The woman question (XVIth-XVIIIth centuries): What is woman?
- A short reminder
- Some quotations
- I. Woman’s body
- II. Woman’s soul
- III. Woman’s understanding
- The Middle Ages = Vth [476: the fall of the western Roman Empire: the surrender of Rome to the Goths] - XVth c [1453: the taking of Constantinople by the Turks, i.e. the end of the Byzantine empire / the end of the Hundred Years’ war between France and England; only Calais remained English).
- The Renaissance = XVth-end XVIth centuries (1640) [1]
- The early modern period = 1450-1660? 1500-1700? 1400-1700? 1300-1700?
- The modern period = until 1789
- The contemporary period = after 1789
« les femelles sont par nature plus faibles et plus froides, et il faut considérer leur nature comme une défectuosité naturelle. » [2]
« [la femme est] un mal nécessaire, une tentation naturelle, une calamité désirable, un péril domestique, une fascination fatale. » [3]
Jean Chrysostome (344/349-407)
“Thus in the state of nature, every woman that bears children, becomes both a mother and a lord […] at this day, in divers places women are invested with the principal authority […] which in truth they have by the right of nature […] Add also, that in the state of nature it cannot be known who is the father, but by testimony of the mother; the child therefore is his whose the mother will have it, and therefore hers.” [4]
« Les femmes n’ont qu’à se souvenir de leur origine; et, sans trop vanter leur délicatesse, songer après tout qu’elles viennent d’un os surnuméraire où il n’y avait de beauté que celle que Dieu voulut y mettre. » [5]
« L’Esprit n’a point de Sexe. » [6]
“Let us […] not entertain such a degrading thought of our own worth […] We value them [men] too much, and our selves too little […] and do not think our selves capable of Nobler Things that the pitiful Conquest of some worthless heart.” [7]
“If all Men are born free, how is it that all Women are born slaves? as they must be if the being subjected to the inconstant, uncertain, unknown, arbitrary Will of Men, be the perfect Condition of Slavery?” [8]
Alas! A woman that attempts the pen,
Such an intruder on the rights of men,
Such a presumptuous creature is esteem’d,
The fault can by no virtue be redeemed. [9]
“[a wife] has nothing she can call her own.” [10]
“a wife being as much a man’s property as his horse, or his ass” [11] (2.11.158).
“The institution of English patriarchy, inherited from Hebrew and early Christian societies, rested upon twin pillars: the subordination required of women as a punishment for Eve’s sin, which was fundamental to biblical teaching, and an understanding of men’s and women’s bodies, evident among early modern medical writers […] in terms of relative strength and weakness. Patriarchy was thus founded upon God’s direction and woman’s natural physical inferiority. [My underlining].” [12]
See Robert Filmer: Patriarcha; or, The Natural Power of Kings (written in 1640, published in 1680). In 1690, Locke objected these points in the first of his Two Treatises of Government and in a large part of his second treatise.
« Le patriarcalisme de Filmer se distingue de ces approches en faisant système de la sujétion naturelle des hommes vis-à-vis du chef de famille et, à travers lui, vis-à-vis d’Adam, ancêtre unique de l’humanité dont la toute-puissance supposée sur les êtres et les choses s’est transmise aux rois de la terre. » [13]
The woman question is the name of a debate in Western literature starting in the Renaissance which is a landmark since, for the first time in England, women started to write their own defences and a significant number of women started to publish defences.
Then, at that time, the controversy on women became more comprehensible to the modern reader since texts were written in English and no longer in Latin or in middle English, the tongues used for earlier attacks and defences.
Besides, the pamphlets published during the Renaissance refer to a way of life which is closer to ours even if many ideas and conventions still belong to the Middle Ages. They were written for a reading public belonging to the urban middle class, in a world increasingly dominated by commerce and individualism.
Finally, those pamphlets contain some prefeminist elements and herald some modern prefeminist ideas. To understand the contents of those pamphlets, it is necessary to give a short survey of the sources on the woman question and of the popular controversies between 1540 and 1640.
The way woman was viewed little changed between the Renaissance and the Enlightenment. The fundamental question is that of her nature: can woman be man’s equal? Must she be his equal? Not to forget the prevailing conception at the time together with its ideological roots. Plato’s doubts were still present: can woman be considered a reasoning creature? Others wonder about the existence of woman’s soul. The physical, spiritual and intellectual aspects of woman’s specificity were at the core of the debate. Men, who felt threatened by women who show intellectual ambitions, develop arguments in the philosophical, physiological and theological fields so as to preserve their superiority.
