Princes of Condé named honorary curators of all of the Abbé’s property, with Jacques Planson, councilor and secretary to Louis XIV as the curateur onéraire. The Abbé d’Orléans outlived his uncle and his cousin (his honorary curators). The fate of his fortune after his death in 1694 led to one of the most complex and dramatic legal cases of the seventeenth century, pitting his half sister against his cousin’s son, François-​Louis de Bourbon, Prince de Condé. Dupin likely read about the case, which was finally decided in 1702, in the Journal des principales audiences du Parlement avec les arrêts qui y ont été rendus, depuis l’année 1700 jusqu’en 1710, ed. Nicolas Nupied (Paris: Théodore LeGras, 1737), 5:312–​324.

Part III: Law  217 Madame la Duchesse d’Aiguillon, aunt of the Marquis de Richelieu and the Abbé de Richelieu, shared her tutorship of them with Madame de Pontcourlay.199 And in the house of Coetlogon, tutorship was attributed to a woman, as we find confirmed by the Parlement of Brittany. Thus the author cited above spoke out of hand. Yet so many other jurists have interpreted any and all points of law pertaining to women with the same temerity that we might as well pardon him as one of the crowd; it isn’t worth singling him out for individual refutation. The Romans understood tutorships and curatorships differently; a child without a father or mother received a tutor entrusted with the care of the child’s person and property until the age of twelve for girls or fourteen for boys. After that, the child received a curator responsible only for the child’s property. Does this resemble yet the perpetual tutelage of women? In any case, a reasonable woman could be a tutor or curator just as a man could, according to the same conditions and with just as many advantages for the minors. We can infer from the words of a man who says “women would do well not to go curiously seeking out tutorships,” that women have inquired into their rights and have protested their deprivation of them. We aren’t running after them; we have already amassed enough evidence to show that the rights of women were common with those of men. Simply reflecting on these facts will suffice to be convinced that things did not develop into what they are today without opposition or usurpation.

199 Cardinal Richelieu named Marie-​Madeleine de Vignerot de Pontcourlay, Duchesse d’Aiguillon, tutor of her nephew (his great nephew), Armand-​Jean de Vignerot du Plessis, Duc de Richelieu. It is unclear why this tutorship was necessary, as Armand-​Jean’s father did not die until 1646, when Armand-​Jean was seventeen. Perhaps it was because he was General of galley ships and frequently absent. Certainly Cardinal Richelieu did not trust his nephew; shortly before his death in 1642, he made him hand over his generalship to Armand-​Jean. Several factums (accounts of court proceedings) from 1646 indicate that the young Duc de Richelieu was eager to be free of his aunt’s authority. See Catalogue des factums et d’autres documents judiciaires antérieurs à 1790, ed. A. Corda, vol. 5 (Paris: Librarie Plon, 1900), 125–​126. We have found no evidence that Armand-​Jean’s brothers, Jean-​ Baptiste Amador de Vignerot du Plessis, Marquis de Richelieu or Emmanuel-​Joseph de Vignerot du Plessis, Abbé de Richelieu, were under the tutelage of the Duchesse d’Aiguillon. Nor have we found any information about a Madame de Pontcourlay, other than the Duchesse d’Aiguillon herself—​it was one of her titles.

218  Louise Dupin’s Work on Women

On testimony Based on the fact that Julia law forbade the testimony of any woman condemned for adultery we can infer that the testimony of women was received in court except of course in the case of legitimate recusals, which also applied to men {Domat, Legum delectus, page 74, column 2}.200 Those who have sought to interpret recusals against women more expansively have found it difficult since an edict of Charles VI from November 15, 1394 decreed that women should be admitted as witnesses in all civil cases, whether in civil or criminal court, excepting the legitimate recusals that might be made against them in particular cases {Royal Ordinances, volume 1, page 16}.201 However, we hear it said in law schools today that women’s testimony is not worth that of men, that women can’t serve as witnesses except in certain cases, that there must be several women to amount to the testimony of a man, etc. and that is said on the authority of the very scholars who wrote it. Thus does a little fourteen-​year-​old boy studying law bring back to the paternal household pretty instructions to show off his progress in the study of justice and just ideas. One must not condemn jurisprudence in its entirety for the teaching of such things; ordinances, edicts, and decrees show exactly the contrary on several occasions. There have been disputes between civil and canon law on this matter over the course of the last centuries, but both should be based on common sense and neither has ever been able, nor should be able, to exclude necessary witnesses because they are female. The distinctions that men have attempted to establish on this matter are anecdotes202 [in the history] of masculine usurpation and examples of the madness to which the spirit of usurpation can lead men.

200 Roman women could represent themselves but not others in court. Aude Chatelard, “Minorité juridique et citoyenneté des femmes dans la Rome républicaine,” Clio: Femmes, Genre, Histoire 43 (2016): 23–​46. 201 Pierre Néron and Etienne Girard, Recueil d’édits et d’ordonnances royaux (Paris: Montalant, 1720), 1:16. 202 Dupin uses the term “anecdote” from the Greek anecdota—​things that haven’t appeared, that are kept secret. In France, “anecdotes,” usually in the plural, was a title given to a genre of history detailing the private lives of the nobility. Dupin masculinizes a genre in which the manipulation of men by women is a recurring theme.

Part III: Law  219

Chapter 37. On Rape While203 some peoples believed it permissible in war to rape the women of an enemy Nation, others thought very differently, and the latter certainly upheld more virtuous principles than the former and presented better models to men.204 Hebrew law went so far as to obligate a man to marry the woman prisoner whom he had violated—​taking away, in that case, his right to sell her to someone else.205 Laws against rape in France go further still by demanding the death penalty.206 Rape is all the more punishable insofar as it cannot occur without the help of accomplices or takes place between two people in whom an age difference or a difference in strength entails great inequality.207 It was allowed for a time that a woman could save the man who had raped her from the death penalty by marrying him. We might say that this outcome almost encouraged the crime, and today when it comes up, judges make more jokes about it than judgments. Since this point has indeed on occasion generated curious cases involving unscrupulous women, it is entirely reasonable to specify those in which such punishment may apply, and even to modify its terms, for the word “crime” has no place in the case of a girl or woman old enough to protect herself from seduction and even from violence. With the exception of these cases, however, rape cannot be punished too rigorously, even when the victim is of lower rank than the accused, since according to human respect one cannot make concessions on this issue without offending nature and without encouraging the most odious form of violence. And yet, there are so many modifications [of punishment] allowed in this regard that a man guilty of rape has very little to worry about, so long as it has not occurred with a woman belonging to an influential family.

203 This polished manuscript is located at the Illinois Rare Book and Manuscript Library (Post-​ 1650 MS 0563). It has been edited by Sylvie Dangeville in “Deux articles inédits de l’Ouvrage sur les femmes de Mme Dupin.” 204 Hugo Grotius, in De Juri belli ac pacis libri tres (1752) 3.4.19, acknowledges multiple opinions about the permissibility of rape during war, but sides with those who condemn it. Grotius surfaces again in “On Mores” (MJJR), where Dupin objects to his recommendation of a fine as punishment for rape. She rejects a rationale given for tolerating prostitution: that it prevents “honest women” from being exposed to “paying Grotius’ fine” (i.e., being raped). 205 This law is based on an interpretation of Deuteronomy 22:28–​29. 206 Indeed, the punishment for rape in France was the death penalty. However, rape was not considered a capital crime if the victim was a woman or girl of “ill repute.” Ferrière, Dictionnaire de droit, 2:706. 207 Rousseau concedes that “there can be such a disproportion of age and strength that real rape takes place,” even though he suggests that most contemporary rape accusations are contrived (Emile, 360).

220  Louise Dupin’s Work on Women Whether because jurists imagine rape as a mark of men’s force and empire, or because they are used to putting men first, laws ordinarily discuss rape as a crime of men with punishments for men. However, they do cite a few women who have been punished for this crime. If we attribute the fact that women more rarely commit rape to the greater shame that it entails for them, might we use the same means so as to restrain men in this respect? In pointing out that women have been punished for this crime, Heaven forbid that I demand equality for them here.208 Both the goal of this work and the truth constrain me to acknowledge that women are as prone to vice as men, but not to consider their capacity for vice as a justification for it, least of all with respect to the point in question. Rape is too odious [for any such justification], since it entails the abuse of human kindness, in the case and in the moment where it has the greatest obligation. There is also a kind of rapt “by seduction” punishable by death, though these laws can be eluded also. This crime deserves no less punishment than the other [rapt “by violence”],209 because between unequal ages, seduction can have as much force as force itself. Such a case occurred in our day between a man over forty and a twelve-​year-​old girl. I once had the pleasure of hearing a man justify this man’s actions by alleging the girl’s consent—​ clearly, he was not a judge. I say “pleasure” because for the purpose of this work, I have gladly gathered the injustices I have encountered. All readers are equipped to make their own judgments about this well-​known case, and as a result, about cases that might resemble it.

208 In other words, rapists, whether men or women, should be punished; a woman who commits rape should not be able to evade punishment as many men have. 209 On rapt, see the final section of the introduction to Part III.

Part IV Education and Mores Introduction In Part IV, Dupin becomes an ethnographer of her own society, scrutinizing the lived experience of men and women and exposing the everyday sexism in which they are immersed. Looking back on Part II, she recalls all of the “witticisms historians use when they speak of women”—​so many that she collected them into a chapter that practically wrote itself (Art. 38: “Particular observations on the style of some authors”). Ubiquitous in history books, misogynistic platitudes are no less frequent in social spaces. Conversation was an art in which women were said to excel, and over which hostesses of salons had some authority. Madeleine de Scudéry modeled the delights of mixed-​ gender sociability in her collections of Conversations anthologized from her novels (1680–​1692),1 and other authors featured women conversants in works of philosophical, scientific, and moral exposition: Poulain de la Barre’s On the Education of Ladies (1674), Fontenelle’s Conversations on the Plurality of Worlds (1686), and various pedagogical works by Madame de Maintenon, the founder of a school for the daughters of poor noblemen.2 As the hostess of a reputable salon, Dupin undoubtedly mastered “the art of conversation”3 (Art. 45), yet she peels back the veneer of camaraderie to expose indignities that don’t usually make it into published works. In mixed company, men crack lewd jokes under their breath; women play dumb, purposefully mispronouncing words when they speak with men; and even “the most 1 On Scudéry’s Conversations, see Allauren Samantha Forbes, “Madeleine de Scudéry on Conversation and its Feminist Ends,” British Journal for the History of Philosophy 30, no. 1 (2022): 48–​70. 2 These were copied, collected, and circulated in manuscript form. Conley, Suspicion of Virtue, 130–​131. On Maintenon’s pedagogy, see also Lisa Shapiro, “Assuming Epistemic Authority, or Becoming a Thinking Thing,” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 118, no. 3 (2018): 307–​326. 3 See Benedetta Craveri, The Age of Conversation, trans. Teresa Waugh (New York Review Books, 2005); Marc Fumaroli, Trois institutions littéraires (Gallimard: 1993); Dena Goodman, The Republic of Letters: A Cultural History of the French Enlightenment (Cornell University Press, 1994); and Daniel Gordon, Citizens without Sovereignty: Equality and Sociability in French Thought, 1670–​1789 (Princeton University Press, 1994).

222  Louise Dupin’s Work on Women dignified women are not impervious” to the insults with which men enforce their dominance in social spaces (Art. 45). Dupin marvels at the consistent messaging of men who “seem to have lent each other a hand in convincing women to believe that they were worth less than them”4—​and so effectively that women lack solidarity amongst themselves and even participate in the behaviors that perpetuate their subordination.5 In Part IV of the Work on Women, Dupin analyzes an interlocking system of social practices in which customs script unjust gender relations that a society accepts as moral givens; divergent education for boys and girls replicates those givens, creating social relationships that lack actual relating; and marriage—​the most important of those relationships and “the basis for all social organization” (Art. 18)—​is riven with distrust and miscommunication. By putting Dupin in dialogue with her contemporaries—​a dialogue she never formally had—​we uplift her attention to power. Dupin’s moral philosophy is feminist philosophy in that it interrogates the way in which power asymmetry inflects gender-​specific mores, results from sex-​specific education, and impedes communication and relationships. We conclude with a brief explanation of Part IV’s discontinuous chapter numbering.

The Science of Mores Through her analysis of the causes and consequences of sexism in day-​to-​day life, Dupin confirms the stance she adopted in Part I, establishing herself as a moraliste and as a moral philosopher. As she puts it, la morale (moral philosophy or ethics) is the “science of mores which teaches men the principles of the duties they have toward each other” (long “Preliminary Discourse”). Mores are a given society’s social norms and expectations, and as a “science of mores,” moral philosophy seeks to understand human interaction, while aspiring to guide social conduct toward the good. Dupin’s contemporaries variously attribute mores to temperament (see Art. 3), environment (especially “climate”);6 and culture (religion, government, laws). While she agrees that these shape the mores of different nations, she denies that there is any 4 In “The Learned” (Les sçavants). 5 Sexism “justifies and rationalizes a patriarchal order,” while misogyny “polices and enforces its governing norms and expectations,” Kate Mann, Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny (Oxford University Press, 2018), 20. 6 A country’s zone or latitude, which determines its geography, seasons, and, above all, temperature.

Part IV: Education and Mores  223 natural foundation to the differing behaviors of men and women within a given nation. Gendered behaviors and positionalities result from relations of power within a hierarchical society: “Women are raised to consider small things great, since those are their principal occupation, and to find great things small—​or at least in relation to themselves, to consider them indifferently, because they have no connection to them” (Art. 40). Falsely persuaded that great things have no connection to them, women are ill-​equipped to understand how powerful interests shape the smallness of their lives. And conversely, those whose principal occupation is greatness have little reason to inquire into the distortions of perspective from which they benefit. Dupin’s interest in how the dynamics of dominance and dependence shape social mores distinguishes her from the moralistes she engages in this section, whose work she dismisses as social satire: François VI, Duc de La Rochefoucauld; Jean de la Bruyère; César Vichard de Saint-​Réal; Luc de Clapiers, Marquis de Vauvenargues; and the English poet Alexander Pope (Art. 39). These men ostensibly encourage virtue by depicting vice and provide insight into the human condition by dissecting the vanity, interest, loyalty, hypocrisy, snobbery, and self-​love that parade across society’s stage. Yet their observations are suspect, because they treat the moral failings of men and women inconsistently. “They seem to have supposed that their species [sex] is too perfect to have ever been attributed the entirety of some vice or fault,” whereas in reading about women “I have been made to understand that it fell on them in particular and even in such a way that men were exempted from [it]” (in “Virtues and Rights Ceded”). They single out faults to attribute to women as a whole. Such partiality in a genre meant to inspire self-​reflection reveals a prejudice that itself merits philosophical examination. Dupin thus implies that these “modern Theophrastuses” fail at their own game. She alludes to Pierre-​Jacques Brillon, author of Modern Theophrastus, or New Characters on Mores (1700), who continued La Bruyère’s Characters of Theophrastus, Translated from the Greek with the Characters or Mores of this Century (1687), with the requisite collection of digs at women. The problem is that sexist commentary, however trivial, is not harmless; Dupin points out that Brillon—​one of her sources in the Law section—​fills works destined for the bookshelves of judges with similar invective.7 7 Pierre-​Jacques Brillon, Le Théophraste Moderne, ou nouveaux caractères sur les mœurs (The Hague: Meindert Uytwerf, 1700). Dupin comments on Brillon’s Dictionnaire des arrêts (1727) in Art. 38. Dupin says La Bruyère leads readers to “scorn and even detest humanity, without actually correcting anyone” in “Ideas on Several Authors and Several Works.”

224  Louise Dupin’s Work on Women What of women moralists, whose work Dupin does not acknowledge? Dupin mentions Anne-​ Thérèse de Margenat de Courcelles, Marquise de Lambert’s New Reflections on Women (1729) in her own moral essay “On Friendship.”8 Lambert protests the ridicule that, ever since Molière’s comedy mocking Learned Women (1672), shames women with intellectual aspirations and leaves them nothing to pursue but frivolity. This complaint surely captured Dupin’s attention. But one of the reasons that the moral essay was a genre deemed acceptable for women was that its psychological focus precluded the political, where “politics is about the organization of society and the distribution of power.”9 Despite her nostalgia for a time of greater decorum and restraint, Lambert considers human behavior to be timeless. To the charge that women are more dissolute than ever before, Lambert replies: “To save the present, I need only send you to the past. Mores are the same in all times, but they manifest in different forms.”10 This wisdom of the ages could hardly have satisfied Dupin, who describes even the passions as a function of the development of human societies: “Men in multiplying, multiplied their passions,” she writes in the long “Preliminary Discourse.” Likewise, although Dupin shares Lambert’s conviction that women would make more compelling companions for men if they were able to cultivate their reason, she insists that domination and subordination undermine intimate relationships, while Lambert dilutes political considerations in a sentimental “metaphysics of love.” Men “have usurped their authority over women by force rather than by natural right,” she acknowledges, but women’s empire would be absolute if only they joined virtue to beauty.11 We have no evidence that Dupin was aware of Madeleine d’Arsant de Puisieux’s Advice to a Friend (1749), which masquerades as a conduct book—​ or “misconduct book,” as Julie Candler Hayes puts it12—​while offering misanthropic sketches of social mores. Puisieux’s “advice” can be read literally, as misogynistic sport (there is no hope for ugly women; don’t get mad, it makes you ugly, etc.), or ironically, as the reflection of a society that paints girls into a corner with moral prescriptions and social pressure, neither of 8 She cites Lambert’s New Reflections in “Ideas on Friendship.” Villeneuve-Guibert, Portefeuille, 80. 9 Green, A History of Women’s Political Thought in Europe, 2. 10 Anne-​Thérèse de Margenat de Courcelles, Marquise de Lambert, Réflexions nouvelles sur les femmes et lettres sur la véritable éducation (Amsterdam: Pierre Humbert, 1732), 27. 11 Lambert, Réflexions, 7. 12 Julie Candler Hayes, “Philosophical about Marriage: Women Writers and the Moralist Tradition,” ASECS Presidential Address 2013, Studies in Eighteenth-​Century Culture 44 (2015): 1–​16, pg. 6. For Lambert, Puisieux, and conduct books, see Nadine Bérenguier, Conduct Books for Girls in Enlightenment France (Ashgate, 2011).

Part IV: Education and Mores  225 which ascribe any purpose to women in society beyond pleasing others. Stunningly, Puisieux’s narrator faults wives for the power of husbands, which Dupin shows to be firmly grounded in their control of marital resources (Art. 30). According to Puisieux, “a wife humiliates herself below the level of a servant if she is too submissive. Submission is a mark of subordination, and between married people, everything is equal. [ . . . ] Men are only what we have made them, and if they have claimed superiority, it is because we have let them do so.”13 In her Characters (1750), Puisieux proposes drive-​by snippets, including some protest of men’s condescension toward women, but no moral compass: “I leave things as they are,” she proclaims.14 She observes, for example, that women cry as easily as they laugh, while men only cry for a reason.15 But observing mores without considering their causes does not lead to greater understanding. Women cry for a very good reason, Dupin insists—​a reason not based in their nature but in the social distribution of power. In theater, “tears have been left to women as if they were a weakness” (Art. 46). Tears express a weakness produced by the structural infantilization of women: “Tears will only ever be the effect of oppression without any resource. We know that this expression of feeling is common in the childhood of both sexes. Women conserve its usage longer because the state of being surrounded by masters—​people on whom one is dependent—​is prolonged for them” (“Vices and Faults Given”). Tears are the language of the powerless. Dupin’s attention to causes distinguishes her moral philosophy from the moralist writing of her contemporaries.

Satires of Education Insofar as moral philosophy “gives us rules for practice [ . . . ] and grants us wise conduct in all actions of human life,”16 it is deeply concerned with éducation, which in French encompasses not just formal instruction but also the tenacious lessons of familial upbringing. Dupin joins the chorus of feminists before her—​Marie de Gournay, Poulain de la Barre, Gabrielle Suchon—​in identifying gendered mores as the product of “habit, practice, 13 Published as Madame de P., Conseils à une amie (n.p. 1749), 131. 14 Published as Madame de P., Caractères (London, n. p., 1750), 133 15 Caractères, 144–​145. 16 In the words of Gabrielle Suchon, Treatise on Ethics and Politics, in A Woman Who Defends All the Persons of Her Sex: Selected Philosophical and Moral Writings, trans. and ed. Domna Stanton and Rebecca Wilkin (Chicago University Press, 2010), 154.

226  Louise Dupin’s Work on Women [and] education”17 on the one hand, and in lamenting the uneven distribution of formal education as a social good on the other. There is nothing to say about women in a chapter on education, she shrugs in the long “Preliminary Discourse,” “except that they are given no education beyond learning to read and write, and even that with such limits that it is not unusual for a woman at the age of eighteen to have read only her prayers and to have written only to wish her grandmother a Happy New Year.” It wasn’t always like that. Consistent with the historical methodology she applies throughout the Work on Women, Dupin uplifts women’s work as educators in pagan antiquity and in the early Church (Art. 23) in parallel to women’s participation in the priesthood (Art. 8). What women “lost little by little” in religion, “they lost twice over in education” (Art. 23), as the independence in women’s monastic communities was squelched (Art. 10). Yet far from recognizing this loss, present-​day pedagogs place the consequences of educational neglect at the altar of natural differences. If moralistes write satires of women, what pedagogs write for girls are “satire[s]‌of education” (Art. 23). Dupin singles out François Fénelon, who as preceptor to the young Duc de Bourgogne wrote The Adventures of Telemachus (1699)—​a best-​selling novel and one of two books that Rousseau assigns to his imaginary pupil Emile in his own didactic novel. Dupin was not impressed with Fénelon’s Treatise on the Education of Girls (1687), Lambert’s inspiration for her “A Mother’s Advice to her Daughter” (1728).18 Fénelon worries about what girls should not learn as much as he describes what they should learn.19 What’s the worst that can happen, Dupin objects? Pedantry never killed anyone. Her impatience with Fénelon’s discussion of women’s moral duties in a treatise on education recalls the irritation of Fontenelle’s Marquise when the narrator compares the earth’s movement to the workings of self-​love: “You are moralizing,” she yawns.20 Curiously, Dupin does not mention the “Project for Perfecting Girl’s Education” (1728) by her mentor and beloved friend the Abbé de Saint-​Pierre. 17 A Physical and Moral Discourse Concerning the Equality of Both Sexes, in The Equality of the Sexes: Three Feminist Texts of the Seventeenth Century, trans. and ed. Desmond Clarke (Oxford University Press, 2013), 187–​188. Hereafter abbreviated as “Equality.” 18 On this letter, see introduction to the volume. 19 Fénelon was at the time the spiritual advisor of Madame de Maintenon. His ideas about girls’ education had reach: Charles Rollin cites them approvingly throughout his Supplément au traité de la manière d’enseigner et d’étudier les belles lettres (Paris: widow Etienne, 1734), in which he argues that girls mainly need to learn the things that will help them run a household. 20 Bernard le Bovier de Fontenelle, Entretiens sur la pluralité des mondes, ed. Christophe Martin (Paris: Flammarion, 1998), 79.

