Mary Wollstonecraft and the beginnings of female emancipation in France and England

by Jacob Bouten

Of these, the second may be dismissed in a few words, as containing nothing very striking beyond the author's dissatisfaction with the spirit prevailing at the Universities.

The first, on the other hand, contains the gist of Poullain's contentions. We are exhorted to judge only from evidence, without regarding the opinions of others, and are brought face to face with what the author holds to be the unvarnished truth, unaffected by that spirit of misplaced gallantry which he feels to be particularly offensive. If, therefore, anybody is shocked at the crudeness of some statements, he expects him to blame Truth, and not Poullain de la Barre.

Conventionalism is what the author holds to be the chief source of the prevailing inequality. In conformity with the tenets of the Christian faith, people are taught to regard the submission of women as the will of God, whereas Reason shows it to be merely the consequence of inferior strength. To maintain this usurped supremacy men have purposely kept women from being instructed. In many respects the capabilities of women are superior to those of men: it is their special province to study medecine and by its aid to restore health to the sick and ailing. There is, in fact, nothing for which he pronounces women to be unfit: "il faut reconnaître que les femmes sont propres à tout." He would make them judges, preachers and even generals.

The faults of women, which even this fanaticist of Reason cannot overlook in the face of the distressing state of female manners and morals, are due to the defective education which is given them. They are taught to feel an interest only in balls, theatres and the fashions, with the result that vanity is their predominant characteristic. So far we might be listening to some English moralist of the eighteenth century. Their only literature is of a devotional kind, "avec ce qui est dans la cassette," Poullain meaningly adds. For a girl to display any knowledge she may have acquired is thought a shame, and makes her a "précieuse" in the eyes of everybody.

The only state of dependence which finds favour in Poullain's eyes is that of children on their parents. Here again, we have the purely rational view which was also Mary Wollstonecraft's. The reason of a child is undeveloped, and therefore requires the support of full-grown reason. But this dependence naturally comes to an end as soon as that age is reached when the faculty is sufficiently developed to enable the child to judge for himself, when advice may take the place of command.

Pierre Bayle informs us that Poullain fully expected to be taken to task for this daring vindication of the right of woman to be educated. However, as two years passed without bringing the looked-for refutation of his arguments, he himself anticipated his opponents by writing the third treatise. Its title is rather misleading. As a matter of fact, the pamphlet itself presents the usual arguments in favour of the theory of male excellence with which the arsenal of anti-feminists was stocked, whilst the "remarques nécessaires" by which it is followed, demonstrating the author's opinions, contain the entire feminist theory. The spirit that was to conduct straight to the Revolution breaks out when the author confidently states that as yet feminism is only a matter of theoretical speculation, and not ripe for social or political action. He next enters upon a diatribe against civilisation, which has failed to bring humanity any nearer to absolute truth, and extols the never-failing power of Reason.

However interesting treatises like the above may be in the evidence they contain of what was secretly going on, of the mental processes which occupied individuals when conventionalism was at its height, processes which contained in them the germs of the great upheaval of a later century, yet it cannot be sufficiently insisted on that they were only abortive eruptions, showing that the social volcano was very far from being extinct; mere puffs of smoke which the slightest breath of wind dispersed. Of far greater direct importance to the growth of opinions was that social movement which began in the early seventeenth century, of which woman was herself the originator, and by means of which she almost leapt into the seat of social influence: the movement of the salons. We have seen that it was in the sixteenth century that woman made her triumphal entry into society and began to dominate the world of conversation and of literature. The chivalrous worship of earlier centuries had degenerated without doing anything permanent to increase the esteem in which women stood. But in the sixteenth century a new form of courtship was introduced from Italy and Spain, which was utilised by clever women as a means of gaining the ascendancy over men.

The love theory evolved by Plato, with its metaphysical conception of the passion, which in the Greek philosopher's days had fallen on deaf ears, was carried into practice two thousand years later under the auspices of the great Renaissance. In accordance with the views of Plato's circle, love came to be recognised as the chief inspirer of virtue and of noble deeds. The platonic ideal thus was from the beginning a refining influence, a corrective to coarseness and materialism, and an incentive to the purest idealism. The theory of spiritualised love recognised the love of physical beauty only as the first step on the ladder of Beauty connecting Earth with Heaven; at each new step, however, the ideal becomes transfigured and purified, until everything earthly sinks into nothingness, the Soul becomes paramount and everything else falls away. This view was adopted by the intellectual leaders of the Italian Renaissance, Dante and Petrarch, and also by the leading churchmen, in whose speculations the highest and purest form of passion became the love of God. The spirit of Platonism thus became mingled with that of religious mysticism, which even surpassed Plato in its condemnation of that earthly love which the latter had recognised. The Florentine Academy, however, adopted the Platonic view, making human love one of the steps leading to the ideal of eternal beauty; and refining upon it until it became the chaste passion of the sacrifice of self to the loved object, of which the passion of Michel Angelo and Vittoria Colonna furnishes an example.

The Italian wars of the late fifteenth century had brought Lewis the Twelfth and his retinue to Genoa. One of the highly-cultured ladies of that city, Tommassina Spinola, made a deep impression upon the king. She was married and virtuous, and so the royal lover had to control his passion and to be content with that platonic friendship which made of the lady "la dame de ses pensées", and entitled him to nothing beyond the purest and most disinterested friendship. A great many parallel cases occurred among the king's followers, and the women found their influence upon their platonic lovers far greater and more lasting than that exercised over the husband in matrimony. There was in this new form of courtship,—which in literature often took a pastoral form,—an element of idealism which placed the weaker sex on a pedestal in putting the adored one far beyond the reach of the lover, who only aspired the more faithfully for not having his passion gratified. In this lay the dormant power of womanhood, which might be successfully turned into a means of improving their position in society; and as soon as women came to realise this they made the most of their opportunity. The "Platonic friendship craze" spread to France, where the sentimental passion of these "Jansenists of love" found a fruitful soil. Before this new form of worship all class-distinctions fell away; not unfrequently the lady was so high above the lover's reach as to exclude all possibility of gratification, which only added an additional zest to the adventure.

Unfortunately the morals of the French court were not such as to encourage the hope of a permanent improvement in the relations between the sexes. The antithesis between the platonic ideals and the brutal coarseness of sexual desire, ill-concealed under a varnish of hypocritical gallantry, was indeed very marked. At the court of Francis physical beauty was considered far above virtue. The years following the introduction of the female element and the rise of female influence at court witnessed a long and bitter struggle between the coarse manners which the long years of warfare had engendered, regarding women as the playthings of men, to be trifled with and to be lightly thrown away when used, and the newly-introduced "galanterie" which implied patient and disinterested worship of an object, superior in the possession of that beauty of feature which was regarded as the reflection of a beautiful soul. Women had become conscious of their growing influence, and of the means of increasing it. This struggle for recognition found expression in literature in the "Contes de la reine de Navarre", written by Marguerite after her marriage, and modelled upon Boccacio's Decamerone, the evident purpose of which was to correct French manners and morals, and to glorify that form of love which is a mixture of the worship of chivalry and the platonic passion. The Contes themselves show a certain looseness of morals which is rather a concession to the general taste of the times, but the prologues and epilogues are of a far more refined character, and breathe a spirit of platonic idealism. In their celebration of virtue and the pure, idealistic passion it inspires, the Contes are a precursor of Mlle de Scudéry's later romances. Instead of the deceitful, hypocritical homage of feudal times, the demand was for women to be respected and to be recognised as the social equals of men.