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Chapter 2

Poullain de la Barre: Feminism, Radical and Polite

From 1673 to 1675 François Poullain de la Barre published three books arguing that women were by nature as intelligent as men.¹ From our perspective other early modern feminist thinkers reflect the inhibitions of their times in one way or another, but Poullain seems to crash through his times to offer us nothing less than the full-blown agenda of feminism in our own era.² And yet, though we now have a better historical understanding of the intellectual chemistry that produced Poullain’s feminism, the compound itself still seems to leap out of its historical context and address contemporary feminism in its own terms, without that quality of strangeness, requiring a strenuous leap of the imagination, with which we expect seventeenth-century thought to confront us.

That Poullain’s historical significance remains less than fully contextualized is not due simply to the fact that he has acquired iconic status. The more serious problem is that, in part because he failed to command the public attention he sought, the historical traces of his life are so meager and scattered.³ What we have is the skeletal narrative of a life: his birth into a Parisian family of the judicial nobility in 1648; theological studies at the Sorbonne from 1663 to 1666, almost certainly in the expectation of pursuing a university career; his disillusionment with Scholasticism and discovery of an alternative source of certainty in Cartesian philosophy; his withdrawal from Paris to village curacies in Picardy from 1680 to 1688; his relocation in December 1688, as a Protestant, to Geneva, where he married, raised a family, taught at the collège, and died on May 4, 1723.⁴

Despite the paucity of detail, we can push farther in historicizing Poullain’s thought. There are, first, the autobiographical details in the texts, which tell us more about the experiential meaning, and particularly the social meaning, of Poullain’s feminism than has been recognized. This biographical inquiry in turn opens another avenue of approach. To date, the texts have been read largely as exercises in formal argument. But we can also read them as sites for social and cultural representations in seventeenth-century discourses, hence recovering meanings that are more diffuse but also more resonant than formal argumentation. Of the various relevant discursive contexts, the most important for our purposes is the discourse of honnêteté.

On the Equality of the Two Sexes and his second book, On the Education of Ladies for the Behavior of the Mind in the Sciences and in Mores, are two distinct textual moments in a fusion of Cartesian philosophy and the discourse of honnêteté. Together they reveal the affinities that made the fusion possible, and the tensions that made it problematic as a point of departure for modern feminist thought. The second text—the Education—is not, as is generally assumed, a straightforward reiteration and elaboration of Poullain’s basic position that “the mind has no sex,” but a tentative moment in turning a utopian vision of gender equality, offered as a regulative idea, into a strategy for realizing that vision in a specific social milieu.⁵ When we consider the two texts in sequence, we find Poullain shifting tack. One way—an emphatically historical way—to understand the contextually unique radicalism of Equality is to watch Poullain turning the salon culture’s reconfiguration of gender distinctions in a new and startlingly unconventional direction. Not only did he draw radical implications from the discourse’s devaluation of certain kinds of male intellectual labor; pulling the discourse out beyond the salons’ well-guarded walls of social exclusiveness, he combined it with Cartesianism to project a sweeping transformation of the social organization of labor. As compelling as his argument may have been as an exercise in Cartesian method, however, it was problematic in application to a culture whose norms of exclusiveness rested on the banning of labor, including intellectual labor, from the practice of a thoroughly aestheticized art of leisure. It was one thing to appropriate those norms for the egalitarian vision in Equality, but quite another to come to terms with the issue of labor in Education.

Poullain was even more radical in context than has been assumed, and at the same time more distant from us, less familiar to us, and less detached from the constraints of his contexts than his application of Cartesian rationalism, taken by itself, might suggest.⁶ This split profile tells us a great deal about the ways in which even the most radical applications of Cartesian doubt were socially refracted, and thereby constrained, as they became instruments of social critique; and about the inescapable entanglements of gender with class and, more important for our purposes, with status in the question of female emancipation in the ancien régime.⁷

Conversion

Sometime in the late 1660s, when Poullain was twenty or a little older and was pursuing his doctoral studies, he underwent a “conversion” (his term), both in his intellectual orientation and in his social persona. The intellectual turn is described in the fifth (and final) “conversation” of Education. Poullain came to realize that, outside the narrow academic career track he had entered at age nine, “everything” he knew was “of no use to the world,” since “cultivated people (les honnestes gens) cannot endure our way of reasoning.” Finding himself in “no little anguish,” and listening to the advice of “certain people (he) talked to,” he resolved to “start all over again.” A “friend” took him to a meeting at which “a Cartesian spoke about something concerning the human body.” Having already come to regard the Scholastic “sciences” as “particularly distasteful,” he found the lecturer’s “principles” so “simple” and so “true” that he “could not fail to agree with them.” For six months he followed Descartes’s “method,” learning more than he had learned in the previous six years. One of his discoveries was that the “scholastic” view of women “as monsters, and as very much inferior to men,” was completely wrongheaded.⁸

There is something stylized about this recollection, echoing as it does Descartes’s autobiographical account of his “search for truth” in A Discourse on Method. We have reason to suspect that in his ardent identification with Descartes the young Poullain had cast his recent conversion to fit a received mold. And yet the details are revealing of Poullain’s own experience. We learn that he came of age at a time when Scholastic learning, still deeply entrenched in the Parisian university faculties, faced a mounting challenge from the new natural philosophy and its offshoots. As in the case of many other educated young men in the 1660s, Poullain’s disillusionment with Scholasticism and his attraction to the Cartesian alternative fed off each other. The study of Descartes was not simply another intellectual experiment; it proved to be a definitive way out of a personal crisis, an escape from the anguish of disillusionment. Having lost the sense of purpose he had had since childhood, he found a new one. This intense awareness of shedding an outworn tradition and embracing a new mission drives the feminist argument in Equality and the subsequent texts. Poullain’s reasoning was that if Cartesian clarity can prevail on the subject of the equality of the sexes, which is “more prone to prejudice than any other subject,” it can prevail against “custom” in any area of social life. He would show that women in their current state were not what “nature” intended them to be; they were what arbitrary male domination—the abuse of superior force, sanctioned by mere custom—had made them. Once emancipated they would prove to be men’s equals, and perhaps in some ways their superiors, in every kind of work requiring rational intelligence.⁹