Part IV: Education and Mores  227 Saint-​Pierre scales up an idea hatched by Poulain de la Barre’s characters in On the Education of Ladies. Poulain imagines separate schools run by women, with instruction ensured by well-​ trained nuns.21 Saint-​ Pierre proposes turning convents—​girls “have no other schools in France”—​into colleges that could educate 200 girls at a time in classes of fifteen to sixteen girls of the same age, from the age of five until the age of eighteen, when they would marry.22 Girls would learn needlework (instead of Latin), history, geography, public law, civil law, astronomy, anatomy, and arithmetic.23 The rationale for learning beyond what household management requires is that a wife should be able to enjoy being mansplained to by her husband—​preferably eight to ten years older than her so that he can be “as it were, her governor.”24 Dupin echoes Saint-​Pierre’s rationale for educating girls: women’s education should not be left to chance, because mothers are the first teachers of their children and may become their tutors as well as heads of household if widowed (Art. 40). But in observing that girls “are given examples only of the most perfect submission and the greatest patience, such as the heroism of Griselda,” she rejects Saint-​Pierre’s pedagogy and principles (Art. 23). Not only does her mentor want little girls to memorize Charles Perrault’s versified version of the Griselda tale because its main character is “a model of patience”; he moreover envisions a monthly patience prize for the pupil who has “suffered the most without complaining”—​for a patient woman is a “treasure” in any home.25 A font of projects for the public good, Saint-​Pierre was mocked as a harebrained utopist. Émilie le Tonnelier de Breteuil, Marquise du Châtelet, in her 1735 translator’s preface to Mandeville’s Fable of the Bees (1714), jokes that she should ask Saint-​Pierre to add her “scientific experiment” for the education of girls to his laundry list of projects: “It might appear just as difficult to implement, but it would perhaps be more reasonable.”26 Her 21 Poulain de la Barre, On the Education of Ladies, in Three Cartesian Feminist Treatises, ed. Marcelle Maistre Welch, trans. Vivien Bosley (University of Chicago Press, 2002), 156. Saint-​Pierre does not adopt the Cartesian syllabus Poulain’s characters come up with. 22 Charles-​Irénée Castel de Saint-​Pierre, “Un projet pour perfectionner l’éducation des filles,” Œuvres diverses de Monsieur l’Abbé de Saint Pierre (Paris: Briasson, 1730), 2:91. 23 Saint-​Pierre, “Un projet,” 119, 122–​124. 24 Saint-​Pierre, “Un projet,” 91, 119–​121. 25 Saint-​Pierre, “Un projet,” 118. To make “the bizarre behavior of this jealous and credulous prince” more plausible, Saint-​Pierre suggests “adding in the manipulation and calumny of an evil [female] rival” (114). 26 Du Châtelet translated Bernard Mandeville, The Fable of the bees: or, private vices, publick benefits, 3rd edition (London: J. Tonson, 1724). All subsequent quotes from her “Préface du traducteur” are from the electronic edition provided by the Center for the History of Women Philosophers and Scientists, University of Paderborn, in cooperation with the National Library of Russia, Saint

228  Louise Dupin’s Work on Women experiment eschews patience policies in favor of political action: “If I were king, [ . . . ] I would reform an abuse that cuts off [retranche], so to speak, half of the human species. I would make women participate in all the rights of humanity and above all those of the mind.” She calls out the injustice of deprivation and queries systemic barriers: “Why do these creatures, whose understanding seems in everything so similar to that of men, seem somehow blocked on one side of the gate by an invincible force?” Until (or unless) naturalist philosophers find a satisfactory answer to that question, she insists, “women have a right to protest the education they have received.” Du Châtelet’s preface was not published until 1941.27 We cannot confirm that Dupin had access to any manuscript copy, though that would not be impossible. Several drafts were in the papers that Voltaire inherited at du Châtelet’s death in 1746; might he have shared one with Dupin? We return below to one striking commonality in du Châtelet’s and Dupin’s thoughts on the social benefits of educating women. Given Dupin’s impatience with Fénelon’s moralizing, and in light of Saint-​ Pierre’s development of Poulain’s ideas for how to go about implementing a robust education for girls, readers may be disappointed that Dupin does not propose her own program for educating girls in the Work on Women. In “Ideas on Education,” a separate piece similar in title and tone to her “Ideas on Friendship” and “Ideas on Happiness,” Dupin considers the importance of education for society and the principles that should guide it. What distinguishes Dupin’s thoughts on education in the Work on Women is her awareness that content—​what one learns—​is just one part of education, and perhaps not the most important part. She doubts that better training for nuns would suffice to reform the education of girls, because the cause of the paltry education currently on offer is due not just to their ignorance, but also to their isolation—​a consequence of the imposition of enclosure following the Council of Trent (see Art. 10): “Due to their loss of freedom and resources, female religious are completely incapable of making good on this responsibility [educating girls], while male religious can do quite well thanks to the Petersburg, and the Centre international d’étude du XVIIIe siècle, Ferney-​Voltaire. Transcription, encoding, annotations by Andrew Brown, Ulla Kölving, Stefanie Ertz, December 14, 2020, https://​ his​tory​ofwo​menp​hilo​soph​ers.org/​stp/​docume​nts/​view/​man​devi​lle#hea​d16. See also Émilie Du Châtelet: Selected Philosophical and Scientific Writings, ed. Judith Zinsser, trans. Isabelle Bour and Judith Zinsser (University of Chicago Press, 2009), 35–​52. We preferred to use our own translation. 27 As an appendix in Ira Wade, Voltaire and Madame Du Châtelet: An Essay on the Intellectual Activity at Cirey (Princeton University Press, 1941).

Part IV: Education and Mores  229 resources they glean from study and their commerce with the world” (Art. 23). With the eye of a sociologist, she insists that belonging to a community and contributing to a larger purpose should also be features of women’s education: “The great communication of men among themselves is also a great advantage to them. Thus not only would good schools be necessary [to properly educate women], but also all sorts of schools and academies and all kinds of ways to communicate and to assemble for the common good” (Art. 23). This would involve radical change. Even still, securing all of these advantages for women would not achieve equality between men and women in society unless men’s education were also reformed, because Dupin identifies men’s education as just as much a problem as women’s lack of it. While girls are reading devotional materials and writing to their relatives, boys are following a “reasonable and instructive” educational program: “Voilà ten full years; voilà many things planted in young minds.” Among the things planted in young boys’ minds is a conviction of their place in the world. The simple fact of receiving an education (when girls do not) inflates boys’ self-​importance and primes them to accept prejudices about women as natural fact—​the “masculine vanity” Dupin confronts in Part I. Boys not only see themselves as “more precious” than girls from their tenderest youth (Art. 39); they also disrespect their mothers for having been denied the privileges they enjoy (Art. 23, Art. 40). Yet who could blame them, based on what they are taught and what they observe? To imagine that women could do all the things they do if only they had benefited from the same education would require men to question the dominance that their entire upbringing has entitled them to. In that light, “it is more reasonable to believe [that women are incapable] than to believe there is injustice” (Art. 39).

Mores in Marriage Not surprisingly, given their firm belief in their own superiority, whenever the injustice of the inequality of men and women comes up in conversation, men “change the subject as quickly as possible” (Art. 45). They are especially uncurious about the injustice of marital inequality, because, as Dupin notes in a fine example of moralist reflection on self-​interest, people tend not to question what serves them well: “Marriage, such as it is established today, gives men great advantages that they take to be both natural and right, taking

230  Louise Dupin’s Work on Women custom for nature, as we do most of our lives, and taking abuse for justice when it works to our advantage” (Art. 42). The legally dependent status of women in marriage, so central to the analysis in Law section (Part III), re-​appears in Part IV as a degrading moral dependence that limits both men and women. Men’s education prepares them to assume the mastery granted to them by law, which designates the husband as “ ‘master’ and ‘head’ of the marriage partnership, while disbarring the wife from her own rights over herself and her property on the pretext of her weakness and inequality” (Art. 30). Most husbands believe themselves entitled to authority and assert it “over everything that wives think and say, and over all of their actions more generally.” Riffing on the contractual language of rights, Dupin remarks that men willingly “cede” to women “the empire of trifles,” the “right” to determine styles of decoration, and “absolute power over colors and their combinations” (“Virtues and Rights Ceded”). But even this measly empire is not sovereign. It turns out that husbands also want to arrange the furniture! (Art. 42). As for women, the moral education that they receive in preparation for marriage privileges “personal duty, submission, and obedience” (Art. 42), priming them to lose their moral autonomy along with their assets.28 In her profound meditation on the loss of women’s moral autonomy in marriage, Gabrielle Suchon notes that husbands interpret Saint Paul’s law that “married people do not have power over their own bodies” only in their own favor; this law “usually degenerates into extreme abuse, and its rigorous application affords no defense for women except to suffer with patience.”29 Dupin indicates that marital policing works by implicit threat: few are the husbands who haven’t become angry and “reminded their wives of [their authority] at least once in their lives” (Art. 42). However, Dupin is less interested in Part IV in painting marriage as tyranny—​an analogy already well-​covered in women’s writing30—​than in showing how the respective educations of men and women leave them ill-​ prepared for the actual relationship of marriage. Women’s noneducation is a liability for social action in general, since study and knowledge “are necessary, not only for being learned, but for being sociable and pleasant” (Art. 40). 28 In her study of three women writers—​Françoise de Graffigny, Marie Jeanne Riccoboni, Isabelle de Charrière—​Heidi Bostic points out that even being “reasonable” is gendered; a reasonable man’s actions are guided by reason, but a reasonable woman is obedient, moral, and not carried away by gallantry. The Fiction of Enlightenment: Women of Reason in the French Eighteenth Century (University of Delaware: 2010), 39. 29 Suchon, Treatise on Ethics and Politics, 124–​125. 30 See Green, “The Rights of Woman and the Equal Rights of Men.”

Part IV: Education and Mores  231 In her “science experiment,” Du Châtelet emphasizes that in conversing with properly educated women “men would gain a new source of emulation, and their commerce with us—​which in polishing their mind, too often weakens and shrinks it—​would then serve only to extend their knowledge.”31 In similar terms, Dupin regrets that gracious men who “proportion their knowledge to the ignorance of women, [ . . . ] lose something of what they know rather than perfecting it” in conversation (Art. 40). If conversation between men and women is stilted in social gatherings, how much more sterile is it in marriage? Dupin marvels that married couples have any way of relating to each other at all; their interactions are “bizarre and insincere,” rife with misunderstanding (Art. 40, 42). The apportionment of the marital relationship into roles of dominance and subordination has costs for husbands as well as wives, insofar as it kills the “charm that equality, voluntary consent, and one’s own will [could] provide to social interaction” (Art. 42). Suchon, for whom marriage was unredeemable, queered the marriage-​or-​murs (walls, i.e., convent)—​binary by introducing a “third way” for women: voluntary celibacy.32 In contrast, Dupin, like Poulain, embraces monogamous heterosexuality,33 and she shares with the future author of Emile (1762) the conviction that improving education could transform marriage. In the Discourse on the Origin and Foundations of Inequality Among Men, Rousseau sketches out man’s path from a state of original equality through chance events that led to the gradual institution of inequality. In this he adapts Dupin’s musings about the fate of marriage. She imagines “the primitive idea of marriage” as containing “the idea of a perfect equality” (Art. 41). If one were to investigate the “various accidents” leading to the unequal state of marriage today, she says, one might discover that once upon a time, everything “was held in common between married people,” and that it was only as a result of “friendship and cordiality” they made the mistake of believing “that there were no drawbacks in letting everything pass into the hands of only one of them” (Art. 41). Cue the marriage contract, whose institution of inequality she excoriates in Part III and that Rousseau would appropriate and transform into a critique of the Hobbesian social contract in On the Social Contract.34 Like Rousseau (and again, in advance of him), Dupin sees equality not just as a bygone state but as an aspiration for the future. In “On Marriage in General”

31 Du Châtelet, “Préface du traducteur.”

32 In Gabrielle Suchon, Du célibat volontaire (Paris: Jean and Michel Guignard, 1700).

33 Poulain de la Barre, On the Excellence of Men, in Three Cartesian Feminist Treatises, 280–​281. 34 See Wilkin, “ ‘Réformez vos contrats!’,” 88–​105.

232  Louise Dupin’s Work on Women (Art. 41), she gestures toward “the simple society of marriage” as a union still to be realized, the very idea of which brings “the greatest happiness one could aspire to on earth.” Dupin’s lyrical passages about what marriage could be are jarring amidst folios filled with snarky satires. “No other commerce can compare to this one, where two people choose each other to create a perfect community of feelings and interests, for their destiny and that of their posterity” (Art. 41). Not just the ideal of companionate marriage, but the earnestness with which she describes it, anticipates her secretary’s lofty sensibility. Yet nothing could be more different from Rousseau’s plan for achieving marital bliss than Dupin’s. Rousseau’s scheme is founded on a division of moral labor that necessitates an education for girls as restrictive as the one recommended by Fénelon.35 Dupin’s ideal of marriage is patterned on the reciprocity of equals modeled on commerce—​commerce as conversation and sex, both of which are better when marriage partners are equal and free, and commerce as trade between sovereign entities. In maintaining separate quarters and administering their own finances, husband and wife would cultivate the frisson of emulation and have confidence that their company was sought out of desire (Art. 42). A relationship based on reciprocal duties and pleasures that preserved both partners’ freedom would be so satisfying that neither would dream of losing its benefits through recrimination—​almost a requirement of today’s marriages, she says.36 These moral benefits would be matched by an equal exchange of material benefits guaranteed by a new marriage convention—​“Reform your contracts!”—​and freedom would be legally enforced by a law limiting an initial period of marriage for couples (Art. 30). Thus founded on “principles and arrangements stemming from a spirit of equality, marriages would return to the purity and sweetness [douceur] of their origin, to which acquired things would lend a new pleasure” (Art. 42). Better than primitive equality because of the material benefits of modern commerce, this union would also combine the traditional equality of friends with the erotic exclusivity of monogamous lovers: “The partnership of married people would have all the advantages of the society of two friends who not only have chosen each other to love but prefer each other every day over all other objects” (Art. 42). At the end of a Work on Women devoted to breaking down the systemic devaluation of women in science, politics, religion, law, and social mores, Dupin

35 Weiss, Gendered Community, 78–​79.

36 From a section of HRC drafts cataloged as “Marriage and feminine instruction.”

Part IV: Education and Mores  233 gestures toward alternative, better ways of being together in relationships, in company, and in community. Although she leaves it to the reader to imagine how dismantling prejudice would, in practical terms, transform social mores and institutions, a crossed-​out passage in the draft of Article 8 captures her confidence in the momentum of change, even as she acknowledges its unpredictability: “We view revolutions involving women just like other revolutions in which chance often plays an important part. In general, one thing leads to another, you go further than you think you will, and you never go as far as when you don’t know where you are going” (folio 15).

Chapter Numbers, Order, and Missing Pieces The nonconsecutive chapter numbers in Part IV require some explanation. Sénéchal originally hypothesized that the unnumbered “Foreword on Mores” was Article 38 because of its content. However, an article marked 38 was subsequently located by Le Bouler and Thiéry (“Partie retrouvée”) called “Particular Observations on the Style of Some Authors.” Frédéric Marty identifies the “Foreword on Mores” as thematically a fit for Article 22, followed by and linked to 23 (“On Education”).37 Marty hypothesizes that the rest of the chapters on education and mores would have followed from there but that the Law section erupted in the middle at some point in the project’s development. He considers 22, 23, and the missing 24 as part of a “fluid transition” section dealing with education and ethics.38 We agree with Marty that both the “Foreword on Mores” and “On Education” belong thematically to the final section of the extant Work on Women. We do not include several articles from “Mores and Education” in our selection, though we integrated material from most of them above: Articles 38 and 47 deal with language. 38 is an incomplete draft in which Dupin focuses on the style of male authors. She shows how they belittle women’s achievements (or attribute them to men) and discuss women as if they were only made for the happiness of men. She collects gratuitously sexist remarks from jurists, scientists, historians, and voyagers, and she criticizes 37 In Louise Dupin (126; 138). Sénéchal placed the short draft marked 22, “On the Religion of the Pagans,” with the “drafts, fragments, and compilations” for the History section. He speculated that the “Foreword” was 38, which HRC followed in their catalog. We have given the “Foreword” the number 22 here. 38 Marty, Louise Dupin, 126–​127.

234  Louise Dupin’s Work on Women the characters on offer in modern novels. “On the Changing Signification of Words” (47) is a series of fragments that gesture toward more basic components of language: feminine or masculine genders; the use of “man” to speak of all humans; ancient attributes represented by feminine divinities. A subtitle suggests that the changes to be traced involve “revolutions” in meaning. Articles 41 and 43 extend Dupin’s concern for intimate relationships between men and women. In the brief draft titled “On Marriage in General” (41), she asserts the originary equality of marriage, lauds the comforts and pleasures of marriage, and defends monogamy. In a rough, incomplete draft of “Effects of Education in Love” (43) she denounces men who seduce women by feigning love and then threatening to ruin their reputations. She mocks the affectation of the petit-​maître (literally, “little-​master”), satirizes his disguised intentions, and notes how other men help him in his predation. Article 44, “Particular Faults Attributed to Women,” relates to two unnumbered drafts that appear to go together: “Chapter in which We Examine the Vices and Faults Given to Women” and “Chapter in which We Examine the Virtues and Rights Ceded by Men to Women.” These drafts gather together the praise-​and-​blame commonplaces of the Querelle des femmes. In the two pieces focused on women’s faults, Dupin takes on litanies of feminine defects point by point. In “Virtues and Rights Ceded,” she observes that virtues lauded in women are not valued by men, and there is no social reward for them as there is for the virtues men seek to embody. “Virtues and Rights Ceded” seems to have been envisioned as a conclusion to an early iteration of the Work on Women. She asserts that her “little work” has proven the fact of true equality between the sexes, but recognizes the limits of this knowledge in effecting actual change. Assuming a detached perspective that she likens to the wisdom of Plato and to the cosmic view modeled in Fontenelle’s Conversations on the Plurality of Worlds, she recommends accepting the world’s foolishness while awaiting Heaven. And, in a prescriptive vein redolent of conduct literature and absent from the later iteration of the Work on Women presented here, she advocates stoic control over one’s own thoughts and emotions.

Part IV: Education and Mores  235

[Article 22]. Foreword on Mores Undoubtedly, mores rest on a principle, but it is the same for men and women.39 It is equally drawn from nature, which distributed passions and reason equally among them. There are natural mores, since it is certain that [even] people who haven’t received any type of education must behave amongst themselves in particular ways reflecting their sentiments and inclinations;40 and that these manners ostensibly form what we call mores. Eventually, these same mores will come to appear natural in the perspective of a people; this is the state we are in today. But I would ask that someone show me any difference of sentiment or of inclination between male and female children that isn’t saturated with notions and teachings that led them to conceive these differences. Once a person has exhausted the usual trivial remarks—​to which we could always reply, “it’s the effect of what has been imparted”41—​I don’t doubt that they might try to call up some ancient stories42 establishing that a difference in character between male and female children has long been recognized; but the very effort mustered to cite these stories would do more to reveal just how eager they are to establish this opinion of difference between the sexes than to actually prove it. For no matter the time period in which this opinion is found, as soon as we can prove that it is not based in nature, it cannot be used to counter our view. For example, someone might cite the famous deed of clever Ulysses, who, disguised as a merchant, presented weapons and jewels to Achilles, disguised as a daughter of Lycomedes, and recognized him by his preference for the weapons.43 But the Amazons, who came armed to the siege of Troy to save Priam, and other women in Greece raised and trained using weapons, would have been able to confound the ruse of Ulysses; their skill would quite naturally suggest that Ulysses’ method did not reflect a widely 39 Manuscript at Harry Ransom Center (MS-​03636, I.B.art.38). We believe that this is article 22, although HRC has it classed as 38. On the ordering of the articles, see introduction to Part IV. The title—​avant propos sur les mœurs—​is penciled on the cover sheet in Dupin’s hand just below a title in Rousseau’s hand: Du principe des mœurs (“On the Principle of Mores”). 40 Inclination. Proclivity, tendency, penchant, natural disposition. 41 C’est l’effet de ce qui est inspiré. In other words, the imagined interlocutor takes learned behaviors for natural ones. 42 Traits. Memorable parts of stories; tests, tricks, or puzzles. 43 Story relating to the mythology of the Trojan War, recounted in Ovid’s Metamorphoses (Book XIII). Achilles’ sea goddess mother Thetis disguises him as a girl and hides him away because a prophecy has foretold his death at Troy. Lycomedes accepts the disguised Achilles among his daughters. Ulysses (the Roman name for Odysseus) comes to Scyros aiming to find and convince Achilles to join the war effort.

236  Louise Dupin’s Work on Women held opinion but one pertaining in some way to the court of Lycomedes on the island of Scyros.44 Without combatting the elegance of this ruse, is it not the case that in every country, young women could handle weapons displayed in a shop just as easily as young men could toy with bracelets and necklaces, without either of these things having implications for the character—​general or individual—​of the young people involved? In all likelihood, Ulysses learned from Thetis’ women that Achilles was at the court of Lycomedes and probably gleaned from him a more certain sign for recognizing him than this test. If Ulysses had only had this kind of cleverness up his sleeve would he have deserved the nickname “wily”? We can also apply to this question something that the Queen of Sheba did.45 When she came to Solomon’s court, she proposed several tests for him to solve. Among them, she had young boys and girls dressed in the same way to see if he would be able to distinguish them. The King had basins of water brought and ordered all the children to wash their faces. It is said that he recognized the boys by the bold and determined way they scrubbed, whereas the girls only touched the water reluctantly and barely dared to wet their faces. Solomon wouldn’t have been able to use this expedient in those countries {in Brazil} where men and women are such good swimmers because they are accustomed to swimming from childhood; because both girls and boys are almost continually in the water; and because they swim across streams for the slightest reason.46 Solomon’s experiment was perhaps based on some custom specific to boys in his country. Whatever the case may be, one must acknowledge that it’s quite a fine coincidence that several children, because they’re of the same sex, show an inclination to splash about in basins of water whereas those of a different sex seem afraid to do so, for we see the same tastes, inclinations, and occupations across the childhoods of both sexes, when they are not channeled otherwise. We are thus unwilling to bow to the supposed evidence from these stories to acknowledge a real and recognizable difference between the ideas and sentiments of men and women. The climate and the situation of a country 44 In suggesting that local customs might be at play, Dupin argues from a perspective of cultural relativism, a strategy famously deployed in epistolary novels by Montesquieu (Lettres persanes, 1721) and Françoise de Graffigny (Lettres d’une Péruvienne, 1747). 45 Stories of the Queen of Sheba’s [Saba] visit to Solomon in Jewish, Islamic, and Christian traditions emphasize her tests of his wisdom. The version recounted by Dupin comes from the twelfth-​century Byzantine historian Michael Glycas’s World Chronicle (likely via an intermediary source). 46 See Art. 20.

Part IV: Education and Mores  237 in relation to its neighbors, along with laws, customs, education, and example: these are what make characters vary between nations and among individuals within a nation.47 But the influences of these first causes are common to both men and women and would have been so in all times and in all countries. To claim that men and women naturally have a difference in inclination based on a different principle, and to attempt to make social mores the guarantor of this difference: this is assuredly to adopt and produce ideas without any reflection. Education certainly determines social mores more than any other influence. We will examine the education provided in this country to men as well as to women.

Article 23. On Education Comparison of education in the present and in antiquity To pursue one of the goals we have undertaken, which is to point out that women have lost many advantages over time, let’s consider antiquity for a moment.48 We see among the Jews that it was the mother of Solomon who formed the mind and wisdom of this prince. We read in his works, “Listen to the view of a king who was taught by his mother.”49 If he had been ashamed of this instruction, or if he had thought that there was better instruction to be had, he would not have expressed himself thus. A son of Arete—​of whom we have already spoken—​was known as “Metrodidactes,” that is to say, “schooled by his mother.”50 Among the Romans, Cornelia, mother of the 47 In the early eighteenth century, climate loomed large in discussions of differences between peoples. Such categorizations, extrapolated from travel narratives like those used by Dupin in Art. 20, often rested on racist assumptions, leading to mixed messages in the works of her contemporaries. On race, see the introduction to Part II. 48 The manuscript, held at the UCLA Clark Library (f Ms.2002.001), is a bit of a patchwork, including part of a draft from a subsequent chapter; pages on Alexander the Great excerpted from a draft on the history of Macedonia; excerpts in Dupin’s hand on the Ursulines; pieces in Rousseau’s hand discussing Fénelon’s De l’éducation des filles; and a folio cut down the middle that hews closely to a section of her “Preliminary Discourse.” It seems as though thematically related pieces had been collected but not yet fully assembled in a coherent development. We reordered some pages for coherence, but there remains an organizational tension. 49 Proverbs 1:8 and 31:1: “Listen, my son, to the instruction of your father, and abandon not the law of your mother”; “The utterances of King Lemuel: the prophetic vision by which his mother taught him.” Some take Lemuel as a name for Solomon, as Dupin does here. 50 The philosopher Arete (fifth century bce) continued the School of Cyrene (in ancient Libya) headed by her father Aristippus. Arete “maintained this sect with great success” (Dupin, “On Some Women Authors”). The epithet “mother-​taught” comes from Diogenes Laërtius, Lives of Eminent Philosophers, trans. R. D. Hicks (Harvard University Press, 1925), 217 (2.8).

