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