I. Woman’s body
In the early modern period, sexual identity “was not rooted in an understanding of the body,” historian Fletcher stresses [14].14 “The body” was “invented as a topic for historical study” thanks to the works of Mikhael Bakhtin, Nobert Elias, and Michel Foucault but what was created was an “implicitly male early modern body.” [15] The cultural construction of the female body (that is both natural and social) rested on diverse sources, mainly prescriptive literature (conduct books, popular devotion, medical books, childbearing guides...).
The philosophical argument of the hierarchy of sexes is developed by Aristotle (384-322 BC) for whom the male sex is the normal one and woman a natural aberration. In his treatise on natural sciences, On the Generation of Animals, he wrote: « les femelles sont par nature plus faibles et plus froides, et il faut considérer leur nature comme une défectuosité naturelle. » [16] And added: « la femme ressemble à un mâle sterile » [17] since he thought that, in generation, woman played only the passive role of a vessel of male semen. [18]
Thus, woman is an incomplete being, « le fruit d’une insuffisance de l’accomplissement naturel, » « un mâle raté, » as Marc Angenot puts it. [19] Yet woman does not belong to the category of monsters that are, for Aristotle, rare and extraordinary beings, which is not the case of women. Male superiority is an undeniable principle that he confirms in his Politics so as to legitimize women’s subordination in marriage: “the courage of a man is shown in commanding, of a woman in obeying” (1260a 23-24).
In the early modern period, the understanding of the body rested on two elements: the
humoral theory and a structural homology.
a) The theory of the four humours
“Bodies were fundamental to early modern conceptions of sexual difference […] The female body was explained in terms of humoral theory.” [20] From the time of Hippocrates (ca. 460-ca. 370 BC) and Galen (129-199/217 AD), physicians had believed that bodies were composed of four humours (blood, black bile, yellow bile, and phlegm). Each humour had two characteristics: blood was hot and wet, yellow bile was hot and dry, black bile was cold and dry, phlegm was cold and wet. Man was hot and dry, woman was cold and moist. [21] “Thus man was active, woman passive; man was energetic, brave, and strong, while woman was gentle, tender, kind, and timorous. Anatomically, women were less healthful because their passivity subjected them to diseases.” [22]
“An individual’s sexual temperament, in effect gender, was a question of the balance in the body of the hot and cold, dry and moist qualities. [23] This gender system had nothing whatsoever to do with the sexual orientation of men and women. Nor was the visible genital difference, except in so far as it reflected and symbolised someone’s place on the continuum between human strength and weakness, of significance. Sex, in other words, was still a sociological and not an ontological category.” [24]
Thomas W. Laqueur very clearly explains the shift that took place: “For thousands of years it had been a commonplace that women had the same genitals as men except that ’theirs are inside the body and not outside it […] Galen, who in the second century A.D. developed the more powerful and resilient model of the structural, though not spatial, identity of the male and female reproductive organs, demonstrated at length that women were essentially men in whom a lack of vital heat - of perfection - had resulted in the retention, inside, of structures that in the male are visible without.” [25] That is called the isomorphism between the two sexes. As a consequence, as Karen Harvey stresses: “men and women were placed on a vertical, hierarchical axis, in which their bodies were seen as two comparable variants of one kind. Underpinning this ’one-sex model’ was the humoural system […] differences of sex were differences of degree.” [26]
“Sometime in the eighteenth century, sex as we know it was invented […] Here was not only an explicit repudiation of the old isomorphisms but also, and more important, a rejection of the idea that nuanced differences between organs, fluids, and physiological processes mirrored a transcendental order of perfection. Aristotle and Galen were simply mistaken in holding that female organs are a lesser form of the male’s and by implication that woman is a lesser man. [27] […] structures that had been thought common to man and woman - the skeleton and the nervous system - were differentiated so as to correspond to the cultural male and female.” [28] “[there was] a grand effort to discover the anatomical and physiological characteristics that distinguished men from women […] This did not happen all at once, nor did it happen everywhere at the same time, nor was it a permanent shift.” [29] Karen Harvey draws the following conclusion: “Women and men were now arranged horizontally, anatomical differences were stressed, and their bodies were regarded as qualitatively distinct […] while differences had once been determined by cultural ’gender,’ during the eighteenth century differences were increasingly thought to stem from biological ’sex.’” [30]