238  Louise Dupin’s Work on Women Gracchi, raised and taught her children herself.51 The mother of Sertorius served as Governor to this great man.52 Several women ran public schools in Greece, and the greatest men were among their pupils. From before the time of Socrates up until the seventh century after Jesus Christ, we find several examples {Plutarch}.53 We cited a few of these in the article on learned women.54 We spoke of Hypatia and will add here that she taught philosophy publicly in Alexandria, that her school had many students, that she made great progress in knowledge, that people came from all over to hear her speak, and that the bishop Synesius was her disciple and gloried in that. He called Hypatia his teacher in philosophy and always had infinite respect for her.55 Is it extravagant when observing such facts to be shocked by the ignorance and deprivation of all knowledge that is the lot of women today? One of the first historical points that comes to mind in those wishing to present political reflections to young men is that charming anecdote from the Romans, wherein a mother asks her child who had entered the Senate for the first time about what the Senators had debated, and he answers: whether men would have two wives or whether women would have two husbands.56 Isn’t it strange that such impertinence has been conserved and taken as a mark of honor in the boy who said it? Is such a coarse and impudent joke necessary to preserve a secret that must be kept? And in the event that secrecy wasn’t necessary, wasn’t it doubly impertinent for this son to reply thus to his mother? But detractors of women will find a way whatever the price. This story must 51 Cornelia (third century bce), the daughter and wife of a Roman statesmen, reared her sons (“the Gracchi”) “with such scrupulous care that although confessedly no other Romans were so well endowed by nature, they were thought to owe their virtues more to education than to nature.” Plutarch, “The Life of Tiberius Gracchus,” The Parallel Lives, trans. Bernadotte Perrin (Harvard University Press, 1921), 147 (1.5). 52 Quintus Sertorius (first century bce), a Roman military commander who led a revolt against Rome in the Iberian peninsula, was “properly reared by a widowed mother” (Plutarch, “The Life of Sertorius,” Parallel Lives, 8.7). 53 In “Women of Letters from Rome to the Modern Era,” Dupin notes, “Thargelia had a public school. Aspasia had a similar one in Athens for philosophy and politics: Socrates and Pericles were her disciples.” Her source is Plutarch, “Life of Pericles,” Parallel Lives 8.71. 54 This “article on learned women” is likely “Women of Letters from Rome to the Modern Era,” although some similar material is also found in “On Some Women Authors.” 55 The philosopher and astronomer Hypatia (c. 350–​415 bce) had many followers in Alexandria, including Bishop Synesius of Cyrene (ancient Libya). Both here and in “Women of Letters,” Dupin quotes (without attribution) Madame de Château-​Thierry Galien’s anonymously published L’Apologie des dames, appuyée sur l’histoire [1737] (Paris: Dido, 1748), 176–​177. 56 Poulain tells a different version of this anecdote, noting that it was told to highlight women’s supposed indiscretion: the mother, seeking information about a specific issue, is lied to by her son to protect the Senate’s secrecy, and then she goes about town telling everyone what her son had confided—​that the Senate decided to give every husband several wives (Equality, 199–​200).

Part IV: Education and Mores  239 strike them as particularly handy given that it is so prevalent. It has become a common source of gaiety in conversation and was especially popular among Parlement judges at the turn of the century. Before little boys can know who the Alexanders and the Caesars were, they are taught their names alongside notions of taking on everyone and everything and of conquering the world—​notions that are associated only with sublimity and greatness. Alexander was a great conqueror. This prince had great qualities but he also had significant vices. His evil deeds were lost in his great reputation, but they must have made a horrible impression against him at the time, and they are still today detested by anyone who thinks well. In the histories of Alexander and Caesar that are placed in the hands of young men, for whom it is dangerous to separate notions of heroism from ideals of a perfectly virtuous character, the debauchery and murders committed by Alexander are glossed over in the rush to admire his conquests. Historians apparently have no qualms about highlighting this quip about Caesar: that he was a husband for all women and a woman for all husbands.57 Young men are invited to snicker at this anecdote, yet it is presented as a simple episode in Caesar’s history from which nothing bad is inferred about his character. As for girls, they are given examples only of the most perfect submission and the greatest patience, such as the heroism of Griselda, that long-​suffering Countess of Tuscany.58 And when they begin to be told about important things, they are presented with what Caesar said of his wife Pompeia {whom he repudiated out of ambition}: that it was not enough that she be faithful, she had to be beyond suspicion.59 If these two anecdotes weren’t well known, it would be difficult to believe that the same man furnished both of them. Did Caesar have the right to be so demanding about the conduct of others, being so little demanding of his own? Naturally his precept would have enjoyed more credit had it come from the mouth of a more measured man. In such a way that we could say that education such as it is currently established 57 This quip from the Roman historian Suetonius comes from the abbé Augustin Nadal’s essay, “Sur l’origine de la liberté qu’avoient les Soldats Romains de dire des Vers Satyriques contre ceux qui triomphoient,” at the end of Histoire des Vestales, avec un Traité du luxe des dames romaines (Paris: Pierre Ribous’s widow, 1725), 345. 58 Griselda proves her faithfulness despite her husband’s cruel deceptions. Dupin knew this folk tale most likely through Charles Perrault’s “The Marquess of Saluzzo or the Patience of Griselda,” included in Contes de ma mère l’Oye (1697). Saluzzo is in the Piedmont region of Italy, not in Tuscany. Dupin appears to be replying to Saint-​Pierre here; see the introduction to Part IV. 59 Pompeia, Caesar’s third wife, hosted a festival for women to which Publius Clodius Pulcher gained admittance dressed as a woman. Caesar provided no evidence that this young patrician had seduced Pompeia. Nevertheless, he divorced her. Plutarch, “The Life of Julius Caesar,” Parallel Lives, 9–​10.

240  Louise Dupin’s Work on Women absolutely concerns only men, for that which is given to women cannot truly carry this name. If there were a word exactly opposite to “education,” that is the word we could use to give an idea of the way they are brought up. The education of men is done according to a reasonable plan. From the age of five or six, at least ten years are devoted to giving boys a principled idea of languages, sciences, and different histories as well as the art of speaking and writing in prose and in verse.60 Although one might wish for more in the way these studies are conducted, it must be acknowledged that they contribute [as they are] to perfecting the greatest minds and at least save those who are only mediocre from gross ignorance. Colleges organize public exercises that motivate students and inspire emulation even in those least devoted to work. Beyond colleges, there are schools of all types {academies of painting, sculpture and architecture, public lessons on chemistry and geometry, etc.} open to men that offer them the same encouragement: emulation and on top of that, the perspective of utility, fortune, and consideration, encouraging all types of skills. As for women, none of that exists for them. They lose to idleness or useless occupations the ten years that men devote to all that can open the mind and train it. There is no question for girls of any kind of study or exercise. A very short catechism, along with reading and writing, are the extent of their learning, and even those are limited, with reading reduced to a very small number of minimally informative books, and writing amounting to the sole practice of wishing a happy new year to one’s relatives. Attentive families of opulent means add teachers of music, dance, and sometimes even drawing to the mix, but on the condition that each of these lessons occur between the teacher and the pupil in the absence of any kind of exciting emulation or example that could lead her to develop a taste or 60 In the long “Preliminary Discourse,” Dupin fleshes out the steps of boys’ education: “Beginning around the age of 6, if they don’t know how to read and write, the first year is devoted to teaching them to do so. In the second year, they are given some grammar principles and rudiments of the Latin language. In the third, they advance a little more in Latin through translation exercises. In the fourth, they are fortified in their Latin and a little Greek comes their way; they are exposed to some easy-​ to-​understand poets. In the fifth year, they get into what is called ‘Humanities’, which is the study of orators, historians, and poets. In the sixth, the same things are reinforced with more difficult authors. Geography, history, elements of mathematics, dance, and music all find their place in these classes. In the seventh, they move on to rhetoric, which is the art of speaking well, based on the example of the good authors they’ve seen up to that point. They are made to notice the different figures of speech and what constitutes eloquence, and they are given rules and examples. They are led from there to philosophy, whose study for them lasts two years and includes four main sciences: logic, ethics, metaphysics, and physics. Thus are ten years filled and many seeds planted in young minds.” She then lays out the curriculum for law and the priesthood. A similar breakdown of boys’ education is crossed out in the draft of this article.

Part IV: Education and Mores  241 love for these arts, and with no allowance for girls to pursue one or more of these skills even to the age of eighteen, since most of them are married or have entered the convent much younger.61 Girls today are not just brought up without knowledge or skills; even their reason goes uncultivated, and as a result, most of them aren’t familiar with this treasure they possess and don’t know how to use it. We do not blame men exactly for women’s poor education; as we have said, a succession of chance events drives all things. No laws or rulings forbid girls from learning anything, but we are used to teaching them nothing. That is what we wish to denounce, as well as men’s tacit approval of this practice. We can identify the era of ignorance from around the ninth to the fifteenth centuries. This interval of time nevertheless produced some learned people, both men and women, but the general ignorance into which people fell was all the more detrimental to women in that men got themselves out of it, while women remained stuck in it. Even though there was no ban on women cultivating their learning, the simple fact that educational establishments and regimes were made for men alone meant that women had no choice but to remain in ignorance. We know that for a long time in France, young noblemen left their fathers’ houses to go live with other noble families as pages, varlets, or damoiseaux who would then become squires,62 and that it was customary for these young men to unashamedly serve their master and mistress in almost all the tasks ordinarily carried out by servants. We will say here in passing that the services of men and women were at that time equally honorable. The first lessons of these young students mainly concerned the love of God and of ladies with all due respect and honor,63 and it was ordinarily women who were responsible for dispensing these lessons to them {Jean de Saintré}. Everybody

61 In the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, the average marrying age for women was 24–​26. (Louis Henry and Jacques Houdaille, “Célibat et âge au mariage aux XVIIIe et XIXe siècles en France,” Population 34, no. 2 (1979): 403–​442), although this includes women of all estates, and aristocratic women tended to be married younger, often before the age of twenty. 62 A page was a little boy; a squire (écuyer) an adolescent, though according to Dupin’s source, La Curne de Sainte-​Palaye, page, varlet, and damoiseau (a young nobleman not yet a knight) sometimes meant the same thing as squire. All were in training to be knights. The reference to Antoine de la Sale’s Histoire et plaisante chronique du petit Jehan de Saintré et de la Dame des Belles-​cousines (fifteenth century), in which a lady dispenses both moral and worldly lessons to a page, who becomes a knight by the novel’s end, also comes from Sainte-​Palaye (Mercure de France 169:91–​92). 63 en tout bien [et en] tout honneur. An adverbial phrase popularized by Molière in The Miser (1668), 4.1.

242  Louise Dupin’s Work on Women knows that it was long the case that women of the second nobility64 found these same opportunities in the first; that is, girls of noble birth entered into the service not just of princesses, but of all [manner of] great ladies, and received a good education in their homes. The colleges as they are today are quite modern.65 Formal higher education began in France with the university, which we know was established at the end of the eleventh century. Its foundation was attributed to Charlemagne, but that is a misconception, according to scholars.66 Before the establishment of the university of Paris, there were schools in churches, where women shared in the instruction. At the end of the sixth century, Saint Germanus, Bishop of Paris, led a great number of schoolchildren of both sexes, among whom Saint Genevieve distinguished herself through her progress and her piety.67 Saint Caesarius, Bishop of Arles, founded in his city an order of nuns who, as per the order’s constitution, all learned and taught letters and languages.68 Our first kings were raised in convents of women. In the eighth century, Thierry was dubbed “de Chelles” for having spent the first years of his life in Chelles Abbey.69 In the statutes that a Bishop of Soissons gave to his priests, around the end of the ninth century, it is established that they will not receive girls in their schools, which proves that they were [at that time] still admitted there.70 It was perhaps very wise to separate the boys from the girls during their studies 64 La seconde noblesse. Provincial nobles to whom François I, beginning in the 1530s, gave significant military power to ensure protection and loyalty. The ideology of political absolutism in the seventeenth century chipped away at their prestige and power. 65 The first college was the Collège Royal (later Collège de France), founded by François I in 1530 to teach subjects not taught at the Sorbonne, based on a similar institution in Leuven (Belgium). 66 Under Charlemagne, the focus of palace schools for nobility shifted from military tactics and court manners to the liberal arts. His and his successors’ capitularies in the ninth century show a desire for a better-​educated clergy as well as for the foundation of new schools. The University of Paris, the first in France, was originally a teacher-​student corporation annexed to the Notre Dame Cathedral school (circa 1150s); it received its official charter in 1200 from Philippe II. 67 Dupin conflates three bishops here. According to a Vita sanctae Genovefae from the early sixth century—​probably commissioned by Clotilda, wife of Clovis—​Germanus, Bishop of Auxerre, met Genevieve as a little girl in her native Nanterre on his way to England; he encouraged her in her vocation. An unknown bishop of Paris bestowed the veil on her as a young woman—​over a hundred years before another Germanus was named bishop of Paris by King Childebert (in 555). Genevieve is mainly celebrated for having inspired resistance to Attila the Hun’s 451 siege of Paris and for converting Clovis to Christianity (though this has also been attributed to Clotilda; see Art. 21). 68 “Some of these nuns busied themselves with copying holy books in script [belles lettres]. They all learned to read and spent two hours a day reading.” Fleury, Histoire ecclésiastique (7:154). 69 Chelles Abbey, in the Val-​de-​Marne region, was established in the seventh century as a monastery for women and was later expanded to include men. It had a strong reputation as an institution for learning. The Merovingian king Thierry (Theuderic) IV (721–​737), was brought up at Chelles. 70 Fleury, Histoire ecclésiastique, 11:567. Riculfe, Bishop of Soissons, based his 889 instructions to parish priests on Councils held in 888 in Mayence and Metz.

Part IV: Education and Mores  243 especially, but it should have been done in such a way that they advanced in their different courses of study at the same pace, despite being taught separately. Otherwise, a good rule was very imperfectly applied. After the establishment of the university, those teachers who found themselves entrusted with private education were often called upon to provide girls with the same—​or almost the same—​education as that provided to boys. It was not a strange thing in the twelfth century that a Canon from Paris assigned a teacher of philosophy and learned languages to his niece, although the extreme love that Heloise and Abelard had for one another was not something that happened ordinarily.71 The number of learned women that one finds in different countries until today and of which we have cited multiple examples proves that women shared in learning and in the sciences as they were understood in different times, and that they even had the honor of teaching them.

On education In the Christian religion, education seems to have almost always been in the hands of clergy. What women lost little by little in this estate, they lost twice over in education. Today, it is especially in the hands of male and female religious. Due to their loss of freedom and resources,72 female religious are completely incapable of making good on this responsibility, while male religious can do quite well thanks to the resources they glean from study and their commerce with the world. The Ursulines were founded by Angela [Merici] of Brescia around 1500 and something. At that time, women’s education had not yet been totally abandoned. The principle goal of the Ursulines, according to their instituting document, was to educate young people of their sex.73 The Ursulines of 71 Fulbert, a secular canon (a member of a cathedral chapter who took no vows), hired Peter Abelard, a philosopher and theologian, to tutor his niece Héloïse. Their tragic love affair, both carnal and epistolary, culminated in the castration of Abelard, who recounts his story in Historia Calamitatum (ca. 1132). Rousseau reprises these ill-​fated lovers in Julie and her tutor Saint-​Preux, characters in his epistolary novel, Julie ou la nouvelle Héloïse (1761). 72 See Art. 10. 73 Angela Merici founded the Company of St. Ursula in 1535 in Brescia, Italy. The move to transform a secular community of women devoted to the education of girls into a cloistered religious order was led in Italy by Charles Borromeo at the 1572 Council of Milan (see Art. 10). Hélyot, in Histoire des ordres monastiques (see Art. 10), attributes this initiative in France to Madame de Sainte-​ Beuve, daughter of a president in the Chamber of Accounts of Paris (4:157–​164). Ursuline nuns continued to educate girls, within the walls of their convents.

244  Louise Dupin’s Work on Women Toulouse, founded by Marguerite de Vigier a little after the establishment of their first convent, are obliged by their constitution to always offer five classes {volume 4, page 176}.74 Today girls barely learn to read and write there. According to their institution, the Ursulines could come and go in the world and even live in the world if they so desired, which put them in a position to better understand and to perfect the education they were charged with delivering. However, ever since the padlocks of the Council of Trent, every single convent of female religious had no choice but to fall into abject ignorance, [and to become] imbeciles more or less, which surely would have also happened in the most learned male orders had they been locked up and deprived of resources and communication—​and would still happen [if they were treated thus].75

Observation on a work by Monsieur de Fénelon The Abbé de Fénelon published a work on the education of girls76 which proves how difficult it is to make a separate educational program for women that is different from that of men if a good education is actually the goal, since more than half of his work perfectly suits men and women and is addressed to both sexes equally. This part even contains good things: essential principles, clear and exact definitions, and reliable practices for helping students enjoy and appreciate learning. One might wish that the people responsible for educating youth had taken better advantage of his work. Part of what Monsieur de Fénelon made specific to women is a satire of education rather than a system thereof. In the first two chapters, and in the ninth and tenth,77 he appears to attribute to women as a whole faults that are only found in a few of them, and he grants these faults to them for free from the moment of birth. It would be easy to prove that all vices and faults are common to human 74 Hélyot, Histoire des ordres monastiques, 4:176. Hélyot does not specify the subject matter taught by the Ursulines of Toulouse, but notes that they also teach (female) servants on Sundays. This folio was taken from Rousseau’s excerpts of Hélyot (see Art. 10). 75 See Art. 10. 76 François de Salignac de la Mothe-​Fénelon, De l’éducation des filles (Paris: Auboin, Emery, et Clousier, 1687). In 1688, Fénelon was named royal tutor to the young Louis de France, Duc de Bourgogne (grandson of Louis XIV) through the recommendation of Madame de Maintenon, Louis XIV’s morganatic wife. He also advised her on a school for the daughters of impoverished nobles that she founded at Saint-​Cyr in 1686. 77 Chapters 1 (“On the importance of the education of girls”), 2 (“The drawbacks of ordinary education”), 9 (“Remarks on several faults common to girls”), and 10 (“The vanity of beauty and adornment”).

Part IV: Education and Mores  245 nature, and it would be just as easy to prove that certain flaws quite ordinarily found in women are caused by the manner in which they are raised, and we could moreover prove that these flaws are found in many men, the difference in education notwithstanding. Monsieur de Fénelon establishes the supposed weakness of women as a principle. He adds, charitably, that the weaker they are, the more important it is to fortify them. But he also advises, “reign in their minds as much as you can within common limits, and teach them that among their sex, there must be a modesty almost as delicate regarding knowledge as that which inspires the horror of vice” {page 131}.78 What a strange maxim! How could it possibly be reconciled with common sense, reason, and education, and how would a fortified mind possibly result from it? Could the author have chosen better words to convey the bias of a false principle? He reveals all too clearly that it is the spirit of his work. A girl, he says, “should only speak of real needs and with an air of doubt and deference” {page 209}. [This prescription to] speak only of real needs is highly original, but [that of] speaking with an air of doubt and deference is something necessary that should be recommended to men as well as to women. He says further that girls should learn neither Italian nor Spanish. “These two languages,” he says, “are only useful for reading dangerous books susceptible to increasing women’s fault” {page 244}. What are these supposed faults of women? In speaking thus, one must renounce the advantage prophets have when they are far from their own country and abandon all hope of being a prophet at home because bias is too visible not to be recognized and condemned and [too visible] not to raise suspicion. Are Italian and Spanish women beyond hope when it comes to a good education? Is there really no good book written in these languages? It is more plausible that Monsieur de Fénelon wrote some of the pages of his book without sufficiently reflecting on what he was saying. Can ignorance ever be a good principle? It’s a maxim oft-​observed among tyrants and usurpers, and based on that alone, should we expect to find it among respectable people under the reign of good princes? What is meant when it is said that women should not be learned? If it were possible to prove that the only women with vices and faults are those who have distinguished themselves through their studies; if it were possible to prove just that learned women had more faults than other women; if we could

78 From c ­ hapter 7 (“How to inculcate the first principles of religion in children’s minds”).

246  Louise Dupin’s Work on Women prove that these faults were found in all learned women, or at least in the majority of them; or if we could prove that women acquired vices and faults because they devoted themselves to study, condemnation would be reasonable. But if we were to prove on the contrary that almost all women with a taste for study have joined prudent conduct to it, and if we were to prove that the most poorly behaved women were the least studious, on what grounds could it reasonably be said that knowledge must be forbidden to them? It is certain that, in general, study does not lead to vice. It can lead to pedantry, but what harm is there in a few pedantic women, any more than there is in a few pedantic men? Such characters provide amusement on stage but don’t do any harm ordinarily in society.79 Two chapters in the same book entitled “On the duties of women” contain nothing or almost nothing about education.80 Monsieur de Fénelon concedes nevertheless that it would be good for women to know something of the main rules of justice and duty, of the differences between various [juridical] acts, and of the customary law of the region they are in to validate these acts. He advises teaching them the duties and rights of the landed nobility, and what is meant by fiefs, rentes, dîmes, lods et ventes, indemnité, amortissement, papiers terriers, etc.81 Didn’t Monsieur de Fénelon realize that there would need to be a special school just to teach these things, which no ordinary governesses are equipped to teach, and that a [male] teacher could only properly learn through repeated exercises and by bringing some people [experts] together? There is probably no way to deliver a good education to women other than to create colleges more or less similar to those designed for men and in which the instruction would be strictly the same. The principles of grammar, the rudiments of languages would be just as useful to women as to men, since you can’t speak your natural language if you haven’t learned it by principle. The ease with which young people learn languages, a facility that women share with men, makes it highly unreasonable to not have them learn as many as possible, according to a prudent choice of those most suitable to a 79 A reference to Molière’s play, The Learned Women (1672). 80 Chapters 11 (“Instructing women on their duties”) and 12 (“Of the duties of women, continued”). 81 Rentes: revenue, for example from leasing land, but increasingly, annuities received regularly following investment of a capital sum. Dîmes: a tax in the form of agricultural products owed to the Church or to a lord (e.g., of a fief); in English, “tithes.” Lods et ventes: similar to a capital gains tax on seigneurial property when it changed hands. Indemnité: a tax on mortmain property that must be paid to the owner when it is alienated. Amortissement: the extinction of a pension or annuity, which usually results when the originating party pays back the capital that the beneficiary of the pension or annuity invested to acquire it. Papiers terriers: a description of a fief, its inhabitants, and their rights and obligations, as well as a register of juridical acts concerning it (in English, “urbaria”).

Part IV: Education and Mores  247 person’s estate. Still today, in most foreign courts, women are taught several languages. Knowledge of the mind’s different creations in the various genres practiced by orators, historians, and poets is absolutely essential to get by in society. Without the study of geography, history is almost useless since there is no other way to remember and arrange it in your memory; if you don’t learn geography, it is almost pointless to read and study history. Some knowledge of math and drawing is of everyday necessity in society. Rhetoric is absolutely necessary for knowing how to speak well, and you can’t really master it until you have learned rules for it and studied examples. Logic is the art of knowing how to link conclusions to propositions—​in a word, to reason from cause to effect. Ethics is the science of morals; it teaches the principles of men’s duties towards each other. Physics has as its object the knowledge of natural things that present themselves to the eyes of women just as they do to those of men. Metaphysics consists in the reflections that have been made about the principle of [the mind’s] intelligence, of which women have a portion just as men do. In all of that, is there anything unfit to exert the mind equally in women as in men and without putting either party at a disadvantage? And how could it be reasonably proven that women don’t have as much need for these kinds of knowledge as men do? Even if we acknowledge women’s deprivation of ecclesiastical and military responsibilities, is there anything in all that we have said that is not useful simply for the purpose of navigating society?82 And so useful that it is used every day and at every moment? What is called “doing one’s law” is as necessary for women as it is for men even if women don’t have a judge’s responsibilities, since it is very important to have some knowledge of law in order to manage your property competently, to avoid undertaking unjust things, and to be equipped to resist the injustice of others, which is apparently the goal that Monsieur de Fénelon proposes when he says that women should have some knowledge of the customary law of their region, [particularly] those concerning assets and various juridical acts.83 We do not purport to create an entirely learned nation, which would have many drawbacks, but we insist that women should study whatever men of their same condition do. 82 Fénelon claims that women don’t need to learn philosophy, jurisprudence, or anything related to politics, military arts, and theology because they will not be involved in administration in these areas (3). 83 See Part III, on law.

248  Louise Dupin’s Work on Women A good education doesn’t just advance merit and skill, it often determines them entirely. The great communication of men among themselves is also a great advantage to them. Thus not only would good schools be necessary [to properly educate women], but also all sorts of schools and academies and all kinds of ways to communicate and to assemble for the common good. The profession of medical doctors produces proportionally more upstanding and amiable people than other professions in society. It’s not that the heavens favor this kind of man particularly, nor the work of his hands, but his better studies—​along with greater experience with people and with different kinds of people—​equip him to be better than others. Conferences and academies increase emulation, intelligence, and enlightenment. Why are all means of augmenting the advantages of humanity employed solely for men? Women would benefit from them just as they do and both sexes would benefit doubly were studies general and common between them. We can only conclude this chapter by citing the very words of a magistrate whose probity is widely recognized: “The most precious resources in human societies consist in the merit of each associate. Not to give free range to the merit of women is to lessen a great part of this resource. What wouldn’t a state and its sovereign gain if a better education allowed the other half of his subjects to flourish, etc.”84

Article 39. The Effects of Education on Morals Education modifies the passions and all of the dispositions of the soul whose foundation is in nature: all men and all women are generally born prone to credulity, self-​love [amour propre], ambition [interest], envy, pride, hate, anger, laziness, love, and vengeance.85 And the infinite number of condemnable combinations and subdivisions resulting from those passions and dispositions, can, like them, be disciplined and directed by reason and instruction.

