Detlefsen, Bachir Diagne, Don Garrett, Robert Gooding-Williams, Andrew Janiak, Marcy Lascano, Lisa Shapiro, Tommie Shelby
OxfordNewHistoriesofPhilosophyprovides essential resources for those aiming to diversify the content of their philosophy courses, revisit traditional narratives about the history of philosophy, or better understand the richness of philosophy’s past. Examining previously neglected or understudied philosophical figures, movements, and traditions, the series includes both innovative new scholarship and new primary sources.
Edited and Translated by Philip J. Ivanhoe and Hwa Yeong Wang
LouiseDupin’sWork on Women: Selections
Edited and Translated by Angela Hunter and Rebecca Wilkin
Louise Dupin’s Workon Women
Selections
EditedandTranslatedby
ANGELA HUNTER AND REBECCA WILKIN
Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and certain other countries.
Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America.
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You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer.
Library of Congress Control Number: 2023938971
ISBN 978–0–19–009010–4 (pbk.)
ISBN 978–0–19–009009–8 (hbk.)
ISBN 978–0–19–009012–8 (epub)
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780190090098.001.0001
Contents
SeriesEditors’Foreword
Acknowledgments
NotesonSelectionandTranslation
Reader’sOrientation
Chronology:TimelineofDupin’sLife
Introduction to the Volume
Part I: Science
Article 1. Observations on the Equality of the Sexes and on Their Difference
Article 2. On Generation
Article 3. On Temperament
Article 4. On Strength
Article 5. Animal and Plant Analogies
Part II: History and Religion
Article 12. Foreword on History
Article 13. On Ancient History
Article 18. On Turkey and Persia
Article 20. Other Countries
Article 21. On the History of France
Article 8. On the Discipline of the Church
Article 10. On the State of Monastic Orders since the Council of Trent
Part III: Law
Article 27. Foreword on Laws
Article 28. On Salic Law, Considered as a Law
Article 29. On Different Forms of Roman Marriage, on the Property Rights That Married Women Enjoyed, and on Marriage Today
Article 30. On the Power of Husbands; On the Prerogatives That the Law Grants—and Could Grant—to Married Women
Article 32. On Adultery and Its Punishment
Article 36. On Tutorships and Testimony
Chapter 37. On Rape
Part IV: Education and Mores
[Article 22]. Foreword on Mores
Article 23. On Education
Article 39. The Effects of Education on Morals
Article 40. Further Reflections on Education
Article 42. Education in Marriage
Article 45. On the Spirit of General Conversation
Article 46. Observations on the Spirit of Theater
Appendices
Appendix A. WorkonWomenArticles and Manuscript Pieces
Appendix B. Anicet Sénéchal’s Inventory and Ordering of Manuscript
BibliographyofSelectedSecondarySources
Index
Series Editors’ Foreword
Oxford New Histories of Philosophy speaks to a new climate in philosophy.
There is a growing awareness that philosophy’s past is richer and more diverse than previously understood. It has become clear that canonical figures are best studied in a broad context. More exciting still is the recognition that our philosophical heritage contains longforgotten innovative ideas, movements, and thinkers. Sometimes these thinkers warrant serious study in their own right; sometimes their importance resides in the conversations they helped reframe or problems they devised; often their philosophical proposals force us to rethink long-held assumptions about a period or genre; and frequently they cast well-known philosophical discussions in a fresh light.
There is also a mounting sense among philosophers that our discipline benefits from a diversity of perspectives and a commitment to inclusiveness. In a time when questions about justice, inequality, dignity, education, discrimination, and climate (to name a few) are especially vivid, it is appropriate to mine historical texts for insights that can shift conversations and reframe solutions. Given that philosophy’s very long history contains astute discussions of a vast array of topics, the time is right to cast a broad historical net. Lastly, there is increasing interest among philosophy instructors in speaking to the diversity and concerns of their students. Although historical discussions and texts can serve as a powerful means of doing so, finding the necessary time and tools to excavate longburied historical materials is challenging.
Oxford New Histories of Philosophy is designed to address all these needs. It will contain new editions and translations of significant historical texts. These primary materials will make
available, often for the first time, ideas and works by women, people of color, and movements in philosophy’s past that were groundbreaking in their day, but left out of traditional accounts. Informative introductions will help instructors and students navigate the new material. Alongside its primary texts, ONHP will also publish monographs and collections of essays that offer philosophically subtle analyses of understudied topics, movements, and figures. In combining primary materials and astute philosophical analyses, ONHP will make it easier for philosophers, historians, and instructors to include in their courses and research exciting new materials drawn from philosophy’s past.