The recollection also suggests that, if Poullain’s intellectual commitment to Descartes entailed a measure of solitary reading and meditation, it nonetheless took place in, and required, a juxtaposition of social milieus to be found only in seventeenth-century Paris. It was conversations, friends, and at least one public meeting that led him to Descartes. The young Poullain was from a well-established family, if not an especially prominent one.¹⁰ At least from talk with friends and from his own reading, he was familiar with the conversational culture of the salons.¹¹ He was acutely aware that the turn to Cartesianism from Scholasticism was social as well as intellectual, from the emphatically male clerical society of the Sorbonne to the very different world of men and women gathered in the salons. Academic study, he writes in Equality, stamps men with “rudeness” and “crudity (grossièreté) in their manners”: if scholars “want to go back into polite society (le monde) and cut a good figure there, they have to go to the school of ladies to learn politeness, the art of pleasing (complaisance), and everything else that is essential today to polished and cultivated people (honnestes gens).”¹² In the first conversation in Education, Poullain counters the stereotype of the haughty and affected salonnière, used to such satirical effect in Molière’s The Learned Ladies, with the image of a “learned lady” who is “natural, polite, and easy to be with.” A few pages later he makes this appeal to the ladies:

What a singular service you and women like you could render our learned men (scavans)! By admitting them into your circles, you would give them a beautiful means of civilizing what they know; by making them part of your conversations, you would communicate that gentleness that they lack and that is distinctive of you. You would inspire in them insensibly that gallant and cultivated (honnêtes) air that makes you so lovable; and thus ridding them of what is hard and crude in them, you would put them in a position to be well received in le monde.¹³

His conviction of transformation notwithstanding, Poullain is perhaps best understood as a liminal figure. Thoroughly alienated from academic culture, he had probably not been assimilated enough into the empire of women to be aware of dissonances between its self-representation and its actual social practices. He was something of a naïf; enraptured by the ideal of the honnête femme, he made its radical revaluation of women integral to his reconstrual of his own social self.

The Mind Has No Sex

How did Poullain blend the discourse of honnêteté with his Cartesian argument in Equality, and with what results? The first time it is used in Equality, the phrase “the mind has no sex” stands alone, as the marginal header for several paragraphs. There is a sense, of course, in which the statement is eminently Cartesian. Descartes replaced the Aristotelian teleological distinction between a vegetative and a sensitive soul with his famous mind/body dualism. His dichotomy was ontological; there was matter, which he defined as having extension, and there was the single, unitary soul or “mind,” the thinking substance with no extension. The existence of the mind is not, in principle, contingent on anything with extension, including the human body. In this immaterial mind Descartes found our innate certainty—our clear and distinct ideas—of our own existence, of the existence of God, of the immaterial nature of our intellection, and of pure extension. Since the mind thus conceived is cleanly detached from corporeal substance, physical differences between human bodies, including sexual differences, are irrelevant to it.

In the passages Poullain’s phrase introduces, however, we soon learn that the mind has no sex only when it is “considered independently.” Having established the independence of “mind” as a concept, Poullain immediately proceeds to consider embodied minds, which differ despite the natural sameness and “equality” of all minds as such. He observes that “difference” between male and female minds is to be explained by variations not only in education and environment, but also in “the constitution of the body.” This, too, was an eminently Cartesian step. Descartes’s very insistence on the mind/body dualism had made it imperative to explain mind/body interaction. He did so by developing a psychophysiology based on a radically mechanistic conception of the body, including the brain. It was this new paradigm of the human body—a paradigm Descartes posed squarely against the received wisdom of scholastic medicine, despite its numerous borrowings from that tradition—that first attracted Poullain and others to the new philosophy. The human body, we should recall, was the subject of the “Cartesian lecture” Poullain attended with a friend.¹⁴

How did sexual differences affect the workings of the mind? On this subject Descartes’s texts offered very little guidance. Their presentation of the new paradigm was fragmentary and simply ignored sexual differences. Hence in the years following Descartes’s death in 1650, Cartesians had ample room to draw a wide spectrum of inferences. Most of them significantly qualified the principle of the sexless equality of minds by emphasizing that the physical weakness of women had its corollary in their mental weakness, usually explained by the softness of their brain fibers. Poullain derived from Descartes’s mechanistic paradigm a quite different view of the mind/body interaction; and, no less important, he made the normative implications of the discourse of honnêteté integral to his use of Cartesian doubt to mount a radical critique of the social status quo. Women, he argued, “have an advantageous disposition for the sciences”:

Their brain (cerveau) is constituted in such a way as to receive even faint and almost imperceptible impressions of objects that escape people of a different disposition.… The warmth that accompanies this disposition brings it about that objects make a more lively impression on a woman’s mind, which then takes them in and examines them more acutely and develops the images they leave as it pleases. From this it follows that those who have a great deal of imagination and can look at things more efficiently and from more vantage points are ingenious and inventive, and find out more after a single glance than others after long contemplation. They are able to give an account of things in a pleasant and persuasive way, finding instantly the right turn of phrase and expression. Their speech is fluent and expresses their thoughts to best advantage.… Discernment and accuracy (le discernement et la justesse) are natural qualities [of a woman’s disposition] It could be said that this kind of temperament is best fitted for social intercourse, and since man was not made to spend all his time shut away in his study, we should somehow have greater respect for those who have a superior talent for communicating their thoughts in an agreeable and effective way (agréablement et utilement).¹⁵