84 François Richer d’Aube, protégé of Fontenelle, in his Essais sur les principes du droit et de la morale (1743), as cited in the Journal des sçavans of October 1743 (250): “What wouldn’t a state and its sovereign gain, if this sovereign made laws such that, without distracting women too much from the domestic duties that nature specifically assigned them.” Dupin redacts the offending clause. 85 Manuscript from Bibliothèque de Genève, Ms fr.215, f.1–​18. Education, here and in subsequent articles, means upbringing.

Part IV: Education and Mores  249 Men believe themselves to be all the more precious as a result of their education, having seen from their tenderest youth that people rejoice when boys are born while practically grieving the birth of girls, that people dote on boys and spend more money on them, and that men do everything in the world while women are in charge of nothing. Based on all of this, from childhood onward men think that women are completely incapable of doing what they do, and they are right to think this, because it’s more reasonable to believe that than to believe there is injustice [in this].86 This judgment is even the effect of a good heart and mind in that age when children know only to judge on appearances. When reason arrives ready to reform this judgment, it is too late to assert mastery over it; prejudice has taken over the mind and vanity perhaps confirms its dominance. The exclusions imposed on women increase men’s passions all the more since all the objects of ambition, vanity, and interest are concentrated in their hands. It is these same men, raised with the aforementioned principles, who become popes, archbishops, bishops, and generals of armies, heads of tribunals, jurisconsults, historians, and members of academies. We have shown in our chapters on religion and on the discipline of the Church that theologians have not treated women well, although they did not find these principles in the Gospel, in divine revelation, nor in the first practices of early Christians.87 But as morals are taught primarily through works of religion and piety,88 we must once again mention them on this point. To avoid a lengthy examination of everything said in them against women in terms of morals, we will only comment on a short work by Monsieur de Cambrai, whom we believe can be trusted to summarize theological views on every subject.89 In composing his directives for the instruction of the Duc de Bourgogne, Monsieur de Cambrai followed the torrent of injustice against women. It is noteworthy that the principles we condemn were destined to direct the 86 Compare this to Montesquieu about Africans: “It is impossible for us to assume that these people are men because if we assumed they were men one would begin to believe that we ourselves were not Christian,” The Spirit of the Laws, trans. Anne M. Cohler, Basia Carolyn Miller, Harold Samuel Stone (Cambridge University Press, 1989), 3.250. 87 See Arts. 8 and 10, and the summary of 6 and 7 in introduction to Part III. 88 In the Catholic faith. In contrast, Protestants privileged scripture over devotional texts. 89 Fénelon, Archbishop of Cambrai, whom we met in Art. 23 as the author of Traité de l’éducation des filles (1687). Archbishops received the ecclesiastical title Monsieur until the mid-​eighteenth century. After that, Monseigneur (Monsignor) prevailed. Dupin uses the ecclesiastical title in this article as it is the one used in the work at issue, Directions pour la conscience d’un roi (The Hague: Jean Neaulme, 1747), composed for Louis XIV’s grandson, Louis de France (Duc de Bourgogne), during his preceptorship (1689–​1699).

250  Louise Dupin’s Work on Women conscience of a king. As much as the tenth direction is edifying and written with a virtuous and noble liberty that we might expect of one holding the title Preceptor and the status it conveys,90 the eleventh and twelfth are unique for the injustice and lack of reason they contain, as well as the false principles they are based on. We recommend reading this work to those tempted to doubt what we have been saying. We observe only that he asks the prince whether he has authorized immodest freedom in women,91 and we ask whether the same question shouldn’t apply to men. A shepherd who avoids the wrong path only for half his flock risks seeing these two halves meet back up precisely on the path that he had wanted them to avoid. He who cures only half of his flock of an illness may end up with the entire flock sick. Is it because these less than modest liberties are principally practiced by women that he imposes a correction only for them? In not doing so for men, does he not risk leading them to believe that they are excused from propriety? If Monsieur de Cambrai assumes that men never fail to uphold propriety, doesn’t experience prove him wrong? He asks the prince whether it is only based on true need that he has admitted women to court.92 In this case, the best theologian, the most honest politician, and the most reasonable man should admit one woman for each man who is necessary at the court. It would be quite difficult in any case to exclude from the court all of the women who have business there or simply the desire to go there, unless it seems appropriate to turn the court into a monastery. He recommends excluding young and beautiful women from those who serve the queen and princesses, and says that these women would do better to live in a retired life amidst family, far from court.93 This is to say that deformity would be an advantage for being admitted to the honors and graces of a court, a place where everyone naturally aspires to be, especially those who carry what is called nature’s letter of recommendation, which has always had and will always have, in every age, more influence than the recommendations of Monsieur de Cambrai.94 Nature would thus have made beautiful things only to hide them, and ugly things to put them on display. Without the interference of kings and their preceptors, there will always 90 Direction X argues that a king’s moral failings harm the people because his example can be contagious. He urges the king to avoid vice and to make his virtue visible to the nation (12–​14). 91 At the outset of Direction XI (14). 92 Direction XI (14–​15). 93 The references in this and the next paragraph are all to Direction XI (14–​17). 94 Fénelon states that only old women with proven virtue should be selected for court, because young, beautiful ones are a trap for the king and for his courtiers (15).

Part IV: Education and Mores  251 be an overwhelming number of ugly women at court for their satisfaction and edification. Couldn’t we appease them about the crime of being beautiful by telling them that if all the women in a nation were ugly, their lessons wouldn’t be any more effective for their being so; or by requesting that they verify whether it is the most beautiful women who ordinarily have the worst conduct? Monsieur de Cambrai—​more skilled as a theologian than knowledgeable as a historian, and more eloquent than accurate—​says that, according to several authors who are as inaccurate as he is but without his talent, that before François I there were very few women at court. He insists in order to make himself an authority on the matter that young and beautiful women went to court only to do their duties for the queen, and that their honor was to stay in the country with their families. It is quite possible that women find the greatest happiness in a retired type of life.95 But a fanaticism that goes so far as to require it; to make a woman and her family and the kings of the nation ashamed of youth and beauty in those who have it; to condemn women to live in obscurity and in inaction; and to obligate old and ugly women to appear and to act [in society]: this amounts to forcing nature, violating a good principle and driving it to madness. Those willing to read in the annals of France96 from the time will see clearly that this claim is put forward with no basis in fact, and those willing to reflect will find that Monsieur de Cambrai’s zeal carried him away inappropriately. The twelfth direction deals with luxury in general and principally in the case of women.97 Monsieur de Cambrai clearly does not speak about luxury as a statesman, for those who have weighed their true interests know that luxury provides advantages that can compensate for its drawbacks. As for attributing luxury exclusively to women, that is unjust. Men’s clothing, although simpler in appearance, is more expensive than that of women. Who doesn’t know this? He could have refrained from speaking about it. However,

95 Dupin gestures toward Marie-​Madeleine Pioche de la Vergne, Comtesse de Lafayette’s novel La Princesse de Clèves (1678), in which the heroine resolves to live away from court in order to be free from pressures that include male desire. 96 François I became King in 1515. Dupin may have in mind Jean Froissard’s Chroniques (fourteenth century), which she encountered in La Curne de Sainte-​Palaye’s Mémoires sur l’ancienne chevalerie. While Sainte-​Palaye’s Mémoires were not published until 1753 in the Mémoires de l’Académie des Inscriptions (Sénéchal, 219), his reading of the first three to the academy were summarized in the Mercure de France in 1746, 1747, and 1749. 97 Direction XII argues that most women are corrupted by the desire for new fashions and goods; luxury increases their desire to please and leads to ruin. This can draw the king into a similar need to continually spend and then all of the ranks follow (17–​20).

252  Louise Dupin’s Work on Women as we know, theologians want to speak about everything, and that has on occasion led them to include superfluous and inaccurate things in their respectable works. Within works on morality, the largest portion is devoted to depicting and critiquing human vices, and here, as is reasonable, women are included in these general portraits and should take on half of the criticism for themselves. But most minor moralists make in addition a new division of certain faults in order to attribute them only to women. Charron, La Bruyère, La Rochefoucauld, Saint-​Réal—​the modern Theophrastuses98—​all feature such commentary; and in reflections containing the most general remarks in which women should not be singled out as a particular group, we still find ridiculous traits attributed to them. A few years ago a book of reflections and maxims on the knowledge of the human mind was published.99 This book is admirable for the many good things it contains. It was well-​received by the public whose esteem the author merited in several regards. But why would this man, who reveals his intelligence in so many passages of his work, collect some mediocre maxims against women? It must be the effect of the habit that we are protesting against and that cannot be avoided. “Women,” he says, cannot understand that there are men who are not interested in them.”100 To this we might retort: it’s because they can see men’s interest. “Whatever the advantages of youth may be ordinarily, a young man is not welcome among women until they have made a fop of him.”101 This is quite contrary to experience since it’s women who first welcome young people [into society]. Some men may become conceited through commerce with

98 Allusion to the ancient Greek Theophrastus, the first to write character sketches, and to Théophraste Moderne by Brillon (see introduction to Part IV). Pierre Charron described women in De la sagesse (1601) as weak-​minded and superstitious. Jean de la Bruyère added his own characters to Theophrastus’ in Les caractères de Théophraste traduits du grec avec les caractères ou les mœurs de ce siècle (Étienne Michallet, 1687), including a section skewering women’s behavior. François de La Rochefoucauld’s Réflexions ou sentences et maximes morales (1664) singled out women’s vanity and attachment to love and tears. César Vichard de Saint-​Réal decried women’s coquetry and debauchery (“Des Femmes,” in Œuvres de de Monsieur de l’abbé de Saint-​Réal, vol. 2, Paris: Nyons, 1745). In Art. 38 Dupin laments that “[Saint-​Réal]—​normally so pleasant and interesting to read—​is so partial in this chapter, so grossly unjust, that one is tempted to believe it isn’t his and was inserted into his work.” 99 Luc de Clapiers, Marquis de Vauvenargues’s (anonymous) Introduction à la connoissance de l’esprit humain, suivi de Réflexions et maximes (Paris: Antoine-​Claude Briasson, 1746). Dupin cites the first edition; some of the maxims quoted were not in later editions. 100 Maxim 720, as numbered in the Œuvres de Vauvenargues, ed. D.L. Gilbert (Paris: Furne et Cie), 1857, which includes maxims deleted after the first edition as well as posthumous ones. Dupin’s retort is likely a reference to the visibility of men’s erections. 101 Maxim 722 (Œuvres).

Part IV: Education and Mores  253 women, but this is most certainly only in those who bring with them a strong disposition toward self-​importance and who demand that women confirm it. As a type of vanity concerned with the private commerce of men and women, fatuity [in men] displeases women, both as vanity—​vanity is always displeasing—​, and as an attempt to take advantage of them. “It is amusing that we have made modesty a law for women who only esteem impudence in men.”102 On what models does the author pattern this general maxim? Women are pleased and amused by the tender feelings that men express toward them, and doubt such feelings if boldness is the only aspect of their expression. That is quite far and rather different from esteeming impudence. “Women and the young do not distinguish between esteem and taste.”103 This is the case for all people at all ages and of both sexes, and is much to humanity’s credit, since it proves that we wish to esteem what we love. But, at the same time, it can occasionally cause an error, so a maxim that would warn in general terms about how to avoid [conflating esteem and taste] would be useful up to a certain point. Yet to lump women with children in order to establish their bad judgment is neither useful nor accurate, and usefulness and accuracy are of primary necessity in a maxim. “A woman who believes she is well-​dressed doesn’t suspect that her finery will one day be ridiculed like the hairstyle of Catherine de Médicis.”104 Why single out Catherine or her century? The styles of one century have perhaps appeared ridiculous in the next since the beginning of the French monarchy, and certainly a man dressed like Henri II would appear just as extraordinary as a woman dressed like Catherine de Médicis. And if she has so much as even glimpsed an old portrait or read a description of old clothing, no woman will assume that her current finery will one day become that of her grandchildren, any more than a man would. But extravagances particular to women must be invented so that people can say such things about them; for if the intention were merely to depict human extravagance, then women would only get the half of it. Monsieur Pope105 addresses an epistle criticizing all women to a woman, which according to the translator is evidence of Monsieur Pope’s esteem for 102 Maxim 723 (Œuvres). 103 Maxim 38 (Œuvres). 104 Maxim 725 (Œuvres). 105 Alexander Pope, British poet and moralist, was widely translated in French. Dupin had a personal connection to at least one translator: the Abbé Jean-​François du Bellay de Resnel attended her salon (Marty, Louise Dupin, 49) and was, like Dupin, connected to Voltaire (who had spent 1726–​ 1728 exiled in England, during which time he met Pope).

254  Louise Dupin’s Work on Women her, “because to dare tell a person’s faults to her face, one must presume in her a good deal of merit.”106 For that, it seems to me that he need only esteem her patience. How can someone think that he is depicting women in particular by saying that they are an assortment of contradictions?107 By that token, is human nature anything other than that, taken as a whole? Monsieur Pope accuses women of “not having as firm a character as men”—​theirs is hardly firm anyway—​and of being “infinitely more changeable.”108 To have a changeable character is precisely to have no character.109 Among an equal number of men or women, I believe we would find an equal number of inconstant characters. “Then making their entrance are the characters of stuck-​up, sweet, fake, capricious, witty and headstrong, and stupid women.”110 Can we really say that these vices and ridiculous things are only feminine? We know by experience that these and all characters have no sex; they are shared equally. And why mix up sweetness [douceur] with these faults?111 He claims that women are ruled by a tyrannical desire to dominate and by love of pleasure.112 Again, I don’t see anything so very distinctive in that. I see all minds fairly commonly tending toward monarchy, a goal just as flawed and ridiculous in the society of individuals as it is perfect in the hands of a sovereign. Well, can we reproach anyone for loving pleasure unless vice accompanies it?

106 The four poems that became the Moral Essays or Epistles to Several Persons were originally published between 1731 and 1735. Dupin primarily discusses “Epistle Two, To a Lady: On the Characters of Women,” using a 1742 prose translation by Etienne de Silhouette, published in Mélanges de littérature et de philosophie, tome premier: Essai sur le critique, essai sur l’homme, Épîtres morales sur le caractère des hommes, sur celui des femmes, et sur l’usage des richesses (in London by Guillaume Darrés and in the Hague by Adrien Moetjens). Dupin paraphrases here a line of Silhouette’s preface (189). Although not using quotation marks as she did above, Dupin follows the same plan: quoting or paraphrasing with her responses interspersed. We have added quotation marks throughout this section to make this clearer. 107 When Pope turns to praise the lady addressed, he says that the best and the worst women are but a blend of contradictions (221): “And yet believe me, good as well as ill /​Woman’s at best a contradiction still” (lines 269–​70). “Epistle II,” Moral Essays: in Four Epistles (Glasgow: R. Urie, 1754). EEBO Text Creation Partnership, 2011. We demarcate citations from the original English by indicating line numbers and retaining the page number for Silhouette’s text. 108 Silhouette’s preface (189). 109 The poem starts by agreeing with a statement attributed to the woman addressed: “Nothing so true as what you once let fall, /​‘Most Women have no Characters at all’ ” (211; lines 1–​2). 110 Silhouette’s preface describes the negative traits of the various women’s characters portrayed in the poem (190); the list appears again in the margin when Pope turns to these women’s characters (212). 111 Pope’s sweet woman suddenly rages at everyone once she discovers a pimple (213; lines 29–​36). In Art. 44, Dupin wryly notes about sweetness: “it’s generally agreed that women are sweeter than men, because men believe that in ceding this quality to women they give up very little.” 112 Pope claims that women are controlled by two passions: love of pleasure and love of “sway” (line 210). Silhouette parrots these claims in the preface (190) and in the poem (218).

Part IV: Education and Mores  255 He claims that “the individual characters of women are much more varied than those of men, and that nevertheless, it’s remarkable that women’s overall character, considered in terms of their dominant passion, is much more uniform.”113 It seems to me that if there were something true in this, it would be exactly the opposite: men’s different professions necessarily create differences in their characters, beyond the naturally occurring ones. Almost all women have the same profession, so to speak, since they have nothing to do and consequently, they should only have their own naturally occurring differences in character. He says that women let themselves be carried away by the violence of their passions. Their passions, of any kind, seem to me quite moderate compared to those of men. He provides advice for defying the rigor of the passing years.114 This advice should be as useful to men as to women, since time treats both sexes equally. He ends his epistle with the portrait of a worthy woman who brings together in one person a blend of the happiest contradictions.115 This praise is bizarre and poorly thought out, but it is common to write on this subject without reflection. I found an expression in a different epistle that I cannot let pass in silence. He paints a ridiculous man and here are his words: Clodio, the scorn and wonder of our days, Whose ruling passion was the lust of praise, Born with whate’er could win it from the wise, Women and fools must like him or he dies.116

Why this parity? Why women with fools? Women like intelligent men [gens d’esprit] so much and profit so well from their company. . . . In short, the very morals that should rein in the passions are in this instance the source of those most worthy of condemnation: pride, vanity, and contempt for others.117 113 Of women’s two dominant passions, Pope clarifies that “they seek the second not to lose the first”: nature teaches them to love pleasure and, because men “oppress” women, they learn that they need to sway men in order to serve their own pleasure (218; lines 210–​214). 114 Pope describes how women age and how they could do so more sagely (219–​221; lines 219–​268). 115 Silhouette 221–​222; lines 269–​292. 116 Pope, “Epistle I. To Sir Richard Temple, Lord Viscount Cobham” also titled “Of The Knowledge and Characters of Men.” In the margin Silhouette indicates the man portrayed: “the late Duke of Wharton.” Phillip Duke of Wharton was a noted Jacobite political figure. This epistle was first published in 1734; in subsequent English editions the name Wharton replaces the Clodio pseudonym outright. 117 Commerce (company) and la morale (morals). There is a gap in the text here. The final sentence about Pope—​at the bottom of the folio—​has no clear end. The final line appears on the reverse, but

256  Louise Dupin’s Work on Women

Article 40. Further Reflections on Education Observation on the non-​education of women Women face great disadvantages for themselves in being deprived of education, and there are further drawbacks, given the obligation they are under to initiate the education of their children and sometimes even to manage their family and property on their own.118 There are also disadvantages for society in general. Study and knowledge are necessary, not only for being learned, but for being sociable and pleasant; not just to have knowledge, but also to know how to conduct oneself, how to live well and how to entertain oneself. A person who has learned nothing,119 knows nothing, doesn’t know how to occupy her time, and can entertain herself with only a few things in which her interest wanes quickly and comes to an end, while her life endures far longer. Women don’t get to exercise their thinking, because ideas cannot be exercised without support; their feelings are exercised too much because feelings exercise themselves, all the more so in that they are less moderated by the mind’s operations. This is why women judge almost everything by sentiment. That is indeed the best way to judge in some cases, but in many others it’s a sure way to judge poorly. Love, hate, and indifference are too extreme as attitudes to be appropriate for all objects. Very few merit love, even fewer merit hate, and there are perhaps none for which indifference is appropriate, since there can be utility and amusement in anything, if one only knows how to find them. And the exercise of reason alone can accomplish this, in making one appreciate the interest befitting each object without loving it, hating it, or regarding it with indifference. It is because of the profound ignorance in which they are raised that women exercise their judgment only with respect to gallantry and to the delicacy of manners without paying attention to the species120 of things, to what without syntactical connection. The final line responds to all of the moralists addressed in the article. They are blind to the passions that rule their own projects—​passions that are more deplorable than those they single out in women. 118 Manuscript at Bibliothèque de Genève (Ms fr. 215 f. 19–​35). 119 qui n’a rien appris. The subject is gender neutral in French throughout the line. 120 Jean-​Henri-​Samuel Formey defines species as “a universal formed by the abstraction of qualities that are the same across a group of individuals” (Encyclopédie, ou dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers, etc., eds. Denis Diderot and Jean le Rond d’Alembert. University of Chicago: ARTFL Encyclopédie Project (Autumn 2017 Edition), eds. Robert Morrissey and Glenn Roe, 5:955. http://​encyc​lope​die.uchic​ago.edu/​).

Part IV: Education and Mores  257 they are in and of themselves, and to what they should be. Nothing seems worthy to them if it’s not dressed in certain adornments. This same ignorance distills women’s sentiments and transports them even beyond what they feel in those imaginary passions that have given birth to so many bad novels, which are nevertheless practically the only works that amuse them since they find in them the reality of their imagination.121 And it is none other than this ignorance that throws women into a superstitious and fastidious devotion at the end of their youth. This devotion isn’t the worship that the Lord demands, nor does it bind [them to] the society of men since it separates them even from their families and their duties by throwing them into the hands of a spiritual director who finds the whole thing tiresome and who often rewards his boredom by deceiving them.122 This ignorance is thus truly for women a misfortune that accompanies them their whole lives. This cannot be denied insofar as human happiness—​or so it appears—​depends mainly on the relative rightness and truth of one’s ideas.123 The ignorance in which women are raised today not only keeps them from being useful in their children’s education, but can even harm it: through the example of idleness and bad principles in children’s tenderest youth, and then through a poor choice of teachers and of those who govern these children, with whom they interact exclusively.124 If a widowed woman becomes the head of her family, what problems do not result from the insight she lacks into how to make the best choices for her children and from the blind trust this ignorance obliges her to put in those who become involved in her affairs. Even if she isn’t a widow, a woman contributes significantly to her children’s fate, through the principles and 121 In “The Learned” (Les sçavans), Dupin remarks: “I’m not one to hold novels in contempt. The actions presented in them are almost as true as in histories, but the feelings are much truer. [ . . . ] As for the scads of novels that have become popular in the past few years, they are for the most part cleverly written but with such licentiousness that they are reprehensible. If any one of these books lasts long enough to become respectable on account of its venerability, it will fool posterity. People will imagine that the mores of our time were just as dissolute as the writings.” 122 Due to the increased frequency of confession and emphasis on penance following the Council of Trent (see Art. 10), spiritual directors and penitents had regular personal contact to discuss devotional practices, readings, and routines. See Jennifer Hillman, “Soul Mates and Collaborators: Spiritual Direction in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe,” History Compass 13, no. 9 (2015): 476–​484. 123 In her essay, “Ideas on Happiness,” Dupin recommends meditating on one’s own state of being and taking stock of one’s clear, reasonable and true ideas; “he who has the most true opinions should be the happiest, and he who has the most errors, the least happy” (Portefeuille, 39–​40). 124 Dupin was very involved in the education of her son, Jacques-​Armand. She monitored his development and sent him letters encouraging studiousness, diligence, and good temper (Portefeuille, 18–​21). In a 1736 letter, Saint-​Pierre lauds Dupin as the best teacher of reason her son could have (Portefeuille, 174).

258  Louise Dupin’s Work on Women examples she gives them; those who don’t give bad ones often give ridiculous ones. Everyone knows how much we are shaped by the things we see and hear in childhood. It’s thus a major disadvantage to families that women do not receive an education that would allow them to have competence in educating, and that could redress and correct whatever flaws some of them may have. In society in general, women’s ignorance produces thousands of follies and thousands of problems every day. It is the root cause of the opinion we are combatting. Not only are women ignorant, but they don’t dare leave this ignorance which seems to have become their lot. The minute an unfamiliar word from the arts and sciences crops up in the conversation, a woman believes herself obligated to mispronounce it, or she pretends not to understand it even when she does. Women don’t normally know the principles of reasoning; the speech of the smartest women suffers from this, since their minds haven’t received any guidance about how to appropriately proportion different objects and ideas. They often use the same expressions for frivolous things that would be more suitable for weightier things. From this comes their excessive way of speaking that men sometimes borrow by dint of constantly hearing it. Women’s greater leisure and their lack of experience in treating serious questions makes them verbose on the subjects that they do treat. They don’t typically know the proper measure of things—​neither the amount of time a given subject should take up, nor the degree of interest appropriate to it: it’s almost always either too much or too little. Knowing nothing by principle, whatever their mind suggests to them or that they glean from the ways of the world is detached and disjointed from real objects. Women do not regularly pay careful attention to the reasonable and important things before them; and they often give too much to trifles, even drawing attention to them. This makes them go quiet on subjects it would be good and agreeable to discuss, and obligates men to defer to tedious questions with a forced and peeved attitude. Social life thus suffers from women’s ignorance since it is difficult to converse with them in a satisfying manner as they must commonly steer the conversation to subjects readily exhausted, all the more so because these subjects lack variety.125 This limitation has introduced the custom whereby

125 Compare to Poulain: “If their informal study circles were transformed into academies, their discussions would be more informed, agreeable, and wide-​ranging. Every woman can appreciate the satisfaction she would experience in discussing the most interesting topics” (Equality, 178).