ONHP’s range will be wide, both historically and culturally. The series plans to include, for example, the writings of African American philosophers, twentieth-century Mexican philosophers, early modern and late medieval women, Islamic and Jewish authors, and nonwestern thinkers. It will excavate and analyze problems and ideas that were prominent in their day but forgotten by later historians. And it will serve as a significant aid to philosophers in teaching and researching this material.
As we expand the range of philosophical voices, it is important to acknowledge one voice responsible for this series. Eileen O’Neill was a series editor until her death, December 1, 2017. She was instrumental in motivating and conceptualizing ONHP. Her brilliant scholarship, advocacy, and generosity made all the difference to the efforts that this series is meant to represent. She will be deeply missed, as a scholar and a friend.
We are proud to contribute to philosophy’s present and to a richer understanding of its past.
SeriesEditors
Christia Mercer and Melvin Rogers
Acknowledgments
This book was a tremendous task to complete, and we wouldn’t have been able to do it without many kinds of support, for which we are extremely grateful.
We acknowledge the financial support that made it possible for us to begin and to complete this project. We received a National Endowment for the Humanities Scholarly Editions and Translations grant (October 2021–June 2022). Wilkin received a National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Stipend (2019); a Harry Ransom Center Research Fellowship in the Humanities (2019–2020), supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Research Fellowship Endowment; and from Pacific Lutheran University, a Karen Hille Phillips Regency Advancement Award (2014–2015); a Kelmer Roe Student Faculty Collaborative Research Grant with Sonja Ruud (2011–2012); and two sabbaticals (2014–2015 and Spring 2022). Hunter received an ASECS Women’s Caucus Editing and Translation Fellowship (2019–2020); an American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies fellowship at the Harry Ransom Center Research Fellowship, supported by the Mellon Foundation (2008); and from University of Arkansas-Little Rock, Off-Campus Duty Assignment, Spring 2021; and summer research fellowships in 2009 and 2017.
We thank the many people without whose support this book would not be:
For welcoming Louise Dupin to the New Histories of Philosophy series at Oxford University Press and for their guidance, Peter Ohlin, Christia Mercer, Melvin Rogers; and for their assistance, Preetham Raj and Anne Sanow.
For sharing expertise that helped us track down sources: Ann Blair, Michael Johnson, Julia Lewandoska, Eric MacPhail, Steven Nadler,
Sasha Pfau, Jason Schroeder, and Troy Storfjell. For expertise on salon attendees, Melanie Conroy.
For helping us decipher Latin, Marco Dorfsman, Michael Johnson, and Molly Lindberg.
For her advice on Catholic terminology, Daniella Kostroun.
For their research skills and annotation assistance in a few articles, PLU students Kasey Gardner and Anna Nguyen—through Kelmer Roe Student Faculty Collaborative Research Grants—and in the final hour, Molly Lindberg, freelance graduate student extraordinaire.
For making initial translations of portions of Article 23, the students of Wilkin’s 2020 French Feminisms class: Anastasia Bidne, Littlepage Green, Holly Knutsen, Jamie Rose McNeil, and Anna Nguyen.
For providing key feedback on early versions of our section introductions and chapters: Cynthia Bannon, Peggy Elliott, Julie Candler Hayes, Daniella Kostroun, and Geoffrey Turnovsky.
For keeping us updated on Dupin manuscripts for sale: Volker Schröder.
We are grateful to staff members of many libraries and archives: Katie Wallis (for all the ILL) at PLU’s Mortvedt Library; Sal Robinson and Roger Wieck from the Pierpont Morgan Library; Chantal Mustel, Robert Thiéry, and Laurine Perreau for their welcome and for information regarding the Dupin collection at the Musée JeanJacques Rousseau, and Laure Quérouil, co-traveler to Montmorency and unheralded transcriber of Dupin; and Elizabeth Garver of the Harry Ransom Center for years of help (consultations, scans, and more).