In Poullain’s variation on Descartes’s psychophysiology, what he called the distinctive “constitution” of the female brain was not a matter of softer fibers. Recent discoveries in anatomy, he argued in another passage, proved that male and female brains were “exactly the same.” The gendered difference lay in the fact that women’s sense organs were “more delicate,” and hence that the images imprinted on their brains by their imaginations were stronger. Poullain’s radical step lay in assuming that this “more lively” image-making capacity, rather than constricting or overwhelming women’s capacity for abstract thought, gave them the intellectual “advantage.” Taking up what was sometimes implied in the discourse of honnêteté, he made psychophysiological “delicacy”—the putative source of women’s intellectual weakness—the source of their cognitive strength. A woman’s more delicate sensations and stronger imagistic faculty did not make her mind less capable of rational intellection; they gave her thought more clarity, and in that sense more vigor. At the same time Poullain derived from women’s physical delicacy and powers of imagination a natural “eloquence” and persuasiveness. It was not simply that their speech, like their thought, was clear. They had a natural gift for communicating their thoughts in “beautiful” forms: “their message is accompanied by such beauty and grace that it penetrates our minds and opens our heart to them.” Female speech was the instrument of a superior social intelligence; one might even say that it was the social act intrinsic to the workings of that intelligence.

In Poullain’s normative revaluation of female powers of cognition and communication, the implications of two meanings of the “natural”—the “natural” reason of Cartesian philosophy and the “natural” quality of the honnête femme—reinforced each other. Because women had not been corrupted by the formal education of “the schools,” their minds naturally gave assent to self-evident truths to which the learned were blinded. And for the same reason, women’s powers of intelligence were plain to see in the natural flow of their speech. Poullain’s revaluation of female delicacy did not, it should be stressed, give a new lease on life to the conventional paradox that the strength of women lay in their weakness, which required them to develop the wily arts of manipulation and dissimulation summed up in the word “cunning.” His claim was that, thanks to the greater delicacy of their sense organs, women tended to have greater clarity of mind in precisely those areas of intellectual labor which, on the traditional assumption, only men could perform. Nor did his appreciation of female eloquence have the effect of reconsigning women to a merely ornamental role, a world of pleasing appearance distinct from the male world of intellectual substance. By aestheticizing communication, women could give the rational thought of the sciences and their professional applications a new social purchase. The truly learned woman, like the honnête femme, would “insinuate” her thoughts in the positive sense. Rather than being imposed by sheer force of logic, or by overpowering rhetorical techniques, knowledge would be extended as a gift of beauty from one embodied mind to another. Above all in that sense women’s intelligence—unlike the intelligence of the trained rhetor or the pedant—was naturally social.

This reading of Equality is confirmed by the actual agenda for social change that Poullain spelled out in his war against “custom” and “prejudice.” The emancipation of women, to be sure, was only a means to a larger end, a step in realizing a rational distribution of life chances in the entire social organization of labor. There would be an end to the inheritance and sale of offices requiring education; for men as for women, a “wise selection process” would place every individual in the position for which his aptitudes best suited him. It is hardly surprising, however, that women figured especially large in this vision of careers open to talent; the belief that they were self-evidently unqualified for such positions was the most imposing obstacle to it. In the face of conventional wisdom, Cartesian logic did not suffice. Poullain had to harness to it the gendered inversion of the attributes of intelligence in the discourse of honnêteté. And that entailed doing something quite remarkable in the context of late seventeenth-century France—something that would have been virtually unthinkable to interpreters of honnêteté like Méré, Scudéry, and Saint-Évremond. The natural attributes of thought and speech that Poullain extolled were precisely the ones that had made women the guardians of an exclusive, self-referential code, marked above all by freedom from the constraints and indeed the appearance of labor. But now those attributes became women’s qualifications for entering a world of labor that had been closed to them. Intellectual labor was no longer a social stigma, an activity threatening social derogation; it was the social arena in which emancipated women would prove themselves.

It is important to realize how far Poullain went in pulling the social aesthetic of honnêteté down from its elite perch of privileged leisure. Properly educated women, he argued, would be equal or superior to men in all areas of educated labor. He discussed many cases in point, including university teaching, scientific research, medicine, law, theology and clerical offices, military command, and government service. Women, he observed, were less likely to be attracted to fields like algebra, geometry, and optics, but that was not because they lacked the intellectual capacity to excel in them. The nature of their intelligence simply inclined them more to learning that drew them into social interaction, or what he called “the mainstream of conversation.”

All this is to say that the utopian impulse in Equality took two forms. Inspired by Descartes’s radical questioning of the very principle of “authority,” Poullain wanted the dead weight of history to accede to the active force of reason. He rejected what he saw as an irrationally organized society, built on the arbitrary and hence unjust historical contingencies that lurked behind appeals to the sanctity of tradition. In a just social structure, education and its rewards would be open to talent and achievement; the ascriptive power of both gender and class would be annulled. Providing women equal access to educated labor would be the first step in a sweeping reorganization of the distribution of life chances—the step that would prove that the entire agenda could prevail over ingrained resistance to it. But in Equality female emancipation did not figure simply as the first step in a structural change; it was also the key element—the sine qua non—in Poullain’s vision of a cultural transformation, a transvaluation of the values, and ultimately of the terms, of human exchange that informed the social exercise of authority. Here is where a coded social aesthetic became integral to a utopian logic. The issue of intellectual clarity aside, the aesthetic qualities of female intelligence would make work itself the social exchange it ought to be. Because they communicated so effectively as, and so effectively to, embodied minds, women would bring a new efficacy to the entire range of educated offices and professions.