Part IV: Education and Mores  259 a man apologizes to women the minute he mentions in their presence some subject about which they are not informed. It is as if they are owed an apology when one speaks about something sensible. Finally, women are raised to consider small things great, since those are their principal occupation, and to find great things small—​or at least in relation to themselves, to consider them indifferently, because they have no connection to them. What a perfect set up for considering all objects in life falsely and childishly. The mind must struggle to change this outlook and is not always in a state to do so. All of this produces false and passionate judgements that men adopt from women by disposition and as habit. Since women commonly have no notion of what men do in the first twenty years of their lives, every point of study, art or science that they have learned is like a foreign language to them, as a result of which young people—​who are supposed to be bound by esteem, friendship, and by the exchange of ideas—​ have almost no means to be so. All the means provided by different types of knowledge and even by reason are off-​limits to them due to the difference in education. They are left with sentiment alone to bring them close, and even that is altered as much as possible, so much so that we could say, without exaggeration: given the different ways in which men and women are raised, they would be insufferable to each other had Nature not done her part. We do not intend to conclude from the difference in education between men and women that there is such great superiority in merit on the side of men, as experience would belie such a conclusion. We wish only to insist on the distance that this puts between them; on its removal of men’s ability to emulate women,126 since they have no type of knowledge in common with them; and on the false opinion it gives men of themselves based on what they know and what women don’t know. In a word, we are not afraid to say that the majority of vices and faults in society are due to this difference in education. Not only does this difference in education—​and the principles that result from it—​ diminish the real merit of each person, it additionally diminishes the merit of each sex. Because in social life men are obliged to proportion their knowledge to the ignorance of women, they lose something of what they know rather than perfecting it. And since women are even obliged to limit themselves to the mediocre idea people have about them, those who might want

126 Poulain characterizes the feminization of men not as an othering process but as the return to a more natural state (see Pellegrin, Pensées du corps, 379). Dupin likewise imagines that men would benefit from emulating women.

260  Louise Dupin’s Work on Women to study something do not know how to go about it, while others who have studied something do not know how to make use of it. If some woman of a superior order manages to escape these disadvantages, she can hardly avoid in the minds of men in general and even in those of her children, particularly her sons, being enveloped in the general idea that they are given about women. Their minds have been led along all sorts of paths to disregard women, which is, especially in regards to mothers, as contrary to the principles of humanity as it is to good morals and healthy politics, since principles like these cannot form decent enough people. If women lack certain resources, if they find resources in men that they cannot reciprocate, this proves nothing against women nor anything for men. It only proves that we don’t know what we haven’t learned and that knowledge furnishes for oneself, for the conduct of one’s family, and for society resources both useful and agreeable.

Article 42. Education in Marriage Boileau’s127 satire on women is addressed to a man about to marry and begins thus: Finally, drawing your galant intrigues to a close Alcippe, alas it is true, soon you will marry.128

Most often, the time of life when a woman gets married is not yet that of her faults, and it may well be up to her husband to ensure that she avoid the errors and pitfalls that could pain him, adopting with him a respectable life that suits him fully. But why does this satire against women begin with a slight against men? Can one legitimately say that by marrying, a man draws his galant intrigues to a close, without maligning him? This barb would merit even more criticism today since a man about to marry who enjoys his current way of life certainly doesn’t plan to change it after marrying. Ordinarily men are motivated to marry only when it advances their financial affairs, with the 127 Manuscript from Bibliothèque de Genève (Ms fr. 215 f. 36–​59). 128 Nicolas Boileau-​Despréaux imitates Horace and Juvenal in his Satires (1666), which he continually updated. In “Satire X” (1693), the jaded narrator warns Alcippe against a series of caricatures—​ the coquette, the shrew, the prude, the précieuse—​and finally against the litigation he will face should he initiate a separation from his wife.

Part IV: Education and Mores  261 exception of those who are married very young. Marriage, such as it is established today, gives men great advantages that they take to be both natural and right, taking custom for nature, as we do most of our lives, and taking abuse for justice when it works to our advantage. Women are typically married at a much younger age than men.129 Thus, beyond the disadvantages resulting from an upbringing without education and beyond the incapacities assigned them by laws and customs, women also suffer from inexperience. When a young woman is told she will be married, the news is accompanied by presents and parties which seem to promise her more happiness than she could desire. A few benevolent gestures on her husband’s part following inevitably on the heels of the wedding prevent her at first from noticing the miscalculation of her hopes, but typically, after a fairly brief interval, this modicum of happiness is succeeded by a manner of living that is ordinarily anything but happy. The same man who before had been considerate, indulgent, and who had sought to please no longer thinks of such trifles once a husband. Politeness itself would strike him as an affectation in his marriage. Authority wins him over and persuades him that he is the master. He gets angry if his authority goes unheeded, and to the point that among the most genteel there are perhaps few husbands who haven’t reminded their wives of it at least once in their lives. The charm that equality, voluntary consent, and one’s own will provide to social interaction is lost in marriages. Equality cannot endure between two people when one wants to be master;130 the pleasure a husband would get from his wife’s desire to be faithful and from the merit of her consent are destroyed by his authority.131 As soon as a woman is married, all of the reasons for modesty132 and good conduct as they relate to her own self come to an end, so to speak. It is only

129 Large age differences were common among the elite. Dupin was sixteen when she married Claude Dupin, a thirty-​six-​year-​old widower. 130 Similarly in friendship, “habit persuades us that we have a natural right over the will of our friends; we [feel entitled] to govern them.” Claude Yvon and Denis Diderot, “Amitié,” Encyclopédie, 1:361. 131 According to Rousseau, sex is more pleasurable for a man when the woman’s consent is uncertain: “Then what is sweetest for man in his victory is the doubt whether it is weakness which yields to strength or the will which surrenders. And the woman’s usual ruse is always to leave this doubt between her and him” (Emile, 360). 132 Sagesse. Wisdom, which for women boils down to sexual fidelity. In “Virtues and Rights Ceded,” Dupin rates modesty focused on “social graces” above “modesty relating to chaste ideas,” because the former touches all of society, whereas the latter assuages just one man’s jealousy. Rousseau disagrees: the unfaithful wife “dissolves the family and breaks all the bonds of nature. In giving the man children which are not his, she betrays both” (Emile, 361).

262  Louise Dupin’s Work on Women in relation to her husband that she should be good, and it’s not enough that she is so according to her own conscience. She must be good according to her husband’s desire—​and whims, even.133 Making women’s prudence and virtue depend on the authority of husbands does not give it a solid enough foundation. It is true that women’s honor is also at stake, but since it doesn’t hold the highest place, it is even less considered and has even less of an effect.134 Nothing is as strong as the sense of honor. It overcomes Nature even in those moments when she speaks most urgently and eloquently, defying the fear of torture and even death, and making all human feelings fall silent. The courage of soldiers in the midst of grave peril and unwed mothers who kill their own babies sufficiently prove what we are saying. Women should have been given the laws of honor, justice, and conscience before that of conjugal fidelity in order to compel them to live orderly lives. On such foundations, it would have been easy to build beautiful and reasonable laws that would brook no objections, whereas those of personal duty, submission, and obedience allow for objections that sometimes ring true. Another thing that is rather amusing is that a husband believes himself responsible for the modesty of his wife and, by a refinement of extravagance, even his honor is concerned with this fidelity, while it is indifferent to the other vices or faults that his wife may have. It would be more beneficial to morality to apply this fastidiousness to all other points of honor besides this one. It is as if the inverse of this is expected of women: whatever infidelities her husband may commit, she should bear them and never complain about them, and if her husband is guilty of some wrongdoing in society, she must share in his shame and penitence. It is mainly in this context that the work of bringing children into the world and attending to their upbringing is emphasized in order to prove that women are incapable of certain occupations in society.135 But on this point we must come to accounts—​as we have already done with several points—​since 133 As Rousseau argues: “It is important, then, not only that a woman be faithful, but that she be judged to be faithful by her husband, by those near her, by everyone. It is important that she be modest, attentive, reserved, and that she give evidence of her virtue to the eyes of others as well as to her own conscience. [ . . . ] These are the reasons which put even appearances among the duties of women” (Emile, 361). 134 In other words, women’s honor amounts to sexual modesty, and commands less respect than men’s honor, which includes, but is not limited to, the fidelity of their wives. 135 As Rousseau argues: “The strictures of the relative duties of the two sexes is not and cannot be the same. When woman complains on this score about unjust man-​made inequality, she is wrong. This inequality is not a human institution—​or, at least, it is the work not of prejudice but of reason. It is up to the sex that nature has charged with the bearing of children to be responsible for them to the other sex” (Emile, 361).

Part IV: Education and Mores  263 even if we accept this principle at the outset, the tally still comes out wrong. Suppose that each woman gives birth to ten children, a number which is probably more than average. We say that this woman, in allowing herself the full extent of the care she might need, will not spend more than ten months of her life convalescing. Supposing that this woman nurses her children, as it would be very reasonable to do,136 that shouldn’t take up more than ten years of her life: is it reasonable for her to devote the rest of her life to uselessness? Besides, the condition of carrying a baby in one’s womb and even nursing it doesn’t prevent one from coming and going, taking walks or visiting friends. It would be just as easy for a woman to come and go for her business.137 As for the division of labor, it seems that husbands and wives have made a convention: husbands take charge of responsibilities outside the house, as the most important and difficult, and wives take care of those inside, as the least important and least difficult. What results from this division on the part of husbands is an often doleful authority; a tediously patronizing manner; a false sense of self-​importance relating to these dealings; and a profound secrecy over these matters and other common interests about which she never hears anything. Furthermore, this convention is not even respected, since we know full well that men decide everything that is done in these households and do as they wish with all of their contents, no matter how many houses and châteaux they own. There is no place where the wife retains the right or liberty to make the smallest change or to prevent one from being made. All the way down to the choice of furniture and how to arrange it, everything is so determined by men that the result is often in contradiction with what their wives might desire, and, consequently, these cares are no longer a source of occupation or amusement for them. What emptiness in life to never have anything necessary or useful to do! It is hard to fill hours and days with some mediocre handiwork—​that is never completed and ordinarily not worth the trouble of starting or finishing—​or with the time spent dressing and undressing. Must a man seize everything, even the esteem that should go to others, in order to have esteem for himself?

136 Like most urban families, whether elite or working-​class, Dupin almost certainly sent little Jacques-​Armand out to a wetnurse when he was born in 1727. Her endorsement of maternal breastfeeding reflects doctors’ growing insistence on its benefits (see Art. 2). 137 Rousseau objects: “Even if there were intervals as one supposes between pregnancies, will a woman abruptly and regularly change her way of life without peril and risk?” (Emile, 362). Rousseau goes on to ridicule claims about the resilience of parturient women in other cultures, such as Dupin makes in Art. 2.

264  Louise Dupin’s Work on Women Is it necessary for a husband to deprive his wife of all opportunity to do anything well in order that he be valued at his full worth? It seems that now men envy women who have garnered some reputation for the way they receive guests and do the honors in their homes. Society people, who have little to do, will sometimes name the mistress of a house where a supper is being given instead of her husband, and jealousy can arise over this mediocre advantage. La Bruyère138 wrote an item on this, and it is often said about a man who is rarely at home and who, when he is there, doesn’t do the honors of conversation as well as his wife, that the wife governs him and that she is the mistress. What an impressive mark of empire! Women are [considered] highly indiscreet and impolite when they don’t do their utmost to manifest their admiration for their husbands and to solicit it for them. In believing that they have won at this game, they lose; but their husbands are assuredly in the same case and circumstance when they act like that, yet no one speaks of it. The commerce and even the conversation between a husband and wife—​to whom their differing educations and therefore social conduct have assigned different ideas despite a natural foundation that is absolutely common between them—​must on many occasions be insincere and quite bizarre, and, in fact, they are. Almost all husbands and wives are Arnolphe and Agnes to greater or lesser degrees.139 We mean by this that husbands are typically persuaded by Arnolphe’s maxims, and even repeat them, while wives believe that they are entitled once in a while to listen to conversation that seems sweeter and truer than that of their husbands. A magistrate, reputed to be intelligent, pushed these ideas about the just dominance of men and the submission owed them by women to the point of saying that husbands should demand unreasonable things of their wives to mark their empire over them, on the logic that, with reasonable demands, women might believe that they are acting on their own reason and on the advice anyone else would give. I have met several reasonable and clever women who assured me that in the course of their youth they sought out men for the sole purpose of making them speak on different subjects; that they sought them out for private conversation in order to ensure the accuracy of their own statements; and that these men had sometimes spoken to them of love, which they endured only 138 “Monsieur pays the roaster and the cook, and [yet] it’s always chez Madame that one has supped.” La Bruyère, Œuvres complètes, ed. A. Chassang (Paris: Garnier Frères, 1876), 105. 139 On Arnolphe and Agnes, see Art. 1. Despite Arnolphe’s best efforts, Horace finds a way to converse with Agnes.

Part IV: Education and Mores  265 so as not to put them off from speaking about other things. Sometimes men are nevertheless able to obtain a hearing on this last point alone—​but why shouldn’t women listen to lovers occasionally? They make reparations for the rest of the masculine nation. The emergence of a type of man who could take advantage of the trust, affection, and friendship that husbands don’t aspire to merit was inevitable. Nevertheless, it sometimes happens that those men who have worked so hard to be amiable, and who not only acknowledge equality but affect to serve women as slaves [actually] reclaim the idea of domination from the common view; and, in truth—​dependance for dependance—​the one that is most legitimate and sanctioned is the least bad for women. Husbands in a jovial mood sometimes start saying indecent things to their close friends in the presence of their wives, in the guise of joking. They often make ribald comments and display loose manners in their friends’ company, showing concern neither for the reaction of women to such conversation—​ especially the effect it can have on their state of mind—​nor for the freedom it authorizes in the men to whom they say such things in women’s presence. They flaunt scandalous stories, licentious tales, and lewd songs in front of women who are not amused, whereas amusement is ordinarily the point of such things, like those who imitate [Sir John] Brute, the ridiculous husband from an English comedy,140 going so far as to say that they wouldn’t give a fig about a song that wasn’t full of cheek. It’s not too severe to say that manners such as these are as far removed from pleasure as they are from respectable conduct. The species of people called husbands can go without pause from prescribing severe conduct to women to the behavior we deduce from their own indecent comments. In one of our modern novels there is a description of men having three suppers with three kinds of women. The supper with the elite women is boring due to the ostentatious severity that these women bring to it; the one with libertine women disgusts even the men who might share this epithet; and the preference goes to the supper with some theater women who, without priding themselves on austerity, mingle decent manners with a more expansive freedom than elite women allow themselves.141

140 John Vanbrugh’s comedy, The Provoked Wife (1697), features a brutish husband whose mistreated wife is pushed to infidelity. 141 Supper (souper) is an evening or night-​time meal, often served after entertainments. The novel is Antoine François Prévost’s Mémoires d’un honnête homme (Amsterdam: [n.p], 1745). This positive evaluation of theater women must have pleased Dupin, since her mother had been an actress.

266  Louise Dupin’s Work on Women Don’t women as a whole stand to benefit from this lesson? And in effect, to be an upstanding woman, must one indeed be boring to the point of rigor and never dare hear or say anything that might contribute to the charm of conversation? For that, it is true that we would have to expect more measured speech from men, but neither one nor the other is beyond the realm of possibility, and this would surely be more pleasant than an extreme license on one side that necessarily imposes a comparable reserve on the other side. By what fatality do we imagine that husbands and wives constrain each other and are less amiable together than separate? One might respond that we imagine it because we see it: but why is that so? Is there any explanation other than the constraint that the one imposes on the other, which hinders the constrainer as much as the constrained, since, if it only hindered one of them, the other would maintain his worth, and that’s not what happens or ever will happen as long as morality for men and women isn’t the same.142 Why must husbands assert authority over everything that wives think and say, and over all of their actions more generally? Supposedly it’s to preserve women’s modesty; but the good conduct of the common people, which is just as important in the eyes of the creator and just as necessary to the state as that of others, is not violated when a woman of this type doesn’t live in the same house as her husband and when she isn’t even under his domination, since each one has a different master to follow and serve.143 I don’t say this to demand a different domicile for married people in more elevated conditions; on the contrary, I regard inhabiting the same residence as yet another privilege that both husband and wife should consider as such. But I will say that this favor of fortune would be more complete if each enjoyed the same advantages in that house, and that each should control what is theirs, so that they both truly enjoy their own wealth and administer it in such a way as to attract each other’s praise, eliciting reasons for mutual gratitude from each other.144 It is thus true that the condition of women of quality is worse in itself than that of 142 For Rousseau, morality has to be different for women and men, because their “mutual dependence is not equal.” Men depend on women out of desire. Women depend on men out of need. For men to wish to provide for women, women must remain immaculate in public opinion, whereas a man “only depends on himself and can brave public judgment” (Emile, 364). The husband’s individual authority over his wife is a small part of a system of constraint. 143 Dupin alludes to spouses who work as servants in different households. Wives in urban working-​class families were also more likely than elite women to avail themselves of the court system to obtain separations of person and property from their husbands. 144 At the end of her Declaration of the Rights of Woman and of the [Female] Citizen (1791)—​a pastiche of the National Constituent Assembly’s 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen—​Olympe de Gouges includes a “Form for a Social Contract Between Man and Woman.” Unlike Dupin, Gouges does not recommend separate property. Instead, the contract she proposes

Part IV: Education and Mores  267 common women (of whom there are a much larger number), and that they are also less respected among their rank. It seems to us that it would even be advantageous if in the same house they each had their separate quarters with their own personnel, that each would administer according to their fancy. Two households of this kind would surely cost less than a single one. Each would strive more carefully to preempt any misuse of funds. He who conducted himself best would be an example for the other. This would deprive them of neither the right nor the pleasure of living together, and would be a way to do so much more pleasantly. There would be both glory and sweetness [douceur] in seeking each other out and in procuring pleasant things for each other, whereas having to always be together takes away the merit and pleasure of it, while the pretext of not pursuing any fun for oneself leads one to not to seek it for others either. Less wealthy people whose estate included fewer servants would live in common, each contributing from their side, but each keeping for themselves145 their own capital. In this way, they would still avoid a hundred reproaches and a hundred bad behaviors that arise from the arrangement when only one of them controls it. In a word: with principles and arrangements stemming from a spirit of equality, marriages would return to the purity and sweetness [douceur] of their origin,146 to which acquired things would lend a new pleasure;147 the partnership of married people would have all the advantages of the society of two friends who not only have chosen each other to love but prefer each other every day over all other objects; and what’s more, there would be in the

stipulates communal wealth, owned by both spouses, and divisible among all children including from prior marriages. 145 à part soi. “Within oneself,” an adverbial expression usually associated with secrecy, combined with the object le fond de son bien (literally “the depths of one’s property,” perfunctorily rendered here as “capital”), suggests a kind of intimacy between property and personhood that we have not captured in translation. 146 Dupin describes the state of nature as a golden age characterized by doux sentiments in the long “Preliminary Discourse”: “It is plausible that at that time, there was no question of the inequality of the merit of men and women, and that more necessary and sweeter [plus doux] sentiments occupied them.” Dupin associates douceur with equality vs. the Abbé Saint-​Pierre, who describes its facilitation of domination and subordination in De la douceur (Paris: Briasson, 1640). 147 The material benefits of commercial society enhance the douceur of primitive heterosexual attachment: a positive view of commerce in keeping with the Abbé de Saint-​Pierre’s promotion of international trade.

268  Louise Dupin’s Work on Women partnership of marriage that special interest and pleasure that nature meant to put between humans of different sexes.148

Article 45. On the Spirit of General Conversation Conversation turns often enough to the comparison between men and women.149 When this happens, men always hold the advantage on their side, testifying by their words, tone, and accompanying head gestures that one should view the proposition as final and binding.150 After this modest conclusion, those who pride themselves most on politeness fall back on gallantry, saying that women are the queens of the world, that they determine everything in it, and that men toil only to pay women homage with their works, their glory, and their talent. When any one of the most obvious injustices between them is put into question, like the inequality of the division of property or the specific disadvantages of certain countries and customs, it’s somewhat amusing to see the most reasonable men calmly envisioning these injustices—​whereas on other subjects involving perceived injustice, they argue, protest, get worked up. On this point, however, they coolly acknowledge the injustice and change the subject as soon as possible. People believe that the highest praise a woman can be given is to say that she is a “gentleman.”151 This expression—​common enough in conversation and too often abused in flattery (can you believe it?)—​seems to us so bizarre that, without the gradual progression of habit and vanity that have led men to use it and little by little to subscribe to it, we would naturally ask what is meant by this since it’s not even intelligible.

148 Echoes of Poulain de la Barre: a man and a woman seek each other out “to satisfy through the possession of their own persons, a desire which banishes all fears, which gives them the mutual consideration of the most perfect friendship” (Excellence, 280). We amended this translation. 149 Manuscript from the Houghton Library of Harvard University (Ms Fr 182.1). Conversations générales—​ open conversations in mixed company—​ vs. conversations particulières, private conversations, often between two individuals (can also be used to denote those of a secret, gallant, or illicit nature). 150 en force de chose jugée. With no possibility of appeal or re-​litigation. 151 Honnête homme. A masculine social ideal fashioned after Baldassare Castiglione’s Book of the Courtier (1528). His comportment combines integrity, civility, and social suavity; he is spontaneous and able to converse with women.

Part IV: Education and Mores  269 It is quite commonly said that a girl must marry in order to have an estate; that a girl who remains a maiden has no estate.152 What is this supposed estate that husbands give to women? Women who share in the titles of the men they marry typically boast a lineage just as good as theirs. This title brings her no advantage—​neither resources, nor honors—​beyond a few flimsy prerogatives that some women of the highest nobility still enjoy on their own account. For all of the women who, in general, don’t take on the title of the charges or occupations153 of their husbands, what estate are they receiving? And how can one receive an estate without participating in any way in its functions? Doesn’t every human creature created by God have an estate of their own? Don’t women just as well as men hold the estate of Cosmopolitan,154 one that precedes any other estate and will long outlast it? To say that an unmarried woman has no estate is one of those ideas owing its existence to the progress of masculine vanity. Girls who don’t marry, just as boys who don’t marry, wrong the state politically155 but this doesn’t mean that either of them are deprived of an estate, and it is even less the case that only one of them can be deprived of it. On certain occasions, women receive a few honors: one says politely, even then, that the honors given to women are of no consequence. It’s true that they have this in common with clerics in the case of military honors. Men are persuaded that they are younger than women even when they are the same age, and they say so quite often. By what proportion we could not say precisely since it varies according to the ideas of those who say this: perhaps a difference of ten or twenty years? Regardless, in this—​just as in everything else we’ve discussed—​we stand by the tenet of perfect equality. A man who is forty or fifty years old seems to us as far removed from youth as a woman of that age. Seventy or eighty years don’t look any younger whether dressed as a man or a woman. Neither seems to us to be made to please any more than the other, much less to inspire the ideas one has about youth at the 152 État. A person’s status or rank, but also a state (as in a sovereign nation). A married woman is just as estate-​less as an unmarried woman, because none of her husband’s property or privileges redound to her, until he dies (see Art. 30). 153 charges ou emplois. Civil positions in royal administration—​usually in the judiciary, the military, or in public finance—​that may be venal (purchased) and hereditary (see introduction to Part III). On the charges and titles of the Dupin family, see the volume introduction. 154 Cosmopolite. A citizen of the world, a person without a fixed residence, or as an adjective, a synonym for “ecumenical.” Dupin uses it here as a secular alternative to Christian understandings of personhood beyond identity markers. See Mary Helen McMurran, “The New Cosmopolitanism and the Eighteenth Century,” Eighteenth-​Century Studies 14, no. 1 (Fall 2013): 19–​38. 155 Because they won’t have (legitimate) children. Dupin echoes the pronatalist ideology advanced by Louis XIV: subjects should bear children in order to support and strengthen the state.