Merci to our friend in Dupin studies, Frédéric Marty, for sharing his transcriptions of several articles for our comparison, his descriptive list of the contents of the Fonds Dehaynin at the Abbaye de Chaalis, and his thoughts on manuscript ordering. Angela especially thanks him for the warm camaraderie in Montmorency.
For their encouragement and steadfast support of our scholarship on Dupin: Julie Hayes, Marie-Frédérique Pellegrin, Lisa Shapiro, and as ever, Geoffrey Turnovsky. For institutional encouragement, Dean of Humanities Kevin O’Brien (PLU) and Dr. Jeremy Ecke (UALR).
For their moral support: Rebecca thanks Cristina Thomas (so many steps), Mei Zhu (so many texts), and Priscilla St. Clair (too few hikes); her parents, David and Betty Wilkin (all the love); and her daughter, Marian Picard (all the laughs). Angela thanks her parents, Roy and Susan Hunter; her steadfast friend, Michael Johnson (who accidentally introduced her to Dupin); and her children, Ayelet and Delphine Benjamin.
Sonja Ruud deserves more than thanks can convey for being there from the start with Rebecca on the Dupin journey and for returning to this project to provide her scholarly acumen, transcription excellence, and database creation as a Research Associate on the NEH grant.
We gratefully recognize Cédric Picard and Marco Hunter Dorfsman for keeping everything running during our long hours of work, and for their love and boundless patience.
And, finally, we thank Louise Dupin for bringing us together.
Notes on Selection and Translation
Selection
Out of the forty-seven articles that comprised the Work on Women at the time Dupin stopped working on it, eight are missing and four are in fragmentary or very rough form, leaving thirty-five in a condition we would consider complete or likely near completion. Twenty-six of those are featured in our edition. In making the selection, we had two main objectives. The first was breadth, to ensure that we had articles from each of the four thematic divisions, and that together, they demonstrate Dupin’s methodology and style as well as the major tenets of her argument. The second was variety, to ensure we showcased the different ways Dupin engages with traditions and contemporaries. In this, we were careful to include pieces that feature her strengths, but we did not hide her shortcomings.
Translation
We have worked to preserve the tone and economy of Dupin’s prose and to capture her voice: her hyper-rational viewpoint, withering wit, and occasional flights of idealism. We strove to transmit her ideas clearly, rearranging clauses and altering sentence boundaries if necessary. The breadth of the Work’s topics means that there are a range of technical terms, from the sciences to the courts. The first five articles (Part I) employ medical and scientific terms both general and specific, which we have rendered using English equivalents from the time period (e.g., “animal spirits”) and explanatory notes. See
the introduction to Part I for a description of how we handled the word physique, which is particularly tricky as Dupin uses it frequently and there is no perfectly fitting English substitute.
Court proceedings were a facet of everyday life for the wealthy and working-class alike in eighteenth-century France, and the language of litigation inflects Dupin’s prose. For most modern readers this legal terminology is arcane, so we have used explanatory notes to balance accuracy and ease. Dupin was working at times with translations from Latin into French made by her secretary, Rousseau. We chose to translate these passages from the French in order to preserve consistency in style; for the most part we have found Rousseau’s translations to be generally faithful. We used The Roman Law Library as a resource throughout Part IV, the Law section (https://droitromain.univ-grenoble-alpes.fr). Dupin used the Port-Royal Bible—the French translation most commonly used in the eighteenth century, produced at Port-Royal under the direction of Louis-Isaac Lemaistre, sieur de Sacy, from 1657 to 1696. We translated into English from Sacy’s French rather than substituting in a standard English translation.
Reader’s Orientation
Manuscripts
See Appendix A for the list of articles comprising the Work on Women, including the current location of the manuscripts used; we provide the same information for any draft referenced in introductions and notes.
Abbreviations
Some article and draft titles are sentence-length, so they have been shortened in places; they contain the relevant words to allow the reader to find them in the appendix list. In the first note of each distinct article, we provide the full name of the archive holding the manuscripts used for the translation; otherwise we abbreviate the three major repositories in the following way: the Harry Ransom Center (HRC); the Musée Jean-Jacques Rousseau (MJJR); and the Bibliothèque de Genève (BGe).