With this positive evaluation of women’s natural eloquence and powers of persuasion Poullain went far beyond echoing the ideal of honnêteté. He redirected the ideal to engage and change the social world it had been so intent on keeping at a distance. While the discourse of honnêteté challenged distinctly male forms of verbal authority—in the university, in the law court, in the pulpit, and so on—by excluding and ridiculing them, it also implicitly accepted their legitimacy outside its own space. Poullain sought to change those forms; he would humanize them—make them less acts of imposition and more acts of gentle attention and persuasion, as in pleasing conversation—by feminizing them.

Cartesianism for Ladies

In Education Poullain undertook to explain the “new method” for women’s education that he had promised in Equality. His philosophical and psychophysiological arguments for gender equality did not change, but he opted for a new rhetorical strategy. Rather than simply continuing to address the reader directly, he made himself one of four characters engaged in a series of dialogues tuned to the standards of polite conversation. The result was a rather dogmatically Cartesian variation on the Socratic dialogue, ending in entirely predictable agreement.

Having failed to elicit a response with Equality, Poullain hoped the dramatic form of the dialogue would bring him more success. His literary imagination was not up to the task; there is nothing particularly dramatic, much less gripping, about these dialogues. In fact it must be said that, compared with the lively and playful repartee in Fontenelle’s Conversations on the Plurality of Worlds, published eleven years later, Poullain’s conversations are flat and, ironically for a Cartesian, didactic. And yet they are not without revealing tensions. Education was meant to show how the intellectual emancipation of women might find a beginning, a point of departure, in his own society. In creating his interlocutors, he gave that beginning a recognizable social location and sought to dispel the skepticism he could expect to confront there. Though the conversations advance to a forgone conclusion, there are moments along the way when, with a close reading, the tensions in his efforts to fuse Cartesianism and the discourse of honnêteté become audible.

This is not to deny that Education, like Equality, attests to strong affinities between the two discourses. They both offered alternatives to the institutionalized forms of expertise in seventeenth-century France.¹⁶ Both assumed that the mind achieves a certain clarity and precision when it is freed from the pedagogical tyranny of “the schools” and follows its natural inclinations. They shared an undisguised contempt for the obscurantist jargon of Latinist scholarship and a preference for simple, clear use of the vernacular in print as well as in speech. They found ridiculous the conventional scholar’s knee-jerk appeals to canonical texts and especially to the ancients. In rejecting such appeals as mere “pedantry,” and in questioning what they saw as manipulative and intimidating forms of public and private communication, they opposed blind submission to “authority”; and at least to that extent, they both endowed individuals with a measure of intellectual autonomy.

But there are tensions, and these are reflected in the very dramatic structure of the conversations. Poullain introduces his dramatis personae with quick sketches, as in a play bill. There is Sophia, a “lady” (Dame) who is “so accomplished and so wise that she can be called wisdom itself”; Eulalie, a young lady “who speaks well, with ease and grace”; Timander, “an honnête homme who is persuaded by reason and good sense”; and Stasimachus, “the peacemaker, or the enemy of division, quarrels, and pedantry.”¹⁷ From the opening scene, when Stasimachus joins the other three at Sophia’s home, we learn that he is the author of Equality. He has already guided his friend Sophia to the new philosophical wisdom, which she states with a simple and sometimes blunt certainty that may have unsettled some readers. Timander, like Stasimachus, has freed himself from the “pedantic” schooling to which he was subjected; but, as his objections to his friend’s arguments make clear, he is noticeably less free of conventional social wisdom. With Sophia as his exemplar of an intellectually emancipated woman, and with Timander alternately aiding him and raising objections, Stasimachus undertakes the reeducation of the young Eulalie. The process begins with her initiation into Cartesian doubt, and culminates with his outlining an order of study for her, from geometry textbooks to several of Descartes’s philosophical texts. Because she is naïve in the positive sense—because her natural gifts of comprehension and speech have not been corrupted by conventional formal education—Eulalie is an able and willing pupil. By the end she has joined Sophia on the path to wisdom. Having surpassed Timander in intellectual emancipation, she declines his invitation to be as open with her as Stasimachus is with Sophia—though at points along the way she has shared his misgivings about adopting the new philosophy.¹⁸

One might expect the educational program of Education to be designed to realize the larger emancipatory agenda of Equality—the transformation of the world of educated employments into a meritocracy that would be as open to talented women as it was to talented men. That is not the case. In Equality Poullain had explained why, despite his egalitarian convictions, he looked to “distinguished ladies” to prove that women could be as rationally educated as men. He was careful to note that his “observations about the qualities of mind” could “easily be made about women of any class,” and that “the whole sex” was “capable of scientific study”; but because the “ladies” had “opportunity” and “external advantages,” they were able to overcome the “indolence” induced by “pleasure and idleness” and demonstrate their intellectual equality with men. There is an implicit paradox here; if leisure was a habit that “women of quality” had to overcome if they were to undertake “study,” it was also the sine qua non for study. Her advantages made Eulalie a promising subject of Stasimachus’s guidance because they exempted her from the work burdens that left most women with neither the time nor the energy to educate themselves. Poullain would have denied that he was abandoning the larger goal; he saw himself taking the first step—the only step that was practically possible under the circumstances. And yet there is a yawning silence in the text, a disconnection between it and its predecessor. The author of Equality, one might assume, would feel compelled to note in Education, if only in passing, that the Eulalies of French society would some day enter the world of offices and professions, or at least that their education would eventually be organized with that prospect in mind. The text offers no hint of such a prospect. The silence marks Poullain’s need to adapt his argument. The most radical change he had called for—his virtually utopian vision of a rational restructuring of social access to educated labor—could not be reconciled with the norms and taboos of an elite whose self-validation lay precisely in imagining itself hovering above the social organization of labor. Left unspoken is the irony that made this adaptation necessary: in the only social and cultural milieu that made Poullain’s first step possible, the next step was unthinkable.

