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.

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.

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