Marie de Gournay: the Lost Historical Leader

With movements such as #MeToo and #TimesUp, we can look back through the ages to see how at various times throughout history women have raised their voices, getting angry and loud, to try and initiate important change for women. Though there are many as shown by The Other Voice of Early Modern Europe Series, this post will highlight one woman I found very interesting. When looking back, Marie de Gournay, a feminist philosopher from the 17th century, can be seen as someone who would have made an excellent leader in the current feminist movements, since she had a very similar voice and rhetoric.

#MeToo and #TimesUp are movements that have been started to bring awareness to the inequality between men and women in the workforce, especially in regards to equal pay and abuse of power for sexual harassment. However, this is not the first time the world has seen women ban together and fight.

What we see now has already happened with suffragette movement, another movement to fight for certain equalities for women, in that case the rights to vote. The feminist rhetoric that we especially see in the last century and a half is one filled with fed up women finally raising their voices against the patriarchal axis of evil that women have been plagued by for over a millennium with no rational basis. This same rhetoric can be seen in Marie Gournay, who wrote about women’s rights to an education. Her writing could be seen as inspirational for these movements, and she should be thought of as a historical leader since her writing was ahead of her time.

Marie de Gournay writes about a fundamental equality between males and females, who’s only difference is in biological possibilities. She discusses how men and women have an equal capacity for learning, and that if there are differences, they are no bigger than the differences between men in different social classes. She also has a clear distain in her writing for the patriarchal power that puts down and holds down women, preventing them from reaching their full potential, which is much higher than men assume. Here is a Gournay quote that could have been used during any feminist movement, which still rings true today and is exactly the type of culture that the Me Too and Times Up movements are fighting against:

“If women possessed the reasoning and thoughts of Carneades, there is no man, no matter how puny he may be, who would not put them in their place with the approval of most of their company when, with merely a smile or a slight nod of the head, his silent eloquence would communicate: ‘It’s only a woman speaking.’”

Already barely acknowledged or recognized by her peers because of her being a woman, she sets herself apart even more because of her style of writing, which is often filled with irony, sarcasm, and strong bold statements. It is no wonder that the males she encountered despised her! However, looking back at her writing now, we can see the same anger and fight in her as the world saw with the suffragettes, and is now seeing with the Times Up and Me Too movements. Marie Gournay had little respect from others, but that is only because she was so ahead of her time. A revolutionary, she fights for women’s education and equality in a way that we saw the suffragettes fight for women’s rights to vote, and we now see women fighting for equal pay and against sexual harassment.

Marie Gournay did not just say that women deserve an education, she argued for a certain fundamental equality between men and women based on the fact that both genders are at the end of the day human beings with the propensity for rationality and autonomy. She recognized that women are not inherently any less deserving of all the privileges that men have, and men are foolish and egotistical for thinking that they are somehow inherently better and more deserving of rights than women are. Although society has come a long way, we see how these ideas are still very much underlying many parts of society, which is why we once again have strong female voices standing up against the very much still existing heavy patriarchal arm. It is the same fight as Marie Gournay, the suffragettes, and many other feminists, just this time saying that men cannot treat women the way they have been, that females are just as much deserving of equal pay, and that women will no longer stay quiet and tolerate sexual harassment in the work force!

Source: Clarke, Desmond, ed.. The Equality of the Sexes. Oxford: Oxford University

Press, 2013. ISBN 9780199673513