Less obvious is the fault line in the text between two different concepts of selfhood. In the relational selfhood attributed to the honnête homme (or femme), self-formation and self-validation require a kind of hypersociability, leaving hardly any room for the introspection that distances an inner self from the particular society and culture in which it is immersed. Descartes’s philosophical calling was a reformulation of the reflective idea of self-formation as an “inner” ascent to wisdom through the meditative labor of “spiritual exercises.” It was indebted especially to Stoicism, and perhaps influenced by Ignatius Loyola’s Spiritual Exercises as well. Only with that context in mind can we understand what Descartes meant to convey when he wrote of “meditations” and offered “rules for the direction of the mind.” He was calling his readers to engage in reflective intellectual labor, to be distinguished sharply from the mere social “pleasures” that Saint-Évremond extolled.¹⁹

Poullain did not, it should be stressed, evade the possibility that the reflective self of Cartesian philosophy was incompatible with the relational self of the culture of honnêteté. In fact he might be said to have confronted it quite directly. He did so, however, by focusing not on the labor that reflectivity required, but on the commitment to radical critique that it might entail. Could one be an uncompromising Cartesian doubter and an honnête femme—or, for that matter, an honnête homme—at the same time? Descartes himself had been notoriously cautious on this issue. The first maxim in his own “provisory code of morals,” outlined in A Discourse on Method, offered a kind of compromise between critique and acceptance of the status quo. So long as he was on the path to truth, he would continue to “obey the laws and customs of [his] country,” adhering to the faith in which he had been raised, and conforming his “practice” to the “general consent” of “the most judicious.” In his own attempt at a Socratic dialogue—the unfinished Search for Truth—Descartes characterized the ideal seeker after Cartesian truth as an honnête homme.²⁰ He seems to have been using the phrase in its literal sense, to evoke a sensible and upright man. To judge by his own life, the honnête homme he had in mind need not be the totally socialized participant in conversational play that the term honnête had come to imply by the 1670s. Descartes had preferred Holland to Paris. In that commercial country, “in the midst of a great crowd actively engaged in business,” he could enjoy the “conveniences” of “the most populous cities” and yet live “as solitary and as retired as in the midst of the most remote deserts.”²¹ Living in (relative) solitude, far removed from the salon culture as well as the learned societies of Paris, Descartes had simply avoided the demands of the new social aesthetic.

Poullain’s Cartesianism was necessarily much more tension-ridden. Unlike Descartes, the author of Equality extended the principle of radical doubt from epistemology and natural philosophy to a critique of the social order. By the very nature of the imagined setting of Education, its interlocutors could hardly avoid asking whether a consequential application of social critique was compatible with the social identities they brought to its exercise. To judge by his initiation of Eulalie into Cartesian doubt, Stasimachus’s answer is uncompromising. One of his conditions for undertaking her reeducation is that she be prepared to shed completely the habit of blind deference to authority that she originally learned as a child in relation to her parents and has continued to practice in submitting to “prejudice” in all its forms, including the authority attributed to superior social status, public rhetoric, and esoteric expertise. The “discernment” she will acquire will make her aware that conventional authority is nothing more than unexamined “custom,” a social construction by which mere “opinion” perpetuates its dominance.²² Eulalie, in other words, is being asked to undo an entire process of socialization. At issue was not simply the behavior, or “practice,” that Descartes seemed to have in mind; it was speech as the externalization of thought, the act of asserting or withholding the inner self of the Cartesian rationalist in the social presentation of self. Should one’s speech be devoted to helping others along the path to Truth, or should it simply be fashioned to “please” them, even if this complaisance required keeping silent about truths that might “shock” people and thereby explode the aesthetic illusion of the group?

This is the question that occasions the most obvious moment of tension in the text, at the beginning of the second conversation. Faced with the prospect of ridding herself of all untested opinions, Eulalie (“smiling”) asks whether that means that we “have to give up the whole world,” and whether there is not a “disadvantage” to “such a general renunciation.” Timander joins in: will not the result be “a terrifying solitude (une solitude épouvante)”—a life spent seeking the truth “as if we were the only people in the world, with no possibility of ever talking about it to anyone?” At first Stasimachus remains uncompromising. It is not “I” but “reason,” he tells Eulalie, that demands the renunciation. There is no middle ground; one either “submit[s] completely” or “withdraw[s] completely.” Timander’s concern about solitude can be dismissed as “excessive panic.” It is Eulalie who begins to find a way around this stark choice. She imagines a kind of “conversation” that “opens the mind” with a mutual exercise in instruction, not possible in “the privacy of our own studies.”²³

