Women Moralists in Early Modern France

Early modern women writers left their mark in multiple domains--novels, translations, letters, history, and science. Although recent scholarship in literary and cultural studies has enriched our understanding of these accomplishments, less attention has been paid to other forms of women's writing. Women Moralists in Early Modern France explores the contributions of seventeenth and eighteenth-century French women philosophers and intellectuals to moralist writing, the observation of human motives and behavior. This distinctively French genre draws on philosophical and literary traditions extending back to classical antiquity. Moralist short forms such as the maxim, dialogue, character portrait, and essay engage social and political questions, epistemology, moral psychology, and virtue ethics. Although moralist writing was closely associated with the salon culture in which women played a major role, women's contributions to the genre have received scant scholarly attention.Julie Candler Hayes examines major moralist writers such as Madeleine de Scudéry, Anne-Thérèse de Lambert, Émilie Du Châtelet, and Germaine de Staël, as well as nearly two dozen of their contemporaries. Their reflections range from traditional topics such as the nature of the self, friendship, happiness, and old age, to issues that were very much part of their own lifeworld, such as the institution of marriage and women's nature and capabilities. Each chapter traces the evolution of women's moralist thought on a given topic from the late seventeenth century to the Enlightenment and the decades immediately following the French Revolution, a period of tremendous change in the horizon of possibilities for women as public figures and intellectuals. Hayes demonstrates how, through their critique of institutions and practices, their valorization of introspection and self-expression, and their engagement with philosophical issues, women moralists carved out an important space for the public exercise of their reason.

Table of Contents:
Preamble Acknowledgements A Note on Names A Note on Texts I. Introduction: The Moralist World 1. Moralists and Moralizers 2. Unsystematic Philosophy 3. Philosophy and Literature in Early Modern France 4. Women Moralists and the Canon 5. Corpus and topics: Who is a Moralist? II. On Self-Knowledge and Knowledge of the Self 1. Scudéry: Conversation 2. Dupin: Sensation and Belief 3. Verzure: Comparison 4. Necker: Writing 5. Guizot: Doubts 6. Introspection and the Act of Writing III. On Friendship 1. Foundations of Friendship 2. Rituals of Friendship: Reciprocity, Exchange, Secrets 3. Sameness and Difference 4. The Politics of Reconnaissance IV. On Happiness and the Passions 1. From the Passsions to Passion 2. The Worlds of La Sablière and Dupin 3. Practical Guidance in Du Châtelet and Fourqueux 4. The Passions and Their Discontents in d'Arconville 5. Staël's Phenomenology of Passion V. On Marriage 1. The Philosophical and Legal Critique 2. The Implicit Moralist Critique: Lambert and Puisieux 3. The Explicit Moralist Critique: Verzure and d'Arconville 4. Suzanne Necker's Defense of Marriage 5. On Liberty VI. On Age and Experience 1. Experience, Knowledge, and the Seasons of Life 2. Codes of Conduct 3. Not her last word: d'Arconville on Old Age VII. On Women's Nature and Capabilities 1. Politeness and Embodiment 2. Portraits and Mirrors: Pringy's Differens caractères des femmes du siècle 3. Nature, Culture, and the désir de plaire 4. Comment peut-on être femme auteur? Conclusion Bibliography Index

About the Author :
Julie Candler Hayes is Professor Emerita of French at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where she served first as department chair and later as dean of the College of Humanities and Fine Arts from 2010 to 2020. Her research interests include early modern philosophy and literature, theories of language, literary theory, and translation studies. A Chevalier dans l'Ordre des Palmes Académiques since 2010, she is past president of the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies and has held fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Humanities Center, the Huntington Library, and the William Andrews Clark Memorial Library.

Review :
Women writers seldom appear in accounts of the early modern response to the intellectual, political, and cultural changes characterizing the period. Hayes offers a persuasive rethinking of these accounts through her insightful analysis of women moralists' writing. Hayes perceptively demonstrates how these writers' wide-ranging exploration of women's experience contributed to women's self-construction and sense of agency, as well as to the philosophical tradition and its understanding of the human condition. This book offers a valuable reference point for understanding the early modern. Women Moralists in Early Modern France is an important book for its breadth of scholarship and the remarkable narrative framework it constructs of philosophical inquiry in 17th and 18th century France. Hayes shows how women authors across generations treat six themes-knowledge of self and others, friendship, happiness, marriage, age and experience, and women's natural capacities-in the distinctive genre of moralist writing that was devalued as moral philosophy took a turn towards systematicity. It will be an essential resource for those of us working to recover the philosophical work of women and tell new histories of European philosophy. Hayes makes an important contribution to one of the great projects of contemporary scholarship: the expansion of the humanities canon to include the voices of hitherto neglected women authors. She provides a unitary interpretation of several early modern French women authors by showing their common roots in the moraliste genre of the period. By doing so, she reveals the philosophical significance of their work. Dealing more specifically with gender, Hayes demonstrates how these treat the issues of friendship, marriage, aging, and women's rational capabilities. Her careful analysis shows how a woman-authored set of texts, often dismissed as light literature, wrestles in depth with perennial philosophical issues. In this excellent study, Hayes argues for the importance of the writings of the French women moralists of the 17th and 18th centuries, not just to literature and history, but to philosophy.