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