Eulalie’s remark prompts Stasimachus to resolve the issue by advocating a dual social existence, at once withdrawn from social custom and acquiescent to its demands. Stasimachus reminds his friends that, though we cannot suppress thought, we can “avoid argument” by remaining masters of “our speech and action.” The proper strategy is to “consider [the truth] as if you were alone whether you are in fact alone or with other people.” There are two kinds of knowledge: the “feelings and thoughts” we seek through “philosophy,” which we “keep to ourselves” in the face of custom; and the “external” knowledge manifested in “outward actions,” which is “of society” and “concerns the public and intercourse between people.” One can live in both knowledge-worlds without being false to either. But isn’t it “counterfeit and dissimulation,” Eulalie asks, to be “able to speak other than the way one thinks”? Though at first Stasimachus remains uncompromising, he goes on to reassure her that there is a middle ground. Speech in society at large need not be an act of total conformity to opinions one no longer accepts. You can “insinuate” the truths to others, though you must proceed ever so carefully, keeping in mind the need to “moderate the dose” and “add honey to the medicine.”²⁴ Stasimachus elaborates on this need for caution in the fifth conversation. When dealing with opinionated people, “we shouldn’t show off our intelligence or reason constantly in their presence, because they will find us trying.” We must take stock of others very carefully, “become accustomed to turning [our] thoughts so well that they always have several faces”; and “take more pain to excuse [the opinionated] than to condemn them.”²⁵

In a sense these exchanges deflect our attention from the actual social site of the problem. Poullain uses the phrase “the whole world” to refer to society at large, not to the elite society of salon conversation. For the most part, when he insists on the need to choose between intellectual independence and conformity he pits the individual against the mass. There are the “vast numbers of people” who are immersed in custom and opinion and manipulated by authority; and there are the rare individuals who can rise above that miasma. On one level, this abstract dichotomy between an imagined philosophical elite and the uninitiated mass allows Poullain to sidestep the immediate social question: whether Cartesian autonomy can be reconciled with the imperatives of conformity within an elite. Can the individual inject Cartesian critique, with all the egalitarian implications Poullain has drawn from it, into the rarified world of polite conversation without questioning one’s interlocutors’ very logic of self-legitimation and thereby making herself an outcast?

If the question is deflected, it is nonetheless there, posed not only by the characters and the setting Poullain has chosen, but also by the echoes of the social aesthetic of honnêteté in his framing of their choices. In the “world” in which his characters circulate there can be no open “argument”; it is forbidden to be “trying”; a certain serene equilibrium must be maintained within the constraints of custom. We can think of the unresolved tension at several levels. The self that withdraws into a Cartesian state of nature, where disembodied reason reigns, has to coexist, very uneasily, with the embodiment of self in the intensely and relentlessly socialized form of honnêteté. The Cartesian natural self connects immediately with objective (i.e., universal) truth. In that task the mastery of a social aesthetic—the mastery required to achieve self-validation within the community of honnêtes gens—becomes in principle an obstacle, though it may be unavoidable. A Cartesian philosophical conversation is about ascertaining and communicating truth; that aim may very well collide with the need to affirm the cohesion and harmony of a community, to practice an art whose claim to exclusiveness lies precisely in subordinating the “search for truth” to the shared appreciation of a codified and ritualized verbal exchange. Ultimately it is the difference between reasoning as a kind of internal dialogue and reason as the instrument of an emphatically other-directed sociability—between the spiritual self, as autonomous interiority, and the self externalized in relentlessly social speech.

Poullain does, to be sure, try to bridge these dichotomies with his little circle of three or four philosophical friends. In this context speech can be social in another sense; friends use it to aid each other in the search for truth. They help each other strip away the mere appearances, the chimeras of authority, in which society at large remains wrapped. There is something quite radical about this way of giving Cartesian truth-seeking a social dimension. By bonding both Sophia and Eulalie in friendship with Stasimachus, Poullain contradicts the longstanding assumption that truly “philosophical” or “spiritual” friendship is possible only between males. That defiance of conventional wisdom is punctuated at the end; it is Timander’s intellectual inhibitions, and not Eulalie’s, that explain why he fails to draw her into such a friendship. The circle of philosophical friends, however, is more a retreat from the demands of polite sociability than a base from which to challenge them. In their larger social world, the friends can only exercise critique obliquely, with a kind of conspiratorial insinuation. And, while that constraint applies to men as well as to women, it is women who have the most to lose. If she keeps within Stasimachus’s recommended limits, the honnête femme runs the risk that her much-admired gifts for aestheticizing thought and speech will come to be seen, and resented, as a new form of manipulative dissimulation, still gendered female. Violating the limits—openly asserting the power of critique in intellectual argument—would not only condemn individual women to terrifying solitude. Honnêtes femmes could assert the power of critique—could speak that power—only at the cost of sacrificing their normative role in a discourse extending them a kind of intellectual equality and, in some respects, superiority. There is a sense in which their newly acquired capacity for critique lands them in a kind of social nowhere; there is no social space for it in the very world that puts a new value on female intelligence.

Underlying this equivocal solution to the problem of critique, though more obliquely recorded in Education, is the tension between a Cartesian self and the self of honnêteté. Can Cartesian radical doubt be integrated somehow into the aestheticized play of conversation? The difficulty of doing so is acknowledged, very discreetly, in Madeleine de Scudéry’s imagined conversation on “politeness.” In the course of advocating a kind of Cartesian doubt, Clitandre remarks that he “dare not name [the philosopher] before the ladies, although we are in a time when many beauties (belles) are amused to know the new philosophy”—and then proceeds to name him. Has not Descartes, he asks, disabused us of the long-held illusion that we see the same “star” in the morning as in the evening? When Théanor reminds him that Descartes also taught the doctrine of metempsychosis, Clitandre lays the blame for that folly on the great man’s disciples. Théanor concedes the point; Descartes’s “doctrine” could not be so “foolish,” because “his morality (morale) is so beautiful.”²⁶ The philosopher can be named in this circle, and at least some of his ideas can be discussed there, because he is, after all, an honnête homme.