c) A change in the theory of conception
The Aristotelian one-seed theory that maintained that “only the male seed played an active role in generation” (female orgasm was unnecessary for conception) was challenged by the Hippocratic and Galenic two-seed theories of reproduction: “human beings were created like other animals as a result of the fusion of two active principles: the male seed and the female menstrual blood, both said to be ejaculated in orgasm.” [31]
“During much of the sixteenth century, medical writers treated the ancient medical texts as authoritative and concentrated on expounding the ideas of Hippocrates (ca. 460-ca. 370 BC), Aristotle (384-322 B.C.) and Galen (129-199/217 AD) as the basis of knowledge about conception. By 1500, the commonly accepted view of the theories of Aristotle and Galen was that the child was formed from the active principle in the male sperm shaping the female matter of menstrual blood. However, Hippocrates’ view that the child was formed from a mixture of the male and female seed was more popular […] simultaneous orgasm […] would hasten conception. In the later seventeenth century, physicians developed new theories of generation, which shifted the paradigm of sexual knowledge. Most physicians were influenced by theories of the pre-formation of the child in the seed of either the man or the woman.” [32]
“Until the end of the seventeenth century, most writers insisted that sexual pleasure was necessary for conception […] For women and men the implications of these theories differed. There were both positive and negative consequences for women in the theory that simultaneous orgasm was necessary for conception. They could veto a marriage partner whom they found sexually unattractive […] The negative implications were seen in legal attitudes to rape. If a rape were followed by pregnancy, the law deemed it no rape because the woman had, by definition, enjoyed the encounter. By the eighteenth century, however, the change in medical theories of conception was reflected in the justices’ handbooks; a charge of rape was allowed even if a woman were pregnant.” [33]
According to Laqueur, the two-seed theories dominated the one-sex model in scientific and medical texts. [34] Yet “two-seed theories were undermined during the eighteenth century, and ultimately women’s sexual pleasure - symbolised by orgasm - was regarded as dispensable to conception and women were imagined as desexualised, maternalised individuals.” [35]
When men saw in women beings different from themselves, an evolution of the nature of patriarchy (“founded upon on God’s direction and woman’s natural physical inferiority” [36]), due to a new interpretation of sexual identity, was possible. [37] As to physical specificities and advantages, a distinction becomes a principle: man has strength, woman beauty, the fatal tool of man’s fall. Philogynous writers oppose two objections. The prefeminist Poulain de la Barre, unlike his predecessors, does not deny physical weakness but is to consider it in context /keep it in perspective. For him, strength cannot be credited to men, otherwise “les bêtes auraient l’avantage par dessus eux.” [38] Moreover it is alien to merit. For those who were brought up on Platonic philosophy, beauty became the mirror of an inner perfection. Beauty and physical love, which were the reflects of the soul, favoured the elevation of man. The physiological arguments underlining woman’s inferiority are numerous.
The Christian Church does not see any contradiction/ paradox in the fact of praising the worship of the Virgin Mary - “[la] gloire de son sexe” - [39] and denouncing the wicked nature of woman, as the daughter of Eve. John Chrysostom defined woman as « un mal nécessaire, une tentation naturelle, une calamité désirable, un péril domestique, une fascination fatale. » [40]
a) Woman’s inferiority since Eve’s creation
The misogyny of the Church is based on the Bible. Antifeminists and prefeminists wanted to go back to the origins of the Scriptures so as to know the Creator’s will. Religious discourses demonstrating woman’s inferiority since the creation of Eve rested on three reasons:
First, a chronological one: Adam was created before Eve. Yet, prefeminists objected that Adam was just a sketch, and Eve, the masterpiece.
The second was substantial, that is the nature of the materials for the creation of Adam and Eve: silt/alluvium [limon] for Adam, and a human rib for Eve. One can refer to Bossuet’s sentence: « Les femmes n’ont qu’à se souvenir de leur origine; et, sans trop vanter leur délicatesse, songer après tout qu’elles viennent d’un os surnuméraire où il n’y avait de beauté que celle que Dieu voulut y mettre. » [41] Prefeminists retort that, on the one hand, Eve, created in Paradise and not in the countryside, was created out of a bone, a material more noble than earth; on the other hand, if chronology meant superiority, then preference had to be given to animals, created first; all that proving that God created his master piece in the last place.
