A Woman Who Defends All Persons of Her Sex: Selected Moral and Philosophical Writings (review)

The mid-nineteenth to early twentieth century movements for women's suffrage are generally regarded as the "first wave" of feminism and feminist philosophy, as opposed to the second and third waves of the middle- and late-twentieth century respectively. While recently this temporalization has come under criticism, the aim has been to complicate the relationship among the so-called first, second, and third waves rather than to question the intellectual spontaneity of the first. A recent addition to the series, The Other Voice in Early Modern Europe, offers resources for rethinking precisely this. Gabrielle Suchon's A Woman Who Defends All the Persons of Her Sex contains translations for the first time into English of two works, both abridged and annotated: Treatise on Ethics and Politics, Divided Into Three Parts: Freedom, Knowledge and Authority (1693) and On the Celibate Life Freely Chosen, or Life Without Commitments (1700). Editors Domna C. Stanton and Rebecca M. Wilkin, both established scholars of seventeenth-century French literature and culture, have introduced into English language scholarship an exceptionally important seventeenth-century feminist thinker of Stoic ethics as well as what Suchon terms "Neutralism," or the voluntarily celibate life, the life of the unmarried, secular intellectual woman, which Suchon argues is "a blessing from divine providence" (239) and a "vocation that merits our respect and love" (248) during the absolute monarchy of Louis XIV, the Sun King of France.

Suchon (1623-1703) articulates a feminist politics and ethics of freedom in the Treatise and develops the above-mentioned notion of neutralism in On the Celibate Life Freely Chosen. As the editors explain, while both works had fallen out of print until the late twentieth century, the former was reprinted four times in the early eighteenth century, and the latter received two reviews, both favorable, one of which appeared in the Europe-wide publication, Nouvelles de la République des Lettres (42). Marie de Gourney (1565-1645) notably devoted a small portion of a large body of work to la querelle des femmes, or the question of the possibility of human status and virtues of "woman" which was debated from 1300-1700 (xvii-xxvii). However, it is Suchon who is now regarded as the "first female philosopher to have left a substantial body of written work devoted solely to the subject of women" (1).

In the Treatise on Ethics and Politics, Suchon defines the love of freedom as the most natural human sentiment. However, institutional constraint or lack of freedom and privation or lack of authority with respect to centers of knowledge and religious training make women dependent. Though marriage and the cloister are not inherently constraining, their seventeenth century instantiations require that "women must often blind their own reason to submit to all that shocks and thwarts it" (224). Suchon discusses at length the specific constraints posed by these vocations as well as their irrevocably binding legal nature for seventeenth century French women (99). Thus, Suchon argues for the necessity of voluntary divorce and the rescinding of vows (99-102). But why or for what ought one to seek freedom, knowledge, and authority?

It is on this subject that the second work included in the volume focuses (see especially 257). Suchon describes neutralism as a life absent of all possible commitments to marriage or convent, which is scholarly, secular, and celibate. This would have been a rare accomplishment for a woman in Suchon's day, and she acknowledges this explicitly and by regarding the very possibility of a neutral, detached life as a divine gift with a unique social necessity. While neutralism is synonymous for Suchon with Stoic detachment, this detachment is one that presupposes the political possibility for women either to choose or deny traditional commitments. Also discussed are the necessity of women's friendships and strategies for scholarly work, both of which help to...