The reference to the stars is revealing. There were salon women who engaged Descartes’s concept of rational agency, but it was primarily his discoveries in natural science that became popular in the salons from the 1750s onward.²⁷ Fontenelle’s Conversations suggests how the social aesthetic accommodated Cartesian science. In Education Poullain sought a middle ground between Fontenelle’s exercise in the instructive diversion of conversational play and an ascetic insistence on strenuous spiritual labor. Stasimachus seems to provide this via media when he promises, early in the first conversation, that the “quest for truth” will bring a “pure and complete joy” that is spiritual, in that it “has almost nothing to do with the body,” and yet also aesthetic. “Nature,” he assures his friends, endows Truth with “beauties and graces that ought to render it adorable to all men.” Hence there is no danger that women educated in the new philosophy will be corrupted by “meditation and study” and will succumb to the attendant boorishness of the “pedant.” For “women who have leisure and means,” Stasimachus claims, his method of studying science will provide “a gentle and pleasant intellectual exercise”—intellectually challenging, to be sure, but entirely compatible with “their usual diversions.”²⁸ The rest of the text is sprinkled with similar assurances. With his method, “science” will provide his friends with “a gentle and pleasant intellectual exercise.” Eulalie will find it “easy” to “withdraw” into herself and “admit nothing that is not clear and of which one does not have some idea.” In the fourth conversation, Eulalie agrees; the new science would indeed be “a gentle, easy exercise for ladies.”²⁹

Does all this mean that the honnête femme can avoid the rigors of meditative labor? When Stasimachus extolls the ease with which the search for truth can be pursued, he means that the knowledge in question is relatively accessible. He is assuring women of quality that, thanks to the natural simplicity and clarity of Cartesian truth, they will not have to undergo the tedious initiation into obscurantist learning—the dogged training in classical languages, logic, formal rhetoric, and so on—that produces the pedant.³⁰ Their learning will be entirely compatible with both their femininity and their status as honnêtes femmes. At the same time, however, as a Cartesian, Poullain has to insist that, unlike the pseudoknowledge dispensed by learned authorities, truth is not something one can passively receive from someone else; it has to be acquired in a process of self-discovery, an exercise in reflective autonomy, and that requires no little effort. Hence if the Cartesian search for truth is “agreeable,” and indeed a “pleasure,” it is also “serious study,” requiring “acute and clear thought.” The difference is perhaps clearest in its figurative expressions. While the apt metaphor for honnête conversation was a stream flowing by chance, Poullain, following Descartes and the tradition of askesis, figured the search for truth as a purposeful, resolute ascent up a path.³¹ Conversation offered a shorter and more “agreeable” path than the reading of massive scholarly tomes, but only if it was conducted in “a methodical and orderly way,” as the “labor” of “solid reflection” following “principles and rules.” There was no avoiding the fact that we must “labor to become learned.”³²

In Poullain’s construal of Cartesian reflexivity, labor in this fundamental sense is the sine qua non for intellectual and spiritual autonomy. The required commitment to it is implicit to his analogy between the acquisition of knowledge and the acquisition of property. In a particularly interesting exchange at the end of Education, Eulalie and Stasimachus confront the possibility that, by giving preference to Cartesian philosophy, they are simply accepting a new authority. If they are disciples of Descartes, can their search for truth really be said to be an exercise in autonomy? Stasimachus assures his pupil that his loyalty is not to a particular thinker, but to the truth. In her usual laconic manner, Sophie, echoing Descartes, summarizes the point: “If by the force of meditation we gain entry to certain principles, even though we got them from a learned man, they are no longer his but ours. The effort (peine) we have given ourselves in understanding them is the price for acquiring them as property (la propriété), and they belong to us no less than the goods of the body of which we have become masters through legitimate means.”³³ So it is in the “gift” (donation) of “sciences,” Eulalie agrees; “However eager a person is to make us a part of their knowledge, we must collaborate (concourir) with her and accept through our own labor (travail) what she wishes to give to us.”³⁴

In the exchange of verbal gifts in the play of polite conversation, both the giving and receiving must be—or must seem to be—effortless. In the exchange of ideas in Cartesian philosophical conversation, the reception, even more than the giving, is a kind of labor of appropriation. Such labor is the condition for the “natural” freedom of the spirit that Cartesian meditation offers. Having made the point, Poullain does not ask whether natural freedom in that sense can be reconciled with the natural freedom from labor to which the discourse of honnêteté attaches singular honor. Instead he returns to an earlier theme: that the little circle of philosophical friends must be very cautious in their conversation with others. In these broader circles of conversation, Timander adds, perhaps naïvely, women are better at gift-giving (and receiving) than men. It is not simply that men defer to women out of politeness, without taking their ideas seriously. When joined with “intelligence,” “beauty” gives women “such a powerful and absolute ascendancy” over the heart of a scholar that “he keeps nothing secret from them, and far from being as reserved with them as he is with men, he feels an indescribable (je ne sçai quoi) force to tell them all he knows.” Eulalie agrees, “smiling”; “it is in such encounters that it must be said that there is in men and women not a demon but a corresponding genie.”³⁵ Her remark heightens Timander’s disappointment. In her eyes, now open for the first time, he is not, or at least is not yet, worthy of such an encounter. We are left wondering whether the little circle of three philosophical friends—Stasimachus, Sophie, and Eulalie—will eventually become a circle of four.