The last one is teleological (telos meaning the aim): Eve was created not for herself, but as a companion to Adam; so she was created for man, [42] as Paul puts it in his Epistle to Corinthians: “L’homme n’a pas été créé pour la femme, mais la femme pour l’homme” (2.9). [43] Arguments stressing that Eve was responsible for man’s Fall were added. However, philogynists answered that etymology proves Eve’s noble superiority since, as “Adam” means “earth” and “Eve,” “life”; earth deprived of life is nothing. Likewise, this hypothesis omits the sentence that is repeated in Genesis: “Il les créa mâle et femelle” (1.27, 5.2), tending to prove the equality of the sexes before the Fall.
b) Woman’s inferiority since the Fall
The other problem is to know if the inequality of sexes was predestined before the Fall or not. Quite often the arguments drawn from the Bible go in the same direction as those borrowed from Aristotle. Genesis 3.16 is used: “Ton élan sera vers ton mari et lui te dominera” whereas before the fall power was granted to man and woman (Genesis 1.26). [44] According to the Aristotelian principle, man’s superiority, due to the strength of his reason, precedes the Fall. For him and for Augustine, woman’s subordination is not a punishment but a submission to a greater reason, in keeping with God’s primitive design. In De l’égalité des deux sexes (1673; faithfully translated into English as early as 1677) by the (Catholic turned Protestant) French clergyman,
Poulain de la Barre, man and woman were naturally equal before the Fall. [45]
Here are the philosophical, physiological and theological arguments presented to defend man’s superiority.
II. Woman’s soul
The question of the existence of woman’s soul still existed in the XVIth century. In 1613, Count Massino says in The Insatiate Countess by John Marston: “Women were made / Of blood, without soules,” [46] a cynical assertion that John Donne thinks necessary to expose in a sermon he delivered at Easter 1630 (St Paul’s cathedral). [47] The stress laid on woman’s moral inferiority comes from the Church fathers: she was the first to be deceived, sin and she corrupted man. Female thirst of knowledge (the apple from the tree of knowledge) led man to the Fall. Eve’s punishment was to be submitted to her husband but, as is emphasized Marie le Jars de Gournay, submission does not mean inferiority. [48] To deny that woman has a soul means to consider her as an animal. In the XVIIIth century, the soul, Paul Hoffmann writes, is « [un] terme polysémique et d’un usage commode [qui] recouvre aussi bien le concept cartésien de substance que la notion sensualiste de faculté; dans l’idéologie physiologiste, l’âme ne désignera qu’un certain aspect du corps. » [49]
If women are denied the capacity to develop their own moral independence, it is because the greatest part of reason was granted to man because of the biological frailty of her brain. See Halifax in The Lady’s New-Year’s Gift (1688): “Your Sex wanteth our reason for your Conduct.” [50] The result is that the pretended weakness of her understanding makes woman’s moral life dependant on man. The two sexes would be complementary, man being necessary to woman since she is handicapped by her inferiority.
III. Woman’s understanding
The soul and the understanding were refused to woman because of Aristotle’s theory which mixes up the level of the body and that of the mind in order to show woman’s intellectual weakness. That postulate was invalidated/contradicted by the philosophy of Descartes. In his Discours de la méthode (1637), he demonstrates the separation of the soul and the body and, in the sixth of his Méditations métaphysiques, the full autonomy of thought. [51] From then on, in the XVIIIth century, the independance of thought from the physical conditions of sexuality was asserted, an idea that is epitomized, in. 1673, by Poulain de la Barre in “L’Esprit n’a point de Sexe,” a phrase that was to be very often used afterwards. [52] Descartes’s teaching grants man and woman the same ontological status, an essential identity concerning the soul and the body, the substance of which is invariable, whatever the physiological functions of procreation.
However, that philosophical theory, known and accepted by some, was far from being the prevailing opinion. « On croit, » historian Roland Marx writes, « à une ’inaptitude naturelle’ de la femme à apprendre des notions que seuls les hommes seraient capables de comprendre et retenir. » [53] To be under moral and consequently legal tutelage was woman’s lot.
The consequent question of the existence of female understanding is that of the equality or the inferiority of woman’s intelligence to that of man, and that of its nature (comparable or different). Woman seems to be gifted with a kind of intelligence that is different from reason, a kind of “surrationalité feminine” to take up Angenot’s expression. [54] For Christians, that conception rests on Jerome’s authority; these dispositions are to be linked with instinct, of an innate knowledge superior to acquired knowledge.
Man and woman, nature and culture
The scientific revolution that took place in the XVIIth century paved the way for a new attitude to Nature, that was directly connected with an increasing submission of woman. Man’s perception of nature had changed, as is explained by Sylvana Tomaselli: “Treated as something external, disenchanted, to be studied, analysed and probed into by man, nature becomes a thing to be used, mastered and overcome.” [55] The link between man and culture, between woman and culture cannot be neglected. [56] It already existed in the first Christian readings of the Bible. There was an ambiguous relation between nature and woman. Because of Eve, Adam was not able to transcend his terrestrial desires; yet Eve led Adam to the tree of knowledge; hence she is linked to culture and civilisation. The Enlightenment saw woman as a civilizing agent of man.