270  Louise Dupin’s Work on Women sight of their faces. Provided they are amiable, it’s equally possible for us to love men and women at any age and desire their commerce so long as they know how to make it agreeable. There’s a common saying that a man is always handsome enough provided that he is not as ugly as the Devil. I do not believe, however, that women have subscribed to this view. To achieve the effects that it should cause, beauty is just as necessary and just as desirable in men as in women. In all of the things for which beauty is useless, women can do without it just as well as men can. We don’t know why women are called the fair sex, since there is just as much beauty among men as among women. Shouldn’t this have been examined? In conversation, this expression—​“the fair sex”—​is often used derisively. When it’s discussed more seriously, men don’t hesitate to play along, the better to claim some advantage [for themselves], if not in the loveliness of the face then at least in the beauty of their stature or body. Men have even gone so far as to imagine a kind of beauty that is uniquely theirs, composed of majestic traits representing strength and dignity. They have named this figment of their imagination “male beauty,” and they have in a certain sense brought it into being by continually comparing everything in life that might be considered in terms of beauty, strength, or dignity to what they imply by male beauty.156 For everything that is not noble, dignified, or beautiful, they have invented the epithet “effeminate.”157 Thus the denomination “the fair sex” is so attenuated that women would be wrong to be vain about it. There perhaps isn’t a day that goes by that we don’t hear repeated a hundred times in good conversation the word “male” when one wants to depict something as beautiful and the word “effeminate” to suggest that something is mediocre. In general, wouldn’t beauty be better depicted with a neutral or common gender?158 Consistent with the opinion we are writing about, we cannot acknowledge two types of beauty, one for men and one for women; truly we only know one. The beauty of their physical features appears to us the same, as does the beauty of the character to which those traits might belong. Grace, sweetness, wit, an intense and serious air, a noble and dignified air: all of these traits (which are rarely combined) are 156 For examples of such comparisons, see Art. 5. Typifying this tendency, Cureau de la Chambre distinguishes male from female beauty in Caractères des passions, vol. 1 [1658] (Paris: Jacques D’Allin, 1662), 101–​108. 157 “[I]‌f someone wishes to blame a man and mock him for having little courage, resolution or toughness, they call him effeminate” (Poulain, Equality, 185). 158 Le beau en général ne seroit-​il pas mieux peint avec un genre neutre ou commun? “Beautiful” is grammatically gendered in French (beau, belle).

Part IV: Education and Mores  271 dispersed among men and women and in no way form a distinctive character for one sex or the other. These things are only distinctive in the individual who possesses them. In general, beauty is more noticeable in women and in men during their youth. During that time, it’s quite difficult to distinguish between beauty in men and in women, and if they were to dress in a different way, they wouldn’t be recognizable as the sex they are. The ancients hadn’t yet imagined these distinctions of beauty. The fabled Adonis would be considered an effeminate today; Alcibiades, the same. However, this manner of envisaging beauty differently hasn’t seduced every mind: it’s not generally accepted among great painters. Santerre’s masterpiece of Adam and Eve—​a painting of great beauty—​represents the two figures as equal in height, in dignity, and in attractiveness, although they don’t have the same features.159 This equality is perhaps what makes this work so charming. The equal interest we take in both figures in the painting and the interest we imagine them to take in one another is perhaps owing to this [equality in representation]. This is what completes the illusion and what makes it impossible to consider the painting indifferently. When gaiety and witticisms are mingled, in a gathering of eight or ten people with as many women as men, how is it conceivable that some of the witty remarks intended to enliven the conversation are so many insults against all women, and yet habit has made this acceptable? On similar occasions I’ve heard intelligent people of fine taste make this cute remark from a dispute between a woman who was no longer young and a man who apparently wasn’t young either: after quite a few harangues and reproaches on both sides, the man finally responded, “Call me whatever you like, you will never be able to call me an old woman.” And what’s most amusing about this is that some women applaud this comment as men do and occasionally repeat it.160 When it comes to barbs about the ridiculousness of the human species as a whole; or comments about a particular type of person who has earned them

159 The 1717 painting by Jean-​Baptiste Santerre, now in the collections of the David Roche Foundation, shows Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. The two figures are depictions of the Regent, Philippe Duc d’Orléans and his mistress, Madeleine de Vieuville, Marquise de Parabère. 160 Dupin notes another such phrase on the page: “In order to write good tragedies, one must have what your cat lacks” (i.e., testicles). A male mentor reportedly told this to Antoinette du Ligier de la Garde Deshoulières after the failure of her 1680 tragedy, Genséric. Alain Niderst, “‘Traits, Notes et Remarques’ de Cideville: Documents sur La Fontaine, Molière, Racine, Mme de La Fayette, etc.” Revue d’Histoire Littéraire de La France 69, no. 5 (1969): 822–​831, p. 830.

272  Louise Dupin’s Work on Women based on bizarre behavior; those who don’t have any faults or don’t believe they have any are safe from insult and can laugh about them; but even the most dignified and reasonable women are not impervious and cannot escape insults like the one just cited. They have a hard time being entertained by such comments except by reference to the ridiculousness that leads people to say them in the first place. The common manner of speaking in hushed tones is sometimes appropriate in group conversations; this happens more often among men than among women. It’s a mistake to be duped by this custom into regretting being unable to hear what they say under their breath. It would be more natural to think that if what they were saying were good, pleasing, or congenial, they would be delighted to have more than one witness to it. A man who laughs with another loudly enough to interrupt everyone else in the room wouldn’t dare laugh if the thing were heard by all. Commonly one takes what is said in this manner to be something too free to be shared with several people, especially in the company of women. But why do men so often have recourse to such things? In the art of conversation, we can go so far as to speak modestly about subjects that are somewhat free; but those that are vulgar should have no place. With those things duly removed, all those assembled would have an interest in ensuring that everything that could furnish enjoyment or amusement was shared by all. Since this impoliteness regards women more personally, should it not be pointed out and denounced? It’s often to speak ill of women that men whisper. One might think that enough ill is spoken out loud about women that this resource is unnecessary. I once happened to hear a wise man, a friend of the house, say sotto voce161 to the master of the house about the reigning Queen of Hungary: “women take enmity, resentment, and vengeance further than men do.” If several friends had the same thought on the same day and addressed it to the same man, would that dispose him to respect and esteem the mistress of the house? Is this propitious generally for bringing peace into a house? Yet that, along with a hundred other similar things, is common in conversation.



161

Literally “under the voice” (Italian). This describes a comment uttered so as not to be overheard.

Part IV: Education and Mores  273

Article 46. Observations on the Spirit of Theater We162 read in some good Reflections on Poetics163 that the obligation women have to vanquish love—​or conceal it—​and the delicacy of glory that causes them to hide it even from themselves are the sources of the pleasure we take from this passion, and of the depictions made of it [on stage]. The author says that men rarely face the same struggle as women when they are in a similar situation and that love isn’t as pleasing when depicted in men. To say such things, one must really wish to regard men and women as different. When love is true, alive, and tender, it’s as interesting in men as it is in women. When there is love between two people who can love one another legitimately, women can declare their love just as men can, and like them, garner interest in proportion to the truth of their feelings. When men or women conceive a passion that injures glory, that passion should create a struggle between glory and love in men just as it does in women. When love is depicted between two innocent people and some divinity or important person opposes it, whether from the man’s or woman’s side, the worries, fears, opposition of authority, and merit of sacrifice should have the same power and same cost for both the man and the woman in such a situation. When love is depicted between people whose interests oppose their love, whether their family’s wishes or otherwise, the obstacles should have the same force, and the merit of either bowing to or overcoming those interests should be equal whether on one side or the other.164 When love is illegitimate or when it doesn’t limit itself to a single object, one wouldn’t dare present these tableaus to the public if one had any hope of receiving approval for the work. Thus it is absolutely untrue that love is different in men and in women, and that it should be represented differently [in them]; the more love is represented with common features, the more we are open to it and the more interest it will receive. The line that has

162 Manuscript from Bibliothèque de Genève (Ms fr. 215 f. 60–​69). We thank Frédéric Marty for providing us with his transcription of this article. The following notes were developed from those provided by Marty: 163, 165, 166, 167, 169, 170. 163 This is Fontelle’s work, accessed by Dupin in vol. 3 of his Œuvres (Paris: 1742, 127–​208), which she borrowed from the King’s Library (Le Bouler and Lafarge, “Les Emprunts de Madame Dupin,” 135–​137). Dupin and Fontenelle were friends, likely why she is careful to indicate that his work is otherwise “good” before criticizing an aspect of it. 164 Dupin uses the future tense in this sentence, and the next line is in the conditional. This series of repetitive sentences masks a progression from a descriptive mode regarding how things are in the present to a prescriptive, future-​oriented vein of how things could or would be.

274  Louise Dupin’s Work on Women perhaps inspired the most pleasure from this passion in the theater is the one from Roland’s sheepfold: “I will always love my shepherdess . . . etc.”165 Couldn’t we desire that love be accompanied only by modesty and sincerity? These sentiments belong so naturally to love and their effect is so enjoyable in men as in women and would suffice to produce all of the pleasant details that one likes to depict in this passion. In keeping to this, all those expressions like “conqueror,” “defeats,” “wielding arms,” “triumphing over” someone who loves us would disappear: but would that be a great loss? We will observe here that much care is taken [in the theater] to make women cry at any and every occasion. This disposition of nature that sometimes results from the heart’s tenderness, but more often from pain or oppression—​and that is certainly common to men and women—​is absolutely today the sole share of women. We can yet read in the old annals that Caesar cried in Gaul after the Belgian women pillaged and burned his camp. We read that Pope Zachary shed tears when he came to ask Pepin for help against the Lombards.166 We find tearful men in many other histories. All men in the world will still cry in situations made to wring tears, but it will no longer be recorded. It will not be represented on the stage, or only rarely and in an ennobling way. Tears have been left to women as if they were a weakness. They will be made to cry constantly and the only tears mentioned will be the ones that they shed. As a consequence of this false view, we find in our plays the very turn of mind that we lament. Andromache, according to Racine’s tragedy167 in which she was given the character of a modern French woman, is seen only in tears and on her knees pleading mercy. Euripides’ Andromache and his Hermione in the same play have more noble and dignified characters. A few of our modern comedies give women the kind of heroic character we reproach the Romans for.168 One of these plays depicts a married

165 Popular tragic opera (1685) by Jean-​Baptiste Lully, inspired by Arioste’s Orlando Furioso (1516), a tale of medieval chivalry. A group of shepherds and shepherdesses appear in Act IV, Scene III to sing about how delightful it is to love and be loved in return. The shepherd Coridon sings this line to Bélise the shepherdess and then she echoes it. 166 In 751, Pepin the Short received the approval of Pope Zachary to depose Childeric III and replace him as King of the Franks. Both leaders had tense relationships with the Lombard Kingdom. 167 Jean Racine’s tragedy, Andromaque (1687), inspired by Andromache by the Greek playwright Euripides (circa 420s bce) and the Aeneid (circa 20s bce) by the Roman poet Virgil. Andromache was the wife of Hector, who was killed by Achilles during the Trojan War. Years later, a slave to Achilles’s son (Neoptelmus), she is in conflict with his wife Hermione. 168 Dupin refers to a stoic bearing, involving glorying in suffering.

Part IV: Education and Mores  275 woman capable of the greatest constancy and the greatest virtue in the face of her husband’s duplicitous treatment; she even despairs of retaining him despite her virtuous behavior towards him but for the intervention of a friend.169 Another play by the same author170 depicts a married woman whose virtue never flags in the midst of the worst misfortunes; but when some formalities obstruct her marriage, she overdoes her pleading, self-​ doubt, and complaints about what is owed to her. She becomes a character whom one can’t help but find pathetic even if it appeals [to the audience]. We believe that a little dignity in women would in no way diminish the appeal of their roles, nor the pleasure and instruction found in these plays. Obstacles can be arranged in a thousand ways to create a plot that doesn’t depend on women’s mistrust,171 misery, etc. etc. Some opera plots are set in motion and resolved by ordeals that women are made to suffer through in which there is as much folly as cruelty: such are the new lessons about how women are supposed to love—​that is, by sacrificing everything.172

169 Le Préjugé à la mode by Nivelle de La Chaussée (1735). Based on the prejudice that a nobleman should not openly love his wife, d’Urval is cold to the loving Constance. Then he secretly sends her expensive gifts to test her, delighting in her embarrassed confusion. Eventually driven to jealousy as a result of his own machinations, he openly accuses her of infidelity (only to have his own unmasked). Constance is deeply wounded but endures this humiliation with a self-​sacrificing attitude until the happy resolution. 170 This “comédie larmoyante” (tearful comedy) is Mélanide (1741). Two young lovers married in secret against their family’s wishes and, when discovered, were forced to separate by a legal decree; thereafter Mélanide is kept hidden away by her parents. Years later, Mélanide returns with the son from this relationship only to discover that the Marquis, her long-​lost husband (who thought she was dead) is now pursuing Rosalie, the daughter of a friend. Her son also falls in love with Rosalie. When the Marquis finds out that his former beloved is still alive, he says he is unable to conquer his love for Rosalie and rejects Mélanide, leading to plentiful tears. After discovering that his rival is his son and finally meeting with Mélanide, the Marquis re-​discovers his old feelings and they reunite happily in love. 171 Défiance. Distrust, often related to an apprehension of something bad or a lack of confidence. Défiance de soi was used above for the character of Constance. These women are led to distrust themselves because of the behavior of men. 172 In Art. 38 Dupin highlights similar problems in contemporary novels. In addition to women portrayed as so ridiculous as to be detestable, libertine women are portrayed as more condemnable and more criminal than libertine men. Further, if a respectable woman is actually depicted, her merit consists in “pardoning the man she loves for every aberration, to the point of being neither offended nor angered by all kinds of gallant adventures, even though they involve many cruel (and sometimes insulting) infidelities; nor in taking offense when they end in her abandonment[.]‌Voilà feminine heroism in today’s novels.”

APPENDIX A

Work on Women Articles and Manuscript Pieces Table A.1. List of the 47 Articles of the Work on Women This table is based on Sénéchal’s inventory, with updates from Le Bouler and Thiéry (“Une partie retrouvée”) and Marty (Louise Dupin and email communication). Some articles have both full drafts and rough drafts or notes at a single archive or across multiple archives; in these cases, we only provide the location for the drafts we used in our translated selections in this table. The exception is the Abbaye de Chaalis; we did not view any of the manuscripts in this archive and have only listed the pieces that Marty has indicated as drafts of entire articles. Any additional draft pages that have been referenced in our introductions and in notes will appear in Table A.2. See introduction to Part IV for discussion of the number assigned to Article 22. +​denotes an article included in our edition; -​denotes articles not found or not accessible; ^ denotes articles determined by Le Bouler and Thiéry or Marty. Italics denotes articles that are fragmentary and/​or very rough in terms of development. Table A.1  List of the 47 Articles of the Work on Women #

Title of Article

Manuscript(s) Location

1 +​

Observations on the Equality of the Sexes and on Their Difference

MJJR (IR.2002.489.1) HRC (MS-​03636, I.B.art.1).

2 +​

On Generation

MJJR (IR.2002.489.1)

3 +​

On Temperament

MJJR (IR.2002.489.1) HRC (MS-​03636, I.B.art.3) BGe (Ms. fr. 217, f. 187–​210)

4 +​

On Strength

HRC (MS-​03636, I.B.art.4). Draft versions MJJR (IR.2002.489.1 and IR.2002.488.1)

5 +​

Animal and Plant Analogies

MJJR (IR.2002.437.8)

6

On the Old Testament

Private Collection. Photocopy at MJJR (DP Sénéchal. Inv.II.13)

7

On the New Testament

Private Collection. Photocopy at MJJR (DP Sénéchal. Inv.II.13)

8 +​

On the Discipline of the Church

MJJR (IR 2002.4.1)

(continued)

278  Appendix A Table A.1 Continued #

Title of Article

Manuscript(s) Location

9 -​

On the Original State of Monastic Orders

—​

10 +​

On the State of Monastic Orders since the Council of Trent

MJJR (IR.2002.437.7)

11

On Canonnesses and Military Orders

Abbaye de Chaalis (S.5627)

12 +​^

Foreword on History

MJJR (IR.2002.489.1)

13 +​

On Ancient History

MJJR (IR 2000.2.1)

14 -​

(a chapter on Greek history)

—​

15 -​

(a chapter on Roman history)

—​

16

On Byzantine History

MJJR (IR.2002.437.3)

17

Various European Countries

HRC (I.B.Art.17) Abbaye de Chaalis (S. 5626)

18 +​

On Turkey and Persia

MJJR (IR.2002.437.2)

19 -​

On Great Tartary, China, and Japan

Private Collection (not accessed)

20 +​

Other Countries

MJJR (IR.2002.437.4)

21 +​

On the History of France

HRC (MS-​03636, IB.art.21)

22 +​^

Foreword on Mores

HRC (MS-​03636, I.B.art.38)

23 +​

On Education

UCLA Clark Library (f Ms.2002.001)

24 -​

missing

—​

25 -​

On the Origin of Government

—​

26 +​

On the Rights Women Possessed HRC (MS-​03636, I.B.art.26) Naturally, Initiatives Against those Rights; On Those That Were Restored, and Then Taken Away Again by Modern Usurpations

27 +​

Foreword on Law

HRC (MS-​03636, I.B.art.27)

28 +​

On Salic Law, Considered as a Law

Beinecke, Yale University (GEN MSS VOL 225)

29 +​

On Different Forms of Roman Marriage, Beinecke, Yale University on the Property That Married Women (Osborn c403) Enjoyed, and on Marriage Today Abbaye de Chaalis (S. 5623)

30 +​

On the Power of Husbands, on the Prerogatives That the Law Grants—and Could Grant—To Married Women

Illinois Rare Book and Manuscript Library (Post-​1650 MS 0111)

31 -​

On the Benefits that Custom Allows a Large Portion of Married Women to Enjoy

—​

32 +​

On Adultery and Its Punishments

HRC (MS-​0363, I.B.art.37)

Appendix A  279 Table A.1 Continued #

Title of Article

Manuscript(s) Location

33 -​

On Names, Mourning, and Second Marriages

—​

34 -​

On Divorce and Separations

—​

35

On Nobility and Titles

BGe (Ms. fr. 215 f 79–​93)

36 +​

On Tutorships and Testimony

BGe (Ms. fr. 215 f. 94–​109)

37 +​

On Rape

Illinois Rare Book and Manuscript Library (Post-​1650 MS 0563)

38 ^

Particular Observations on the Style of Some Authors

MJJR (IR.2002.489.1)

39 +​

The Effects of Education on Morals

BGe (Ms fr.215, f.1–​18)

40 +​

Further Reflections on Education

BGe (Ms fr. 215 f. 19–​35)

41 ^

On Marriage in General

MJJR (IR.2002.489.1)

42 +​

Education in Marriage

BGe (Ms fr. 215 f. 36–​59)

43 -​

Effects of Education in Love

HRC (MS-​0363, I.B.Art.43)

44

Particular Faults Attributed to Women

HRC (MS-​0363, I.B.Art.44)

45 +​

On the Spirit of General Conversations

Houghton Library, Harvard University (Ms Fr 182.1)

46 +​

Observations on the Spirit of Theater

BGe (Ms fr. 215 f. 60–​69)

47

On Changes in the Signification of Words BGe (Ms fr. 215 f. 70–​78)

280  Appendix A

Table A.2. List of Manuscript Pieces Referenced in Introductions and Notes, Organized by Archive This table includes the piece’s title or relevant identifying information and manuscript call number. Table A.2  List of manuscript pieces, organized by archive Title/​Description of Manuscript

Manuscript Call #

Harry Ransom Center “Preliminary Discourse” (short PD)

MS-​03636, IIIC.8a

“Observations on the Equality of the Sexes” (drafts)

MS-​03636,IIIC.8a

“On Some Women Authors”

MS-​03636, III.C.6k

“Marriage and feminine instruction”

MS-​03636, III.C.4e

“On the Origin of Government” (set of folios categorized as Art. 25, but mainly containing drafts of other pieces, fragments)

MS-​03636, I.B.art.3

Related to Art. 36; draft called “de la disposition des emplois” MS-​03636, IIIC.5d Apostolic Constitutions reading excerpts

MS-​03636, I.A.50

Musée Jean-​Jacques Rousseau “Preliminary Discourse” (long PD)

IR.2002.496.1

“Ideas on Education”

IR.200.493.5

“Ideas on Several Authors and Several Works”

IR.2002.493.8

“The Learned” (Les sçavans)

IR.2002.493.14

“Chapter in which We Examine the Vices and Faults Given IR.2002.493.14 to Women by Men” “Chapter in which We Examine the Virtues and Rights Ceded by Men to Women”

IR.2002.493.15

“On Mores” (a bound volume of various pieces)

IR.2002.493.176

“Reflections on the Adornments of Women”

Photocopy. DP Sénéchal. Inv.II.41

“Women of Letters from Rome to the Modern Era”

Photocopy. DP Sénéchal. Inv.II.40

Bibliothèque de Genève draft of Article 3, “On Temperament”

Ms. fr.216 f. 187r-​v

draft of Article 42, “Education in Marriage”

Ms fr. 215 f. 36–​59

“History of the Amazons, Rearranged”

Ms. fr. 216, f. 14–​95

Domat, Legum delectus, 81, reading excerpt

Ms. fr.217, f. 4

Bibliothèque du Sénat “On Roman Vestals”

RFP0844.A

Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library Gillet, Jean, Treatise on Tutorships, reading excerpt

GEN. MSS MISC, Group 435, Item F-​3

APPENDIX B

Anicet Sénéchal’s Inventory and Ordering of Manuscript Anicet Sénéchal’s authoritative inventory (“Jean-​Jacques Rousseau, secrétaire de Madame Dupin”) shapes our encounter with Dupin’s writing. It’s the standard classification that scholars use for Dupin’s manuscripts, and every major archive or library refers to Sénéchal’s publication in its catalog description. Originally, all of the papers were in the possession of Gaston de Villeneuve-​Guibert (Dupin’s great-​grandnephew), including the portions that he published in 1884 (in Le Portefeuille de Madame Dupin). In the next generations, the manuscripts were divided. One heir, Madame de Montgermont, received (all or some of) Dupin’s papers from the Portefeuille collection and a few other pieces (now called the Montgermont lot); other heirs received drafts of The Work on Women and the critique of Montesquieu’s Spirit of the Laws (see introduction to the volume). The Montgermont lot was sold (in 1951); it (or most of it) was purchased by the Musée Jean-​Jacques Rousseau at a 1980 auction in Monte Carlo. Called upon by Dupin’s surviving heirs to inventory the rest of Dupin’s papers before they were to be sold at four auctions in 1957–​1958 by Drouot, Sénechal was aware of the contents of the Montgermont lot from the auction catalog description, but had no access to them. Jean-​Pierre Le Bouler and Robert Thiéry inventoried the Montgermont lot when it was acquired by Musée Jean-​Jacques Rousseau (“Une partie retrouvée”).

Dividing the Lots In his inventory, Sénéchal prioritized dossiers and pages with the handwriting of Jean-​ Jacques Rousseau. Other hands include those of Louise Dupin, unidentified secretaries, Claude Dupin, and Sauveur-​François Morand (see introduction to Part I). If a folio featuring another hand was clearly connected to a set in Rousseau’s hand, it was included in the inventory; pages with no such connection were not accounted for. For example, he only included Articles 1 and 2 of the Work on Women in the lot he saw (which were in Dupin’s hand) because he knew that the Montgermont lot listed drafts of the same texts in Rousseau’s hand. He organized the inventory thus:

I. Reading excerpts made by Rousseau: • Citations, paraphrases, summaries of texts. Le Bouler and Thiéry as well as Le Bouler and Lafarge later added to this list. • A supplementary list of the sources that Rousseau consulted or knew about. Le Bouler and Thiéry later added to this. II. Pages related to Dupin’s 3 major works: A. Work on friendship [3 chapters], including material published as “essays” in the Portefeuille. Dupin appears to have planned a lengthier work on this topic. B. Work on a critique of the Spirit of the laws [a preface and 6 dossiers]. C. Work on women [47 chapters or “articles”].

282  Appendix B III. Fragments, drafts, sketches, notes, and compilations: • Related to all 3 major works (labeled A.B.C. as relevant), but mostly to C, the Work on Women, categorized thematically: Physiology; Mores; Legislation; History; Chronology; Sketches and drafts of articles; Melange; Diverse.

Defining and Counting Articles Sénéchal’s inventory list of the 47 articles gets replicated as a table of contents of sorts for Dupin’s Work on Women, which is misleading because, as established in the volume introduction, those pieces are not consistently complete, and as shown in our section introductions, are not in a definitive order. The placement or number of some articles is unclear and requires speculation. Some of the uncertainty about the order of the articles reflects Dupin’s own uncertainty: some sections likely grew in the course of her research and writing, with evolving relationships between ideas leading to variant options for placement. Sénéchal’s system is nevertheless an essential guide to an incomplete Work that was dispersed and fragmented. Most crucially, he included a few lines of every article listed, providing at a glance the topic and tone; listed the number of folios, which tells us when pages are missing from the draft to which we have access; and included some of the sources he found referenced in each article. In calling the contents of the numbered folders “articles,” we have put our faith in Sénéchal, who states that article was Dupin’s terminology, with no explanation. We have not seen Dupin use this term.

