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