In 1691, in an effort to improve Genevan French (and perhaps to win sponsorship for a school he hoped to establish), Poullain published a little book on proper French usage. He dedicated it to Mme Perdriau, the wife of a Genevan councillor of state. It was in her home that he had been introduced into the city’s patrician circles and had met his future wife. He fondly recalled that, in a typical conversation there following a dinner, Mme Perdriau distinguished herself “as much by the importance of the subjects (she) brought up as by (her) reasonings and by the turn and beauty of her expressions.” There was nothing more important or beautiful or worthy of our “study” and “conversation,” he recalled her saying, than “the truths of salvation”; and so we should “neglect nothing to acquire the purity of the language,” since “it can serve to render the truth at the same time more agreeable and more useful.”³⁶

We glimpse in the dedication a world of bourgeois wealth and domesticity quite different from the Parisian salons. If there is any room in it for the free play of esprit, it is subordinate to a sober concern with the purity of religious truth. All the more striking, then, that Poullain made Mme Perdriau a kind of bourgeois—and Calvinist—salonnière. We do not know whether his radically unconventional commitment to gender equality survived the transition from Parisian polite sociability to the Genevan variety. But we can be sure that Poullain carried with him to Geneva, along with his Protestant convictions, the social aesthetic with which he had identified when he turned his back on the clerical scholasticism of the Sorbonne. In this bourgeois world of Calvinist religiosity, he retained his Parisian attachment to polite conversation and, with it, his appreciation of the indispensable contribution of women.

The social aesthetic of honnêteté played a constitutive role in Poullain’s youthful feminist thought, crucial to understanding both the experiential grounding of its radicalism and its implicit tensions and inhibitions. The tensions lurk beneath the surface, in the interstices between formal argument and the uncontested norms and assumptions that shape an intellectual field. There is a sense in which Poullain’s concept of equality, “abstract[ed]” from so many intellectual and cultural contexts, is “socially undetermined” and hence “applicable to all social and political practices.”³⁷ But that misses an irony central to his radicalism: that his argument for granting women equal access to educated work roles drew so much of its rhetorical power from a discursive world that made freedom from labor essential to its self-imagining and its claim to incommensurable status. To do justice to the irony, we need to pay due attention to the differences between Equality and Education. And, however useful it may be to separate out gender and status conceptually, we must reentwine, and indeed reentangle, them if we are to understand the historical contribution of both honnêteté and Poullain to early modern feminism.

This is not, it should be stressed, a simple story of the imperatives of status constricting the emancipatory thrust of new thinking about gender. Arguably one of the instructive twists in the story is that a logic of elite status, pervasive in the discourse of honnêteté, played a vital role in making possible a new logic of gender—one that quite explicitly reversed the construed normative relationship between male and female intelligence. It is hard to see how Poullain could have formulated his concept of gender equality without the salons’ efforts to justify themselves as a status community. The denigration of the kinds of intellectual authority represented by male corporate cultures; the revaluation of the relationship between female physical “delicacy” and intellectual strength; the new significance given to “natural” speech as an instrument and emblem of intelligence; the insistence that the value of intelligence and knowledge hinged on their efficacy in forms of social communication emphasizing reciprocity: these new cultural construals of gender were as indispensable to Poullain’s breakthrough as was Cartesian method. Poullain did not simply reorient the discourse; he upended it, using gender norms designed to make women the guardians of a culture of leisure to advocate equal access for women to positions in the social division of labor. In his hands the reconstrual of gender norms leapt across the boundary that distinguished an imagined community of leisure, mixing men and women on new terms of communication, from the rest of society. It justified a vision of a society bringing together men and women on new terms of labor conceived as social communication. It is above all this reimagining that makes Poullain a remarkable figure for his time and place.

In this sense Poullain distilled a socially determined discourse into a “socially underdetermined” concept of equality. In Education, however, he can be said to have reacknowledged the constraints of the historically determinate. Its “conversations” reflect the fact that, in the social world he was addressing, women’s ascent to intellectual equality with men was inseparable from, and indeed contingent on, their fulfilling their assigned role as the exemplars and guardians of an exclusive culture of leisure or, more precisely, of aesthetic play. Because that role was not compatible with the avowed practice of intellectual labor, it also forbade women from using their newfound intellectual equality to engage in critical thinking as a social practice. That is the irony that Poullain’s blending of Cartesian rationalism and the discourse of honnêteté in a polite dialogue could not efface.

We risk limiting ourselves to two equally unacceptable alternatives. One is to discount the ideal of “the feminine” produced by the discourse of honnêteté, and by the women who had a central role in its formulation. Since the discourse banned even the appearance of intellectual labor, we might conclude, it has nothing to say to modern feminism. That would be unfortunate; we would deprive ourselves of an instructive historical precedent for reconstruing intelligence in terms of social communication. The precedent anticipates efforts in contemporary feminism to rethink the nature and value of intelligence. But for feminists seeking ways to avoid the no-win choice between equality and difference, its lesson may be as cautionary as it is inspiring. The other extreme would be to hail the female practitioners of honnêteté as modern feminists, ignoring their need to avoid even the appearance of engaging in the labor of the mind. That too has its cost, or at least its danger. Can a feminism arguing that women have the same capacity as men to engage in the labor of the mind, and that they ought to have the same right to do so, afford to trace one of its roots back to the ideal of the honnête femme? Perhaps; but only if the recovered ideal is handled with extreme care, keeping in mind its double-edged implications. The discourse of honnêteté confirms that, even in emphatically patriarchal societies, gender norms can be reoriented in an emancipatory direction. But the discourse is also an object lesson that, particularly when fused with gender distinctions, status imperatives have been insidiously powerful in segregating women from the freedom that labor has come to promise.