Wendy Gibson

Birth and Childhood

‘C’est une fille!’ The midwife’s pronouncement was calculated to bring little joy to the exhausted mother or her expectant relatives in seventeenth-century France. Queen Marie de Medicis ‘pleura fort et ferme’ in 1602 on learning that she had supplied France with a princess, Elisabeth, instead of a second heir to the throne and ‘ne s’en pouvait contenter’.1 In 1662 Louis XIV’s first sister-in-law Henriette d’Angleterre (Madame), having impatiently ascertained the female sex of the child that she was in the actual process of bearing, ‘dit qu’il la fallait jeter a la riviere, et en temoigna son chagrin a tout le monde’.2 Outside the royal circle the sense of anti-climax was equally keen. Memorialists recording the birth of a girl into an aristocratic family speak of the ‘great regret’ and ‘ordeal’ of the father, and of the mother’s ‘misfortune’.3 Gazette-writers and other well-wishing versifiers stress that couples will rapidly work to correct their mistake: Mais, n’etant qu’un Amour femelle, Les epoux, redoublant leur zele, Vont travailler sur nouveaux frais A faire un Amour mâle apres.4 Grandmothers for their part seek to guard against a second ‘accident’ by stern injunctions to daughters not to let their unborn offspring ‘devenir fille’.5

Women, Religion and Charity

The special hopes which the Church pinned on feminine assistance in the furtherance of its cause and work were recalled in the seventeenth century by a multitude of references to its bestowal upon women of the engaging title of ‘the devout sex’.1 Hopes were not disappointed, though their realisation caused a certain amount of embarrassment to the establishment that cherished them. Convents bulged with new recruits, but disturbing incidents within sacred precincts gave rise to questions about the soundness of vocations. Houses of God ushered into their portals gratifying numbers of female communicants, penitents and pilgrims, but observers discerned and castigated impure motives behind the outward regularity. Charitable institutions mushroomed, but the morals of the ladies who cultivated them were sometimes such as to spell danger for the physically and spiritually destitute. The zeal with which women propagated, suffered and even died for their religion was on everyone’s lips, but the religion concerned had often been pronounced heretical. The devout sex showed a touching desire to merit its accolade, only it did not always proceed along the strictly orthodox lines that pious ecclesiastics envisaged.

Women in Seventeenth-Century France

To the Reader - Birth and Childhood - Education - Preliminaries to Marriage - The Estate of Matrimony - Maternity - The Dissolution of Marriage - Women at Work (i) - Women at Work (ii) - Women at Work (iii) - Women in Political and Civic Life - Women in the Cultural Sphere - Women, Manners and Morals - Women, Religion and Charity - Death - Bibliography - Index

Women, Manners and Morals

‘Les femmes sont d’une substance plus delicate que les hommes.’1 On the basis of what appeared to be a self-evident physiological truth, deducible from women’s muscular inferiority and their traditionally sheltered life, the seventeenth century concluded that the sex was endowed with a correspondingly greater delicacy of mind and taste. Certain spectacles, actions and words unlikely to disturb the average man would, it was imagined, give instant offence to his companion, wounding her keen sense of fitness and propriety. The sensitivity attributed to them resulted in the elevation of women to the position of arbitresses of elegance. ‘C’est aux femmes a decider des modes, a juger de la langue, a discerner le bon air et les belles manieres’, pronounced Malebranche; ‘Elles ont plus de science, d’habilete et de finesse que les hommes sur ces choses. Tout ce qui depend du gout est de leur ressort.’2 Not everyone shared the philosopher’s persuasion that women should be allowed to dictate in matters of fashion, still less in those of language. But none objected to the idea of comely mentors having a shot at polishing manners.

Women at Work III

The need to find avenues of escape from the rigours of existence was as keenly felt in the seventeenth century as at any epoch in mankind’s chequered history. Discounting suicide, forbidden to every Christian, the simplest solution to the problem consisted in beating a hasty retreat from the immediate source of pain or anxiety, were it the insatiable creditor, the marauding soldier, the killer disease or the storm-wrecked home. But even supposing that the cause of distress could be easily located, physical flight was not always practicable or adequate. Psychological withdrawal into realms of illusion and fantasy was a tempting substitute which cost seekers-after-release either as little as a flight of the imagination or as much as they cared to pay for aids to bolster fallacious hopes and induce artificial sensations of well-being. Taking the sting out of living was a prosperous business on which sizeable groups of women flourished. In respectable circles their reputation was unenviable. Yet at the same time they attracted a large and select clientele and achieved in some cases a fame that won for them a place in factual and fictional documents denied to more orthodox luminaries of their sex.