Notes and Sources
Dupin provides occasional notes in the manuscript, which we have included in the body of the text {in braces}. All other notes are our own. In the notes for each article, we provided bibliographic information for the sources that Dupin mentions as well as the many additional sources that we located. There are likely places where Dupin used an intermediary source and we reference the primary
source instead; we did, however, attempt to locate intermediary sources wherever possible. We often used the best possible edition accessible to us, although we attempted to use the exact one Dupin did whenever this information was known, whether because Dupin provided it (rare), because the information was found by a later scholar (common—see Sénéchal, Le Bouler and Lafarge, Le Bouler and Thiéry, Marty), or because we were able to determine this information ourselves. Further information about intellectual context and interlocutors is found in each of the four section introductions. Our focus has been on locating Dupin’s sources; we did not key Dupin’s citations of Roman laws to modern editions and referencing methods.
Bibliography
Bibliographic information for all primary sources is in a note at the first use in each section; thereafter, a shortened reference is used. A brief selected secondary source bibliography is present in the back matter; due to space constraints, this bibliography simply touches on the major issues represented in our work. For sources found in the bibliography, shortened bibliographic information is used in notes throughout. All other secondary sources have full bibliographical information in notes.
Chronology: Timeline of Dupin’s Life
The table below includes important events in Dupin’s life (drawn from Jean Buon’s Madame Dupin) alongside key dates in French history and relevant works published. The publications include other feminist works and important texts by/about women, works by authors in Dupin’s circle, and influential works. *Asterisk denotes an attendee of Dupin’s salon, according to Buon.
Table R.1 Timeline of Dupin’s Life
Years Louise Dupin’s life
1700–1709
1710–1719
1702: Louise’s mother, Armande CartonDancourt, marries Guillaume de Fontaine 1705: Louise’s eldest sister, Marie Thérèse, is born 1706: LouiseMarie-MadeleineGuillaume is born to Samuel Bernard and Armande CartonDancourt 1709: Louise’s brother, Jules Armand, is born
1710: Louise’s sister, Marie-Louise, is born 1712: Louise’s sister, Françoise-Thérèse, is born 1714: Louise’s future husband, Claude Dupin, marries MarieJeanne Bouilat 1715: Claude and MarieJeanne’s son, LouisClaude-Charles, is born 1716: Dupin’s father’s first wife, AnneMadeleine Clergeau, dies
1720–1729
1720: Claude Dupin’s first wife dies 1722:
Louise marries Claude Dupin 1722: Louise’s father gives her mother funds to buy the Château de Passy 1726: Claude Dupin
1701: War of the Spanish Succession begins
1710: Louis XV is born 1713: Treaty of Utrecht 1714: War of the Spanish Succession ends 1715: Louis XIV dies, Louis XV becomes king at age 5 1715: Regency of Philippe II, duc d’Orl é ans, begins 1717: Voltaire imprisoned in the Bastille
1721: Louis XV
Louis betrothed by Philippe II to the infanta Mariana, daughter of King Philip V of Spain 1723: Louis XV reaches his legal
1700: Du célibat volontaire, ou La vie sans engagement by Gabrielle Suchon
1713: Projetpour rendre lapaixperpétuelle en Europe by Charles-Irénée Castel de Saint-Pierre* 1716: Examenpacifique de laquerelle de Mme Dacier etde M. de La Motte sur Homère by Étienne Fourmont* 1719: Discours sur la polysynodie oupluralité des Conseils by Castel de Saint-Pierre*
1721: Lettres Persanes by Montesquieu* 1727: Réflexions nouvelles sur les femmes by Anne Thérèse (Marquise) de Lambert
Years Louise Dupin’s life
becomes fermiergénéral1727: Louise and Claude’s son, Jacques-Armand, is born 1728: Claude Dupin purchases title of Secrétaire de la Chambre etdu Cabinet du Roi, which confers first degree nobility
Historical Context
majority and Regency of Philippe II ends 1723: Philippe II dies, Louis XV appoints Louis-Henri, duc de Bourbon-Condé as his first minister 1725: Louis XV’s marries Marie Leszczyńska, daughter of King Stanisław I of Poland