Outside the Inventory What became of those drafts, sketches, pages, notes, etc. not in Rousseau’s hand, that Sénéchal did not inventory? Later scholars have labeled pieces that weren’t in the inventory at all—​those in Dupin’s hand, or that surfaced later and can’t be integrated into an existing III.C. area—​as “outside the inventory.” In their “Catalogue topographique,” Le Bouler and Lafarge list such manuscripts with the prefix “hors” (outside): for example, Hors. Inv.I.15, “On the allocation of tasks in primitive times,” and Hor Inv.II.1. “Commentary on Ovid” (274). In marginalizing manuscripts that do not feature Rousseau’s hand, Sénéchal’s classification system can, accidentally and ironically, render Dupin “outside” her own work.

Bibliography of Selected Secondary Sources Bély, Lucien, editor. Dictionnaire de l’Ancien Régime: Royaume de France, XVIe-​XVIIIe siècle. Presses universitaires de France, 1996. Blair, Ann. “Early Modern Attitudes towards the Delegation of Copying and Note-​ Taking.” In Forgetting Machines: Knowledge Management Evolution in Early Modern Europe, edited by Alberto Cevolini, 265–​285. Brill, 2016. Broad, Jacqueline. “Early Modern Feminism and Cartesian Philosophy.” In Routledge Companion to Feminist Philosophy, edited by Ann Garry, Serene J. Khader, and Alison Stone, 71–​81. Routledge, 2017. Buon, Jean. Madame Dupin: une féministe à Chenonceau au siècle des Lumières. La Simarre, 2013. Conley, John J. The Suspicion of Virtue: Women Philosophers in Neo-​Classical France. Cornell University Press, 2002. Conroy, Derval. Ruling Women: Government, Virtue, and the Female Prince in Seventeenth-​ Century France. 2 vols. Palgrave MacMillan, 2016. Curran, Andrew. The Anatomy of Blackness: Science and Slavery in an Age of Enlightenment. Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011. Desan, Suzanne, and Jeffrey Merrick, editors. Family, Gender, and Law in Early Modern France. Pennsylvania State University Press, 2009. Diefendorf, Barbara. From Penitence to Charity: Pious Women and the Catholic Reformation in Paris. Oxford University Press, 2004. Dupin, Louise. Des femmes: Discours préliminaire. Edited by Frédéric Marty. Payot, 2022. Dupin, Louise. Des femmes: Observations du préjugé commun sur la différence des sexes. Edited by Frédéric Marty. Classiques Garnier, 2022. François, Alexis. “Rousseau, Les Dupin, Montesquieu.” Annales de la Société Jean-​Jacques Rousseau 30 (1943–​1945): 47–​64. Frier, Bruce, and Thomas McGinn. A Casebook on Roman Family Law. Oxford University Press, 2004. Force, Pierre. Self-​ Interest Before Adam Smith: A Genealogy of Economic Science. Cambridge University Press, 2003. Geisey, Ralph E. “Rules of Inheritance and Strategies of Mobility in Prerevolutionary France.” American Historical Review 82, no. 2 (1977): 271–​289. Gelbart, Nina Rattner. Minerva’s French Sisters: Women of Science in Enlightenment France. Yale University Press, 2021. Green, Karen. A History of Women’s Political Thought in Europe, 1700–​1800. Cambridge University Press, 2014. Green, Karen. “The Rights of Woman and the Equal Rights of Men.” Political Theory 49, no. 3 (2020): 403–​420. Hanley, Sarah. “‘The Jurisprudence of the Arrêts’: Marital Union, Civil Society, and State Formation in France, 1550–​1650.” Law and History Review 21, no. 1 (2003): 1–​40.

284  Bibliography of Selected Secondary Sources Hardwick, Julie. Family Business: Litigation and the Political Economies of Daily Life in Early Modern France. Oxford University Press, 2009. Hayes, Julie Candler. Editor and translator, Marie-​Geneviève-​Charlotte Thiroux d’Arconville: Selected Philosophical, Scientific, and Autobiographical Writings. Iter Press and Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies Press, 2018. Hunt Botting, Eileen. “The Early Rousseau’s Egalitarian Feminism: A Philosphical Convergence with Madame Dupin and ‘The Critique of the Spirit of the Laws’.” History of European Ideas 43, no. 7 (2017): 732–​744. Le Bouler, Jean-​Pierre. “Rousseau et Les Dupin en 1743. Essai de chronologie critique.” Études Jean-​Jacques Rousseau 4 (1990): 103–​121. Le Bouler, Jean-​Pierre, and Catherine Lafarge. “Les Emprunts de Mme Dupin à la Bibliothèque du roi dans les années 1748–​1750.” Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century 182 (1979): 107–​185. Le Bouler, Jean-​Pierre, and Catherine Lafarge. “Catalogue topographique partiel des Papiers Dupin-​Rousseau dispersés de 1951 à 1958.” Annales de la Société Jean-​Jacques Rousseau 38 (1972–​1977): 243–​280. Le Bouler, Jean-​Pierre, and Robert Thiéry. “Un chapitre inédit de l’Ouvrage sur les femmes de Mme Dupin.” Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century 19 (1986): 253–​269. Marty, Frédéric. Louise Dupin: Défendre l’égalité des sexes en 1750. Classiques Garnier, 2021. Marty, Frédéric. “Rousseau secrétaire de Mme Dupin. L’article 2 de l’ouvrage sur les femmes: ‘De la Génération’.” Annales de la Société Jean-​ Jacques Rousseau 40 (2013): 47–​91. Moriarty, Michael. Fallen Nature, Fallen Selves: Early Modern French Thought II. Oxford University Press, 2006. O’Neill, Eileen. “Disappearing Ink: Early Modern Women Philosophers and their Fate in History.” In Philosophy in a Feminist Voice, edited by Janet A. Kournay, 17–​62. Princeton University Press, 1998. Pellegrin, Marie-​Frédérique. Pensées du corps et différence des sexes à l’époque moderne. ENS éditions, 2020. Porter, Roy, editor. The Cambridge History of Science, vol. 4, Eighteenth-​Century Science. Cambridge University Press, 2017. Reynolds, Phillip. How Marriage Became One of the Sacraments: The Sacramental Theology of Marriage from its Medieval Origins to the Council of Trent. Cambridge University Press, 2016. Ruud, Sonja, and Rebecca Wilkin. “The Real Consequences of Imaginary Things: Louise Dupin’s Critique of Sexist Historiography.” In Routledge Handbook of Women and Early Modern European Philosophy, edited by Karen Detlefsen and Lisa Shapiro. Routledge, forthcoming. Sénéchal, Anicet. “Jean-​Jacques Rousseau, secrétaire de Madame Dupin d’après des documents inédits, avec un inventaire des papiers Dupin dispersés en 1957 et 1958.” Annales de J.-​J. Rousseau 36 (1963–​1965): 173–​290. Steinbrügge, Lieselotte. The Moral Sex: Woman’s Nature in the French Enlightenment. Translated by Pamela Selwyn. Oxford University Press, 1995. Stuurman, Siep. François Poulain de la Barre and the Invention of Modern Equality. Harvard University Press, 2004. Terrall, Mary. “Gendered Spaces, Gendered Audiences: Inside and Outside the Paris Academy of Sciences.” Configurations 3, no. 2 (1995): 207–​232.

Bibliography of Selected Secondary Sources  285 Thielemann, Leland. “The Thousand Lights and Intertextual Rhapsody: Diderot or Mme Dupin?” Romanic Review 74, no. 3 (1983): 316–​329. Treggiari, Susan. Roman marriage: iusti coniuges from the time of Cicero to the time of Ulpian. Oxford University Press, 1991. Villeneuve-Guibert, Gaston de. Le portefeuille de Madame Dupin, Dame de Chenonceaux. Calmann-Lévy, 1884. Weiss, Penny. Gendered Community: Rousseau, Sex, and Politics. New York University Press, 1993. Wilkin, Rebecca. “‘Réformez vos contrats!’: From the marriage contract to the social contract in Louise Dupin and Jean-​Jacques Rousseau.” In Women Philosophers in Early Modern France, edited by Derval Conroy. Special issue, Early Modern French Studies 43, no. 1 (2021): 88–​105. Zakaria, Rafia. Against White Feminism: Notes on Disruption. W. W. Norton, 2021.

Index For the benefit of digital users, indexed terms that span two pages (e.g., 52–​53) may, on occasion, appear on only one of those pages. abbess(es), 106–​8, 144n.175, 147–​49, 153–​ 54, 155–​57, 157n.221, 159, 161 academies, 19–​20, 36, 83, 228–​29, 240, 248, 249, 258n.125 Académie des inscriptions, 16–​18, 251n.96 Académie française, 6–​7 Académie royale de chirurgie, 11–​12, 36 Académie royale des sciences, 11–​12, 36–​38, 58n.110 Histoire de l’Académie royale des sciences, 36, 41n.46, 52n.89, 76n.170 Ada of Caria, 112–​14 Aelian, 35, 44–​45, 57nn.106–​7, 86–​87 Africa, 21–​22, 55nn.98–​99, 99–​102, 114–​ 15, 122–​26, 128–​29 Angola, 123 Carthage, 141n.159 Egypt, 58, 112–​13, 143n.169 Ghana, 123n.95 Guinea, 124n.97 Loango, 117–​18, 123 Madagascar, 125–​26 Ouidah, 123, 124n.97 South, 128n.112 Africans, 21–​22, 25–​26, 47, 55, 101–​2, 124, 249n.86 Cafres, 124, 128 Carthaginians, 47, 114, 130 Egyptians, 111, 113–​14, 208 Ethiopians, 111, 122 Numidians, 47 Alexander the Great, 83, 112n.53, 113–​14, 127n.108, 237n.48, 239 Amazons, 87–​88, 98–​99, 112, 113n.58, 125, 235–​36 Americans, Native, 47, 80–​81, 98–​99

Caribs, 80–​81, 102n.16 Cuna, 80n.176 Huron, 117–​18, 128–​29 Incas, 113–​14, 128–​29 Iroquois, 128–​29 Tupinambá, 55n.99 America(s), 55nn.98–​99, 98–​100, 124, 127, 128–​29 Brazil, 55, 92–​93, 124–​25, 236 Caribbean, 21–​22, 101–​2, 124n.97 Chile, 125 Haiti, 21–​22, 25–​26 Mexico, 128–​29 Panama, 80–​81 Peru, 125 analogy, 1, 27, 38, 50, 70, 230–​31 anatomy, 31, 33–​35, 36, 40–​52, 67, 76–​77, 94–​95, 226–​27. See also generation; strength; temperament ancients, 35, 44–​45, 49n.77, 57, 59–​62, 64, 66n.140, 68, 73–​74, 86–​87, 108, 271 Ancillon, Charles, 43n.51, 43nn.53–​54 animals, 27–​28, 30, 33–​35, 38, 41–​42, 46, 47, 48–​49, 50, 52, 56–​59, 60, 66, 68, 73, 78–​80, 81–​84, 86–​95, 119 animal spirits. See body Anne de Bretagne, 109, 136 Anne d’Autriche, 98, 139, 216n.197 Arete, 237–​38 Aristotle, 35, 45n.62, 49n.77, 57–​58n.109, 59–​60, 61n.121, 65n.138, 86, 180n.53 Artemisia(s), 97–​98, 113–​14 Asia, 6–​7, 99–​100, 114–​15, 121n.84, 127, 127n.109, 128–​29 Achem (Indonesia), 121 Armenia, 116, 178n.48 Burma (Myanmar), 121–​22

288 Index Asia (cont.) Ceylon (Sri Lanka), 117–​18 China, 47, 127 Formosa (Taiwan), 128 India, 43, 44–​45, 47, 55, 102–​3, 117–​18, 121n.85, 122, 125 Persia (Iran), 43, 100–​1, 113–​20 Philippines, 128 Siam (Thailand), 121 Tartary (Central Asia), 127 Tibet, 117–​18 Turkey, 43, 100–​1, 114–​20, 121, 141n.160 Asians, 47 Augustine, 143–​44, 178, 209–​10 Augustus, 110n.37, 111, 122, 169–​70, 175–​ 76, 209–​10 Aurangzeb, 102–​3, 122 authority of bishops, 105–​6, 107–​8, 152, 154, 155–​56 of men, 104, 174–​75, 178, 189, 199–​ 207, 224, 230, 261–​62, 263, 266–​67, 266n.142 of science, 39, 74 of women, 105–​6, 109, 115, 116, 126, 129, 133–​34, 136, 139–​40, 144, 152n.205, 192, 193n.95, 206–​7, 217n.199, 221–​22 parental, 181 political, 154, 181 authorization, 25, 189, 200, 203, 206–​7, 206n.152 Bahuche, Marguerite, 16–​18, 150n.196 Bayle, Pierre, 99n.5, 114n.64, 119n.80, 164n.7 beard, 30, 41, 42, 43n.52, 46–​47, 86–​87 beauty, 9, 19–​20, 92, 93, 121–​22, 224, 250–​ 51, 269–​71 animal beauty, 92–​93 male beauty, 93, 270 Bellarmino, Roberto, Cardinal, 44–​45 Bernard, Jean-​Frédéric, 16–​18, 80n.176, 99–​100, 102–​3, 118n.77, 123nn.94–​ 95, 124n.96, 125–​26nn.103–​4, 126n.105, 127n.109, 128n.112, 128n.113, 128n.114 Bernard, Samuel, 21–​23, 101n.11, 164–​65

Bernier, François, 99–​100, 122n.87 Bible New Testament, 15, 103–​4, 110n.38, 147–​48, 187, 249 Old Testament, 92n.209, 103–​4, 110n.37, 126–​27 body, 27–​29, 39, 40–​52, 53–​64, 67–​68, 270. See also strength; temperament animal spirits, 30, 33–​35, 49–​50, 51nn.84–​85, 61, 69n.146, 84 blood and fluids, 45–​46, 49–​51, 52, 59–​60, 61, 64, 68–​69, 72–​74, 76–​77, 91n.207, 94 fibers and solids, 31, 68, 70–​71, 82n.180 Boerhaave, Herman, 31, 35, 50–​51n.81, 68, 70–​71 Boileau-​Despréaux, Nicolas, 260 Book of hours, 16–​18, 110n.37, 150–​51 botany. See plants breastfeeding, 62–​63, 64, 80–​81, 190–​91, 262–​63. See also childrearing Brillon, Pierre-​Jacques, 163n.6, 173n.33, 203n.135, 206n.152, 223, 252n.98 Brunhilda, 134–​35 Bruyère, Jean de, 223, 252, 264. See also moralistes Buffon, George-​Louis LeClerc, comte de, 19–​20, 33–​35, 37, 41nn.43–​44, 44nn.58–​59, 47n.68, 50–​51n.81, 51n.86, 56–​57nn.104–​5, 58n.111, 89n.202 Bunel, Jacob, 149–​50 Caesar, Julius, 83, 209n.167, 239–​40, 274 Candace (Egyptian queens), 111, 122 Castel de Saint-​Pierre, Charles-​Irénée, 6–​8, 16–​18, 19–​20, 23n.87, 226–​29, 239n.58, 257n.124, 267nn.146–​47 castration, 35–​36, 38, 41–​42, 43, 48n.71, 48n.73, 92, 243n.71 Catherine de Médicis, 23–​24, 138, 253 Catholic Church. See Church celibacy, 106, 145–​48, 230–​31 Chardin, Jean, 115, 116n.74 Charlemagne, 134n.136, 144, 144n.175, 145, 242 Charles Borromeo, 154–​55, 243n.73

Index  289 chemistry, 7–​8, 33–​35, 37–​38, 86, 94–​ 96, 240 childbirth, 54–​56, 60, 67, 76, 78, 80–​81, 102–​3, 125–​26, 146–​47, 188, 190–​91, 249, 262–​63 children, 70–​72, 116–​17, 118, 120, 124, 125–​26, 137–​38, 139–​40, 152, 155–​ 56, 180–​81, 201–​2, 204, 206–​7, 210–​ 11, 249, 253, 260, 269 descendance, 116–​17, 118, 133–​35, 137–​39, 184, 185, 186. See also inheritance male vs. female, 50–​51, 59–​60, 82, 235–​ 36 (see also generation; nubility) See also education China. See Asia Choisy, François-​Timoléon, Abbé de, 99–​100, 121 Church, Catholic, 42–​43n.50, 100–​1n.8, 103–​4, 105, 106, 140–​61, 196, 225–​ 26, 246n.81, 249 Greek Orthodox, 104, 145–​46 vs. state, 107–​8, 167–​68 Cicero, 95, 178, 180n.55, 194–​95 climate, 51n.86, 69–​70, 89n.202, 119, 222–​ 23, 236–​37 Colombet, Claude, 175, 191n.89, 193–​94 commerce, 21–​22, 57–​58n.109, 99–​100, 101–​2, 121, 164–​65, 228–​29, 232, 267n.147 conversation as, 230–​31, 232, 243, 252–​ 53, 255, 264, 269–​70 intimacy as, 65–​66, 120, 195–​96, 204n.137, 231–​32 consent, 127, 163–​64, 169–​70, 199–​ 200, 204 to marriage, 167–​68, 175–​76, 193 to sex, 126–​27, 220, 230–​31, 261 contract leonine, 1–​2, 204 marriage, 22n.79, 124, 136n.143, 168–​ 69, 175–​76, 192, 193–​94, 198n.117, 199, 201n.129, 204, 207n.155, 231–​ 32, 266–​67 social, 6–​7, 180–​81n.56, 181n.57, 230, 231–​32 conversation, 18–​1 9, 35–​3 6, 65, 141–​ 42, 155, 190, 221–​2 2, 229–​3 1, 232,

238–​3 9, 258, 264–​6 6, 268–​7 2, 268n.151. See also commerce correspondence, 16–​18, 19–​20, 23–​24, 25–​26, 36, 142, 257n.124 cosmopolitan, 269 Council of Trent, 105–​8, 147, 151–​61, 163–​64, 167–​68, 198n.116, 228–​29, 243–​44, 257n.122 councils, Church, 105–​6, 106nn.24–​25, 107n.29, 141–​42, 144, 145, 146–​47, 147n.187, 148–​49, 154–​55. See also Council of Trent Cujas, Jacques, 177n.46, 195–​96 curator(ship). See tutor(ship) Cureau de la Chambre, Marin, 28–​29, 65n.134, 67n.141, 70n.153, 82n.181, 270n.156 customary law. See law custom(s), 29–​30, 40, 55n.99, 65–​66, 80, 99–​100, 102–​3, 111, 112, 113–​14, 117–​18, 120, 123, 126–​29, 143, 144, 144n.175, 145n.177, 178n.48, 182–​ 83, 191, 192, 192n.91, 204n.138, 222, 229–​30, 236–​37, 258–​59, 260–​61, 268, 272 Dancourt de Fontaine, Armande Carton, 21–​23 Dapper, Olfert, 99–​100, 118n.77, 123, 128n.112 deaconess, 134n.135, 141n.160, 142–​45, 148n.190 death, 55n.97, 102–​3, 121–​22, 128, 148–​ 49, 150–​51, 164–​65, 261–​62 penalty, 167–​68, 179–​80, 182, 208, 209–​ 10, 219, 220 debt, 1–​2, 164–​65, 169–​70, 200n.125, 201, 205nn.142–​44, 206–​7, 212n.178 Democritus, 44–​45, 65 Deparcieux, Antoine, 83–​84 dependence, 109–​10, 151, 160, 161, 176n.44, 179–​81, 202–​3, 206–​ 7, 223 Descartes, René, 1, 28–​30, 28n.1, 31–​35 despotism, 6–​7, 101–​2 masculine, 89–​90, 126, 189, 230–​31 Diodorus of Sicily, 109n.35, 112n.53, 113–​14

290 Index divorce (and separation), 100–​1n.8, 125–​26, 170, 178–​79, 200, 201n.129, 260n.128, 266n.143 Domat, Jean, 166–​67, 193, 202, 212n.178, 218 domination (masculine), 1, 28, 30–​31, 38–​39, 84, 88, 91n.206, 93–​94, 104, 114–​15, 116–​17, 126, 160, 163–​64, 192, 221–​22, 223–​24, 229, 230–​31, 264–​65, 266–​67n.144 douceur, 160–​61, 232, 254, 267 dower, 164, 165–​66, 168–​69, 195–​98, 201, 205, 208n.160 dowry, 164–​66, 169–​70, 175–​76, 193–​ 98, 199–​200, 200n.125, 201n.129, 206n.152, 207n.155, 208n.160 Du Châtelet, Émilie Le Tonnelier de Breteuil, Marquise, 8–​9, 19–​20, 30n.9, 32n.14, 36, 57–​58n.109, 227–​ 28, 230–​31 Dupin, Claude, 7–​8, 9, 19–​21, 22–​23, 24–​ 25, 261n.129 Dupin de Chenonceaux, Jacques-​Armand, 7–​9, 263n.136 Dupin de Francueil, Louis, 7–​8, 37–​38 education, 3–​4, 7, 12–​15, 33, 35–​36, 80, 222, 230–​31, 235, 236–​55, 256–​68 antiquity, 237–​38 boys and men, 11–​15, 18–​19, 74–​75, 80, 218, 229, 238–​39, 240, 249, 259–​60 girls and women, 76–​77, 159, 160n.235, 221–​22, 225–​29, 232, 239–​41, 244–​ 48, 256–​68 legal, 162–​63, 218, 247 medieval, 241–​44 treatises, 244–​48, 249–​52 (see also Rousseau, Jean-​Jacques [Emile]) Egypt. See Africa Encyclopédie, 19–​20, 31–​33, 48n.71 equality, 6–​7, 101–​3, 186–​87, 190–​91, 204 of male and female animals, 66, 87–​90, 92–​93, 94–​95 in marriage, 101–​2, 193, 199, 200, 203–​ 4, 211, 213, 220, 224–​25, 229, 230–​32, 234, 261, 267–​68 of men and women, 3, 11–​12, 24–​26, 27–​30, 39, 40–​41, 53, 58, 62, 63,

65–​66, 67–​68, 74, 75–​76, 78–​79, 86, 103–​4, 105–​6, 108, 130, 141–​42, 181, 182, 204, 234, 235, 254, 255, 265, 269–​70, 271 of mind, 85, 86, 247 See also inequality Ethiopia. See Africa eunuch, 38, 41nn.44–​45, 42–​43, 100–​1n.8, 122n.88, 145–​46. See also castration Europe, 6–​7, 11n.44, 41, 76–​77, 81, 102–​3, 114–​15, 128–​29, 171–​72, 181–​82 Austria, 136n.143, 188n.82 Corsica, 80–​81 Dutch Republic (Netherlands), 21–​22, 87–​88, 121, 130n.120, 188n.83 England, 41, 132–​33, 135, 136n.142, 187, 187n.79, 242n.67, 253n.105 France, 21–​22, 55, 100–​3, 105–​6, 118, 124, 130–​40, 153–​54, 155, 181–​82, 185, 187–​88 (see also law [French]) Germany, 196 Italy, 48–​49, 114, 151n.203, 187, 193–​ 94, 197, 239n.58, 243n.73 Poland, 197 Portugal, 120–​21, 123, 187 Scotland, 89–​90 Spain, 21–​23, 133, 138, 147n.188, 185n.72, 187 Switzerland, 66, 89–​90, 187 See also France; Franks; Gauls; Greece; Rome Europeans, 47, 100–​3, 116–​17 Eusebius, 111, 113n.55, 122, 140n.157 fathers, 124, 125–​26, 180, 184, 190–​ 91, 210–​11 in French law, 164, 167–​68, 174, 206–​ 7, 215–​16 in generation, 54, 56–​57, 58n.111 in Roman law, 194n.97, 201–​2, 208n.162, 209n.167, 211n.175, 213 Fénelon, François, Abbé de, 137n.145, 226, 228–​29, 232, 237n.48, 244–​ 48, 249–​52 Fernel, Jean, 44–​45 fidelity, 46n.65, 116, 117n.75, 207–​11, 239–​40, 261, 261n.132, 262 finesse (mental), 81–​84