Women in Political and Civic Life

The makers of France’s constitution, mindful of female infirmities, had shown themselves reluctant to give women a fair share and a say in the running of the country. The misapplication of a disposition of Frankish Salic law prevented any woman from sitting on the French throne and holding sway as did Elizabeth I of England until her death in 1603 or Christina of Sweden prior to her abdication in 1654. Government offices were closed to practically all members of the sex except queens and a few of their intimates,1 whose powers were more nominal than real. Courts of justice were tranquilly possessed male provinces. Voting in elections was largely a masculine prerogative too.

Women at Work II

The bourgeoisie was a perpetually shifting and, for that reason, ill-defined social class in the seventeenth century. Its wealthy members gravitated towards the old aristocracy, with whom they had in common the possession of land, titles, privileges and cultural tastes, if not that of a lengthy warrior lineage. Its lower ranks merged with the underprivileged masses, sharing their illiteracy and the stigma of poverty. There was no question at the latter end of the scale of work being merely a distraction or a means of providing luxuries, as it was for the tradesman’s wife, or as she carefully pretended it was. Contemporary wages scarcely kept the manual worker, particularly the woman worker in receipt of half a man’s pay, at subsistence level. There was little question either of being fastidious in the choice of work undertaken. Women of the lower classes turned their hand to virtually every trade. Indeed necessity often forced them to practise several concurrently, however taxing they might be physically or however repulsive morally.

The Estate of Matrimony

The arbitrary and impersonal nature of the process by which young men and women were matched and mated in the seventeenth century meant that for the bond of mutual affection and understanding which modern generations have come to regard as a vital prerequisite of marriage was substituted at best an initial indifference, at worst an active resentment against the person to whom fidelity had to be vowed until death. The onus for closing this emotional breach rested largely, it was stressed, with the wife.1 On her flexibility and deference, on her willingness to accept subordinate status, and on her power to resist pressures that threatened to divide her still further from her spouse, depended the degree of marital harmony that could be established.

Women at Work I

That a woman should earn her keep by homemaking, as had countless generations of her sex, seemed as natural in the seventeenth century as that she should wear skirts and bear children. Expertise in housewifery, ‘la plus utile et honorable science et occupation de la femme’,1 was the cornerstone of her education, and those with loftier aspirations were rapidly recalled to ‘leurs aiguilles et leurs laines’.2 However this Golden Age vision of the female, seated at the hearth tranquilly plying needle or distaff while her menfolk ventured into the outside world to procure the family’s sustenance, glossed over certain harsh realities. Not every woman had a man to help support her. A substantial number of the population were widowed in their prime and urged by public opinion to remain so. Economic necessity, unwillingness to relinquish a husband’s flourishing enterprise, concern to avoid an idleness propitious to the invasion of painful memories, might well induce a woman in this position to undertake some outside work or business. In the case of spinsters who had no private income starvation was the simple alternative to obtaining paid employment. Even married women, who seemed the best placed of the three groups, were often driven for reasons of finance or prestige to occupy themselves with other than strictly domestic chores, though these, when done conscientiously, were apt to provide more than sufficient occupation for both body and mind.

Women in the Cultural Sphere

Taking a positive part in the intellectual life of the nation was a challenge which women were ostensibly as ill-equipped to meet as they had been to secure recognition of their potential for significant political and civic action. Placed at a serious disadvantage by their exclusion from institutions dispensing secondary and higher education, they were additionally handicapped by the risk of being mocked whenever they showed an impulse to improve their mind or to commit themselves in print. Official reunions of the French intelligentsia were in the main sympathetic to the policy adopted by the Academie Francaise on its foundation in 1635 of limiting its forty Immortals to members of the male sex. Nothing daunted by bans and prejudices, women used their ingenuity, as always, to find means of getting round them. They opened up relations with the art world by employing all kinds of masters to create at their bidding. They took pains to make of their homes inviting rendezvous where men of learning were glad to forgather with colleagues and social superiors, away from the regimented atmosphere of the academies. They capitalised on their reputation for possessing greater refinement than the opposite sex to set themselves up as judges of literary works which authors hastened to submit to them out of deference and gratitude. They also ventured to publish on their own behalf, using stratagems to ensure that the dictates of modesty were not violated.