At the same time, woman’s relative ignorance was linked to the supreme value of the Enlightenment, Nature. Heroines in eighteenth-century novels had a kind of intelligence called « intelligence sauvage » by Pierre Fauchery in La Destinée féminine dans le roman européen du dix-huitième siècle: « On peut presque dire que c’est grâce à leur ignorance qu’elles développent cette sagesse insigne, non-apprise, qui est l’authentique apport de la femme à l’intelligence du monde. » [57] Rather than a rational understanding, woman would have a more acute and refined sensitivity and artistic capacities that could enable her to excell in arts such as poetry and music.
Annex: Women’s conception from lust (the early modern period) to modesty (the
Enlightenment) to passionlessness (the Victorian age)
Historian Nancy Cott refers to a “traditionally dominant Anglo-American definition of women as especially sexual which was reversed and transformed between the seventeenth and the nineteenth centuries into the view that women […] were less carnal and lustful than men.” [58] She adds, “At least three phases of British opinion contributed to the development of the idea of passionlessness.” [59] At the beginning of the XVIIIth century, in “the new professional and commercial middle class”, an opposition to aristocratic libertinism (Defoe, Steele, Richardson) “led to an ideal of sexual self-control, verbal prudery, and an opposition to the double standard of sexual morality (for the sake of the purity of men, not justice for women).” [60] According to etiquette manuals available to middle-rank women (such as George Savile’s A Lady’s New Year’s Gift; or, Advice to a Daughter [1688] and John Gregory’s A Father’s Legacy to His Daughter [1761]: “woman was made for man’s pleasure and service; woman was strong only insofar as she could use her own weakness to manipulate the opposite sex (within the bounds of social propriety).” [61] Restraint was advised. “According to Keith V. Thomas, [62] the idea of passionlessness emerged in this context as an extension of the ideal of chastity needed to protect men’s property rights in women […] Modesty was the quintessential female virtue […] that women had to appeal to men turned modesty into a sexual ploy, emphasizing women’s sex objectification.” [63]
At the close of the century, there was a shift “from modesty to passionlessness” [64] under the influence of the Evangelicals (working “to regenerate Protestantism” [65]): for them, “women were made for God’s purposes, not man’s” and “the collective influence of women was an agency of moral reform.” [66] Women were deemed virtuous by nature, hence their “moral potential.” Hannah More’s Strictures on the Modern System of Female Education (1799) “transformed woman’s image form sexual to moral being […] the price [was] a new level of self control […] Her outlook revealed to women a source of power (in moral influence) and an independence of men (through reliance on God) in a female world view that inspired and compelled women throughout the nineteenth century.” [67] Mary Wollstonecraft and Hannah More “wished to emphasize women’s moral and intellectual powers rather than their ‘mere animal’ capacities, and expected reformed women to reform the world.” [68]
Towards women’s moral superiority
“The new focus on moral rather than sexual determinants of female character in didactic works at the end of the eighteenth century required a reversal in Protestant views of women. In Puritan ideology, earthly women were the inheritors of Eve’s legacy of moral danger […] Nineteenth-century Protestantism relied on women for its prime exemplars and symbols. Between 1790 and 1820 particularly […] the clergy intensified their emphasis on women as crucial advocates of religion […] The tacit condition for that elevation was the suppression of female sexuality […] The clergy thus renewed and generalized the idea that women under God’s grace were more pure than men […].” [69]
“The evangelical view, by concentrating on women’s spiritual nature, simultaneously
elevated women as moral and intellectual beings and disarmed them of their sexual power. Passionlessness was on the other side of the coin which paid, so to speak, for women’s admission to moral equality […] To women who wanted mean of self-preservation and selfcontrol, this view of female nature may well have appealed […].” [70]
“In this perspective, women might hail passionlessness as a way to assert control in the sexual arena-even if that ’control’ consisted in denial […] passionlessness served women’s larger interests by downplaying together their sexual characterization, which was the cause of their exclusion from significant ’human’ (i.e. male) pursuits […] The belief that women lacked carnal motivation was the cornerstone of the argument for women’s moral superiority, used to enhance women’s status and widen their opportunities in the nineteenth century.” [71]