Index  291 Fleury, Claude, 15–​16, 106, 140n.156, 142n.162, 143, 144–​45nn.176–​79, 147–​48, 149n.192, 151n.201, 163n.4, 242n.68, 242n.70 Fontenelle, Bernard le Bovier de, 19–​20, 35–​36, 221–​22, 226, 234, 248n.84, 273–​74 Fontevraud, order of, 153–​54, 156–​57 France. See Europe, law (French) Franckenau, Georg Franck, von, 35, 41, 44–​45n.61, 45, 46n.64 François I, 137–​38, 242n.65, 251 Franks, 130, 131, 133n.131, 134–​35, 182n.64, 201n.130, 209n.165 Fredegund, 134–​35, 198, 201–​2 freedom in conversation, 187n.77, 265, 272 of female animals, 88–​90 of religious women, 151, 155n.217, 158–​ 59, 228–​29, 243 as natural right, 181, 182, 198, 215n.194 sexual, 102–​3, 118n.77, 119, 123, 124 of women, 24–​25, 55n.98, 115, 117, 120, 129, 129n.115, 175–​76, 179–​80, 181–​82, 195–​96, 198–​99, 206–​7, 232, 249–​50 Freind, John, 31, 35, 68–​70, 72–​74 Galen, 35, 44–​45, 44n.57, 49n.77, 60n.120, 65, 73n.162 Galien, Madame de Château-​Thierry, 98, 114n.62, 238n.55 Gauls, 130–​31, 197, 274 generation, 27, 31–​33, 39, 49, 53–​64, 90–​ 91. See also nubility animalculism, 31–​33, 58, 59 hermaphroditism, 38, 56–​57 ovism, 31–​33, 58 Gillet, Jean, 15, 174n.37, 211n.172, 212n.180, 214n.184, 216–​17 God, 33–​35, 54n.93, 58–​59n.112, 104, 189, 241–​42, 266–​67, 269 See also Providence Gorgonia, Saint, 143–​44 government, 20–​21, 43, 57, 101–​2, 110, 162n.1, 182–​83, 184, 189, 222–​23 missing article on, 103–​4, 167n.16, 179

by women, 109–​10, 111–​14, 121–​23, 125, 129, 130, 131–​32, 133–​34, 136, 137–​40, 184–​85, 186, 188, 216n.197 See also monarchy; republic Graffigny, Françoise de, 8–​9, 113n.60, 129n.115, 160–​61, 236n.44 Greece, ancient, 43n.53, 113–​14, 182, 197, 214, 235–​36, 238 Gregory of Nazianzus, 140–​41 Gregory of Nyssa, 140–​41, 143n.167 Grotius, 88, 219n.204 happiness, 4, 118, 180, 184–​85, 190–​91, 196, 199, 231–​32, 233–​34, 251, 257, 261, 272 harem, 88–​90, 100–​1, 115n.69, 116–​18, 119, 120, 122 heirs. See inheritance Heister, Lorenz, 31, 35–​36, 49n.78, 59, 68n.145 Helvétius, Claude-​Adrien, 19–​20, 33–​35, 111n.40 Hélyot, Pierre, 15–​16, 16f–​18, 151n.201, 155n.218, 156–​57nn.220–​21, 157n.224, 158n.225, 158nn.227–​28, 160n.232, 243–​44nn.73–​74 Henri II, 23–​24, 137n.148, 167–​68, 253 Henri III, 23–​24, 133, 137n.148, 138n.150, 167–​68 Henri IV, 105–​6, 133, 135n.139, 138, 169–​70 Herodotus, 112–​14, 125 Hervet, Gentien, 46–​47 Hippocrates, 44–​45, 59–​60, 65, 68, 73–​74 historians, 112, 129n.115, 132–​33, 165, 166, 196n.104, 239, 240n.60, 246–​ 47, 249 bias of, 56, 97–​98, 107–​11, 134–​35, 138, 139–​40, 148, 221–​22, 233–​34, 251 history, 1–​2, 7, 19–​20, 56, 97–​103, 108–​29, 141–​42, 201–​2n.131, 211, 218, 221–​ 22, 257n.121, 274 as category, 11–​12, 98, 103–​4, 105–​6 in education, 226–​27, 239–​40, 246–​47 natural history, 86–​90 (see also science) See also religion Hobbes, Thomas, 6–​7, 44n.57, 78, 231–​32

292 Index humors, 64–​75 See also body; temperament husbands in education and mores, 224–​25, 226–​ 27, 238–​39, 260–​68, 269 in history and religion, 102–​3, 105–​6, 111, 112n.48, 116, 124, 125–​29 in law, 163–​73, 174–​78, 185–​86, 189, 192–​93, 199–​207 in science and natural history, 54, 57, 66, 87–​90, 92–​93, 95–​96 Hypatia, 238 India. See Asia Indies. See Asia inequality development of, 1, 6–​7, 8, 97–​98, 108, 163–​64, 166–​67, 169–​70, 178, 182–​ 83, 231–​32 of inheritance, 177, 178–​79, 268 in marriage, 164, 175–​77, 195–​96, 198, 202–​3, 208, 229–​30 natural, 219, 262n.135, 266n.142 social, 24–​25, 27–​28, 30–​31 See also equality inheritance, 4, 22–​23, 109, 113–​14, 120, 131–​32, 131n.123, 133–​34, 136–​37, 164–​66, 171–​73, 175–​78, 184, 189–​ 91, 192–​93, 197, 199–​201, 202n.133, 205n.145, 205n.149, 206, 207nn.157–​ 58, 209n.163, 210–​11. See also tutor Isabelle of France (Queen of England), 132–​33 Jeanne I de Navarre, 109, 136 Jeanne II de Navarre, 132 Jesus Christ, 104, 105, 111, 141–​42, 144, 187, 208n.161 Journal des sçavans, 16–​18, 35–​36, 41n.46, 98–​99, 248n.84 Juncker, Johann, 35, 65 Junia, 142 jurists, 15, 107–​8, 164, 166–​69, 171–​72, 174–​77, 181, 182–​83, 184, 188, 193–​ 94, 196, 197–​98, 201–​3, 206–​7, 209, 214–​16, 220, 234 justice, 54n.93, 66, 85, 125–​26, 139n.153, 163–​64, 178, 180, 182–​83, 184–​85,

186, 189–​90, 193–​94, 204, 206, 229–​ 30, 246, 260–​61, 262 Justinian I 43n.54 Corpus juris civilis, 162–​63, 165, 167–​68, 174–​75, 177–​78, 194–​95, 196n.104, 208n.160, 209n.167, 211–​12, 213, 213n.181, 214–​15, 214nn.185–​86, 216n.197 Kangxi (Chinese emperor), 127 Kircher, Athenasius, 91–​92, 96n.214 labor, 21–​22, 78, 80, 91, 95, 113, 124, 125, 129, 264, 266n.143 women’s 55, 69, 78, 80–​81, 99–​100, 102–​ 3, 124, 125, 129, 179–​80, 187–​88 La Condamine, Charles Marie de, 98–​99 La Curne de Sainte-​Palaye, Jean-​Baptiste de, 79n.175, 197n.111, 241n.62, 251n.96 Lafayette, Marie-​Madeleine Pioche de la Vergne, Comtesse de, 6–​7, 8–​9, 251n.95 Lambert, Anne-​Thérèse de Marguenat de Courcelles, Marquise de, 6–​7, 8–​9, 29n.3, 224, 226 Lancisi, Giovanni Maria, 35, 50 La Rochefoucauld, François, Duc de, 223, 252 La Roque de la Lontière, Gilles-​André de, 172n.31 law, 1–​2, 4, 7, 16–​18, 107–​8, 182, 222–​23, 232–​33, 236–​37, 261, 262 barbarian, 162–​63, 174n.37 canon, 54n.94, 104–​7, 146–​47, 162–​63, 167–​68, 200–​1, 216n.196, 218 (see also Council of Trent) as category, 9n.37, 98, 103, 105–​6, 179, 233 civil, 105–​6, 115, 124, 131n.123, 162–​ 64, 166–​67, 168–​69, 173, 175–​76, 178–​80, 182, 200–​1, 202n.132, 218, 226–​27 customary vs. written, 163n.4, 165–​67, 168–​70, 192–​93, 200n.125, 201n.129, 206, 246, 247 French, 162–​220, 230 Hebrew, 66, 122, 219

Index  293 natural, 118n.78, 163–​64, 180, 182 Roman, 15, 128–​29, 162–​63, 164, 165, 167–​68, 169–​70, 171–​72, 174–​78, 182, 191–​98, 201–​2, 206–​7, 208–​10, 211–​15, 217, 218 See also Justinian I, marriage: in law; Salic law; Theodosius libertinage, 95, 100–​1, 208, 265, 275n.172 liberty. See freedom Louis XIII, 138–​39, 157n.221, 173 Louis XIV, 6–​7, 21–​22, 36, 79n.175, 81n.179, 107–​8, 139, 156n.220, 166–​67, 169–​70, 187n.77, 216n.198, 269n.155 Louise de Marillac, 157 love, 89–​90, 105, 119, 224, 234, 243, 248, 252n.98, 253, 256, 264–​65, 267–​68, 269–​70, 273–​74, 275 in marriage, 205, 232 self-​love (amour propre), 30, 223, 226, 248 Loyseau, Charles, 142n.164, 172–​73, 194 Macrina, 143 Maintenon, Françoise d’Aubigné, Madame de, 221–​22, 226n.19 Mairan, Jean-​Jacques Dortous de, 36 majority, age of, 133–​34, 140n.155, 167–​ 68, 204, 206–​7, 214, 215 manuscripts xv, 2–​3, 4–​5, 8–​26, 27, 28n.2, 142n.162, 167n.16, 181n.59, 212n.178, 213n.181, 244n.74, 255–​56n.117 locations of, 40n.40, 53n.90, 86n.191, 97n.1, 108n.34, 114n.63, 121n.82, 130n.116, 140n.156, 151n.201, 180n.52, 184n.68, 191n.88, 199n.119, 208n.159, 211n.172, 219n.203, 235n.39, 237n.48, 248n.85, 256n.118, 260n.127, 268n.149, 273n.162, 277, 281 Maria Theresa, Holy Roman Empress, 186n.76, 188, 272 Marie de Médicis, 138, 139, 157 marriage and adultery, 102n.16, 116, 207–​11, 218, 262, 265n.140, 275n.169

in education and mores, 91n.206, 222, 224–​25, 229–​33, 260–​68 in law, 1–​2, 88n.201, 101–​2, 105, 124, 162–​80, 185–​86, 189, 191–​207, 219 in religion, 105, 140–​41, 145, 147, 168–​ 69, 198, 204 as slavery, 101–​3, 119n.80, 173–​75, 181–​ 82, 203–​4 See also equality: in marriage; husbands; polygamy Maupertuis, Pierre Louis Moreau de, 35, 56–​57nn.104–​5, 58–​59nn.111–​12, 61n.124, 64n.132 Mazarin, Cardinal Jules, 139–​40 Mendes Pinto, Fernão, 99–​100, 120–​21. See also Body; Science menstruation, 31–​33, 44–​46, 54, 54n.93, 68–​69, 69n.147, 72–​73 Mercure de France, 16–​18, 79n.175, 98–​99, 187n.79, 197n.111, 251n.96 Mézeray, François Eudes de, 112, 130n.117, 130n.120, 130n.121, 131n.123, 133n.131, 198n.115 mind, 27, 28–​30, 39, 47, 49–​52, 77, 81–​86, 91, 160–​61, 189, 216n.197, 227–​28, 229, 230–​31, 237–​38, 240, 245, 246–​47, 249, 252, 254, 256, 258, 260, 265 moderns, 33–​35, 44–​45, 59–​63, 68, 86, 91–​92, 93, 97–​98, 108–​9, 111, 122, 127, 128–​29, 133, 139–​40, 175–​76, 178, 181, 182–​83, 184, 193, 195–​96, 202–​3, 214–​15, 223, 252, 274–​75 modesty, 66–​67, 86–​87, 98, 245, 249–​50, 253, 261–​62, 266–​67, 272, 274 Molière, 30–​31, 46, 75, 169n.22, 203n.134, 204n.137, 224, 241n.63, 245–​46 monarchy, 24–​25, 101–​2, 107–​8, 131, 138, 171–​73, 181, 188, 203–​4, 253, 254 Montaigne, Michel de, 43–​44, 180n.52 Montesquieu, Charles Louis de Secondat, Baron de dispute with Dupins, 9, 20–​21 Persian Letters, 100–​2, 236n.44 Spirit of the Laws, 131–​32, 162–​63, 173, 174n.37, 178, 181n.60, 182–​83, 211n.175, 249n.86

294 Index Montfaucon, Bernard de, 16–​18, 130n.119, 192 moralistes, 4n.14, 30–​33, 47n.70, 222–​25, 226, 252 Morand, Sauveur-​François, 11–​12, 16–​18, 36, 40n.40, 52n.89, 54n.93, 63n.129, 64n.131 mores, 92–​93, 98–​101, 109, 116, 123, 124, 140–​41, 160–​61, 179–​80, 196, 207–​8, 222–​25, 229–​33, 235–​37, 247, 248–​ 55, 257n.121, 260–​68 mothers in education and mores, 190–​91, 226–​ 27, 229, 237–​39, 260, 262 in generation, 56–​58, 59–​60, 62–​63, 80–​81, 180 in law, 172–​73, 193, 211–​13, 214, 215–​17 See also breastfeeding; childbirth; children; fathers; generation government: by women Muhammad (Mahomet), 114–​16, 120 nature, 27–​28, 33–​35, 39, 40, 102–​3, 119, 127, 182–​83, 229–​30, 248, 255n.113, 260–​61, 261n.132 as allegory, 41, 43–​44, 48, 49–​50, 51–​52, 54–​58, 59–​61, 62, 63–​64, 66, 67, 68–​ 69, 71, 76, 78–​79, 81–​82, 89–​90, 91, 93, 110, 117, 118, 184, 219, 235–​36, 248n.84, 250–​51, 259–​60 state of, 7, 163–​64, 180, 181, 261–​62, 267–​68, 267n.146, 274 See also philosophy: natural Nemours, Marie de, 216–​17 nobility, 18–​20, 21–​22, 23, 24–​25, 79, 115–​16, 139–​40, 153n.208, 158n.225, 170–​73, 175–​76, 179–​80, 189–​91, 195–​96, 205, 215–​16, 218n.202, 221–​ 22, 241–​42, 244n.76, 246, 269 Nouvelles de la République des lettres, 35–​ 36, 63n.130, 99n.5, 119n.80 novels, 8–​9, 63, 111, 160–​61, 221–​22, 226, 233–​34, 236n.44, 241n.62, 243n.71, 245, 251n.95, 257, 265, 275n.172 nubility, 48–​52 Nzinga, Ana, Queen of Ndongo, 97–​ 98, 123

Olmo, Marco Antonio, 42n.47, 46–​47 orientalism, 100–​1 Ovington, John, 99–​100, 126n.105, 128 Parmenides, 65 Paul (Saint), 105, 140n.157, 142, 230 Perrault, Charles, 226–​27, 239n.58 Persia. See Asia Petronilla, 140–​41 philosophy, 1–​2, 18–​19, 28–​33, 35–​36, 38, 40, 46n.66, 51n.83, 78, 112, 151n.202, 221–​22, 223, 238, 243, 247n.82 definitions of, 33, 240n.60, 247 feminist, 1–​2, 3, 4–​5, 24–​26, 28–​29, 55n.98, 97–​98, 100–​3, 222, 225–​26 moral, 1–​2, 4, 8–​9, 30–​31, 78, 221–​26, 228–​33, 247, 248–​55, 256–​72 natural, 31–​96 political, 1–​2, 6–​7, 20–​21, 24–​26, 57–​58, 88n.201, 105–​6, 112, 139–​40, 162–​ 220, 247 Photios, 42, 145–​46 physician (doctor), 28–​29, 30, 31, 33, 44–​ 47, 59, 60, 61, 61n.121, 62, 65, 68, 71, 74, 75, 84, 214, 248, 263n.136 physiology. See anatomy plants, 33–​35, 37, 44–​45, 59, 86, 90–​92 Pliny, 43–​45, 86, 111n.44 polygamy, 20–​21, 54, 100–​3, 116–​20 Pope Joan, 145–​46 Pope, Alexander, 223, 253–​55 Poulain de la Barre, François, 1, 3–​4, 7, 28–​30, 38, 39, 40n.42, 54n.96, 55nn.98–​99, 60n.119, 65n.134, 70n.152, 76n.169, 82–​ 83, 82n.182, 83n.184, 85n.190, 87n.198, 97–​98, 104, 105, 163–​64, 221–​22, 226–​ 27, 228–​29, 230–​31, 238n.56, 258n.125, 259n.126, 268n.148, 270n.157 pregnancy, 54–​55, 56–​57, 60, 64, 126–​ 27n.106, 146–​47, 262–​63 See also childbirth prejudice, 1–​2, 9–​10, 28–​31, 38–​39, 42, 66, 86, 87, 93, 95–​96, 97–​98, 109, 190, 223, 229, 232–​33, 249, 262n.135, 275n.169 Preliminary Discourse Long, 1n.1, 7, 11–​12, 30, 33, 35–​36, 162–​63, 168–​69, 222–​23, 224, 225–​ 26, 237n.48, 240n.60, 267n.146

Index  295 Short, 9–​10, 27–​30, 97–​98 Prévost, Antoine François, 99–​100, 118n.77, 123nn.91–​92, 123nn.94–​95, 124n.97, 127n.110, 265n.141 Primerose, James, 35, 45, 45n.62, 55n.99 Providence, 130–​31, 187, 190–​91 Puisieux, Madeleine d’Arsant de, 224–​25 queens. See government: by women rape, 78n.174, 167–​68, 179–​80, 219–​20 Raynaud, Théophile, 41n.45, 42–​43n.50, 43nn.52–​54 Réaumur, René-​Antoine Ferchault de, 35, 56–​57n.105, 57–​58n.109, 58n.110 Reland, Adriaan, 115 religion, 97–​98, 103–​8, 140–​61, 222–​23, 225–​26, 232–​33, 243–​44, 249 Islam, 100–​1, 114–​20, 128n.111 See also Bible; Church; God; Providence; marriage: in religion Rénaudot, Théophraste, 59–​60, 60n.119 republic, 24–​26, 57–​58, 181, 203–​4 Roman, 174–​75, 192n.91, 209, 212n.176, 214 Richelieu, Armand Jean du Plessis, Cardinal Duc de, 138–​39, 157n.221, 173, 203–​4, 217n.199 right equality as, 88–​89 natural, 110, 143, 162n.1, 177, 178–​79, 180, 181–​82, 224 to rule, 132n.126, 136n.141, 136n.143, 138–​39, 185n.72, 186, 187 rights of clergy, 106–​7, 140n.157, 153–​54 human, 24–​25, 228–​29 of husbands over wives, 116, 201–​2, 209, 219 of nobility, 112–​13, 246 property, 105–​6, 137, 164, 165–​66, 171–​ 72, 191–​207, 208n.160, 208n.162 (see also authorization) of religious women, 141–​42, 145, 147, 148, 152–​53, 155–​56, 157, 158, 159, 161 of women, 4, 8, 25–​26, 110, 117–​18, 130, 137–​38, 143, 162–​63, 173, 177, 200–​ 1, 206–​7, 211, 215, 217, 234, 269

Rodericus, 45, 61, 87 Romulus, 192, 201–​2, 208–​9 Rouelle, Guillaume-​François, 7–​8, 37, 38n.37 Rousseau, Jean-​Jacques, 8, 23n.83, 37 Confessions, 3–​4, 7–​8, 19–​20, 24–​25 Discourse on the Origin and Foundations of Inequality among Men, 1, 142n.161, 163–​64, 231–​32 Discourse on the Sciences and Arts, 8 Emile, or On Education, 3, 78n.174, 101n.9, 210n.171, 219n.207, 226, 232, 261n.131, 261–​62nn.132–​33, 262n.135, 263n.137, 266n.142 Encylopédie (“Voice”), 48nn.71–​72, 48–​49nn.74–​75 Institutions chimiques, 38n.37 Julie ou la Nouvelle Héloïse, 243n.71 On the Social Contract, 180–​81n.56, 198n.117, 231–​32 as secretary, 2–​4, 5–​6, 7–​26, 9f–​10, 12f–​ 15, 16f–​18, 40n.40, 56n.103, 104n.20, 111n.43, 142n.162, 146n.184, 151n.201, 174n.37, 191n.88, 209n.165, 211n.172, 212nn.177–​78, 213n.181, 235n.39, 237n.48, 244n.74, 281, 282 Roxelana, 115, 116n.70 Saint-​Pierre, Abbé de. See Castel de Saint-​Pierre Saint-​Réal, César Vichard de, 223, 252 Saint-​Séverin (church), 16–​18, 149–​50 Salic law, 98, 103, 105–​6, 130–​33, 173, 174, 184–​90 salon, 4, 6–​7, 18–​21, 26n.95, 36, 111n.40, 187n.77, 221–​22, 253n.105 Santerre, Jean-​Baptiste, 16–​18, 271 Santeul, Jean de, 149–​50 sati, 102–​3, 127–​29 satire, 134–​35, 138, 150n.199, 159n.231, 183, 223, 225–​29, 231–​32, 244–​ 45, 260 science, 1–​2, 8–​9, 18–​20, 27–​96, 108, 221–​ 23, 227–​28, 230–​31, 232–​33, 240, 243, 247, 258, 259–​60 See also anatomy; chemistry; philosophy: natural

296 Index Semiramis, 109, 113 Sénac, Jean-​Baptiste, 31, 35, 49n.78, 59n.113, 61n.122, 61nn.123–​24, 62n.126 sexual desire, 54, 65–​67, 95, 232, 251n.95, 267–​68 Sheba (Saba), Queen of, 111n.45, 122, 236 sibyls, 16–​18, 110, 149–​50 Sinibaldus, 11–​12, 61 skepticism, 31–​35, 38, 51n.83, 65n.138, 98–​99 slavery, 21–​22, 23, 25–​26, 47n.67, 55n.98, 80n.177, 101–​2, 123, 123n.94, 124, 134n.135, 181–​82. See also marriage: as slavery slaves, Roman, 175–​77, 182, 195–​96, 197n.110, 201–​2, 212, 215 Solomon, 111, 122n.88, 187n.79, 236, 237–​38 South America. See America(s) strength, 27, 30, 38, 41, 42, 44n.59, 47, 48, 49, 49n.78, 51n.86, 54, 59–​60, 65, 69, 70n.151, 73n.162, 74, 75–​86, 124–​25, 139, 219–​20, 224, 261n.131, 270, 273–​74 Suchon, Gabrielle, 105n.22, 225–​ 26, 230–​31 sultan, 88–​89, 116–​18, 121 Valide, 115–​16 Tacitus, Cornelius, 112n.46, 112n.47, 130–​ 31, 130n.120, 203n.136 Tardin, Jean, 46–​47 temperament, 27, 28–​29, 31, 39, 41, 49, 64–​75 See also humors Tencin, Claudine Guérin de, 6n.20, 8–​9 Tertullian, 140–​41 testimony, 218 theater, 18–​19, 21–​22, 224–​25, 265, 273–​75 See also Molière Theodosius, 175–​76, 195–​96, 213 Theophrastus, 86, 223, 252n.98 Modern Theophrastus, 223, 252 Theosebia, 140–​41 Thiroux d’Arconville, Geneviève, 72–​73 Tournefort, Joseph Pitton de, 90–​91, 116, 125

travel narratives, 16–​18, 47, 55, 99–​100, 101–​3, 112, 117–​18, 120–​29, 237n.47 Turkey. See Asia Tutor(ship), 15, 46, 117–​18, 123, 163–​64, 174–​75, 194–​95, 206–​7, 211–​ 18, 226–​27 Ursulines, 15–​16, 237n.48, 243–​44 usurpation, 8, 113–​14, 123, 131–​32, 133, 134, 146n.182, 146n.183, 155–​56, 177, 182–​83, 199, 210n.171, 217, 218, 224, 245 Vaillant, Sébastien, 90–​91 vanity, 115, 122, 192, 223, 244–​45, 252–​53, 252n.98, 255, 268, 270–​71 masculine vanity, 1–​2, 30–​31, 38, 39, 57–​58, 84, 91, 92, 93, 94, 95–​96, 229, 249, 269 Vauvenargues, Luc de Clapiers, Marquis de, 31–​33, 38, 223, 252–​53 Venette, Nicolas, 49n.79, 59n.116, 63n.130 Vestals, 128–​29, 174n.37, 209–​10 Villeneuve-​Guibert, Gaston de, 4, 7n.27, 9–​10, 10n.38, 12n.48, 20n.71, 281 Vincent de Paul, 157 voice, 41, 42, 42n.48, 48–​49 Voltaire, 16–​18, 19–​20, 30–​31, 101–​2, 146n.182, 167n.13, 187n.79, 227–​28, 253n.105 Vossius, 113 weakness, 28–​29, 42, 59–​60, 65, 67, 69, 70n.151, 73–​75, 81–​84, 132–​ 33, 139n.153, 148, 174, 180–​81, 202–​3, 224–​25, 230, 245, 252n.98, 261n.131, 274 will (and testament), 139n.154, 166, 206–​7, 213 See also strength Winslow, Jacob, 50n.80, 76–​77 wives. See husbands; polygamy; marriage; tutor working class (women), 25–​26, 170, 179–​ 80, 263n.136, 266n.143 See also labor: women’s Work on Women as title, 1, 9–​10 See also manuscripts