Relevant Publications
1730–1739 1732: The Dupins buy the Hôtel Lambert 1732: Louise opens her salon 1733: The Dupins purchase Château de Chenonceau 1734: Voltaire sends Louise plans for a work in progress, Alzire 1739: Louise’s father, Samuel Bernard, dies 1739: The Dupins sell the Hôtel Lambert
1733: War of the Polish Succession begins 1738: War of the Polish Succession ends
1732: Le Triomphe de l’amour, play by Pierre de Marivaux* 1733: Traité physique et historique de l’aurore boréale by JeanJacques Dortous de Mairan* 1734: Lettres philosophiques by Voltaire* 1736: Traitéde l’amitiéby Anne Thérèse de Lambert 1736: Alzire by Voltaire* 1736: L’Apologie des dames, appuyée sur l’histoire, by Madame de ChâteauThierry Galien [anonymously]
1740–1749 1743: Father Castel introduces Rousseau to Louise; Rousseau develops a friendship with Louise and her step-son 1743: Rousseau works as a private tutor to Jacques-Armand Dupin
1740: War of the Austrian Succession begins 1748: War of the Austrian Succession ends 1740: De la douceur by Castel de Saint-Pierre* 1740: Institutions de physique by Émilie le Tonnelier de Breteuil, Marquise du Châtelet 1745: Œconomiques by Claude Dupin 1746: Essai sur l’origine des
Years Louise Dupin’s life
de Chenonceaux for about 8–10 days 1743: Castel de Saint Pierre, friend and important influence for Louise, dies 1745: Louise’s mother dies 1745: Rousseau begins working as a secretary for both Louise and her stepson. During this time, Rousseau accompanies the Dupins to Chenonceau several times 1749: Jacques-Armand Dupin de Chenonceaux marries Julie de Rochechouart-Pontville
Historical Context
Relevant Publications
connaissances humaines by Étienne Bonnot de Condillac* 1747: Lettres d’une Péruvienne by Françoise Graffigny 1748: Mémoire sur les bleds by Claude Dupin 1748: De l’espritdes loix by Montesquieu* 1749: Réflexions surquelques parties d’un livre intitulé “de l’espritdes loix”by Dupins (et al) 1749: 1st volume of Histoire naturelle, générale et particulière by de Buffon* 1749: Traitédes systèmes by Condillac* 1749: Conseils àune amie by Madeleine d’Arsant de Puisieux
1750–1759
1751: Rousseau leaves his job as secretary to the Dupins 1751: Jacques-Armand and Julie’s son, ClaudeSophie, is born 1755: An alleged illegitimate daughter of JacquesArmand, Marie-Thérèse Adam, is born and Louise raises the child 1758: The Dupins buy the Hôtel de Vins 1758: Louise’s brother, Jules-Armand de Fontaine, dies
1751: 1st volume of Encyclopédie is published 1754: Louis XVI is born 1755: Montesquieu dies 1756: Seven Years’ War begins
1750: Dissertation sur la question, Lequelde l’homme ou de la femme estplus capable de constance?by Mademoiselle Archambault 1750: Caractères by Madeleine de Puisieux 1750: Discours sur les sciences et les arts by Rousseau 1753: Mémoires sur l’ancienne chevalerie, considérée comme un établissementpolitique & militaire by Jean-Baptiste de la Curne de SaintePalaye* 1754: Discours sur l’origine et les
Years Louise Dupin’s life
Historical Context
1760–1769
1770–1779
1762: Claude Dupin retires 1763: Louise’s daughter-in-law and grandson leave the Dupins’ home 1765: Two of Louise’s sisters, Marie-Louise d’Arty and Françoise-Thérèse
Vallet de Villeneuve, die 1767: Dupin de Chenonceaux dies of yellow fever, exiled in present-day Mauritius 1769: Claude Dupin dies
1762: Rousseau’s Émile burned on order of the Parlement of Paris 1763: Seven Years’ War ends 1764: Expulsion of Jesuits from France 1769: Napoleon Bonaparte is born
1778: Rousseau dies 1770: Marie
Antoinette marries future King Louis XVI 1771: Paris Parlements are dissolved 1774: Louis XV dies, Louis XVI accedes to the throne 1778: Voltaire dies 1779: Serfdom abolished by comptroller
Relevant Publications
fondements de l’inégalité parmiles hommes by Rousseau 1756: Essaisur les moeurs by Voltaire* 1758: De l’esprit by Claude-Adrien Helvétius* 1758: Lettre àd’Alembert sur les spectacles by Rousseau 1758: Candide by Voltaire*
1761: De l’amitiéby Geneviève Thiroux d’Arconville 1761: La Nouvelle Héloïse by Rousseau 1762: Du contratsocialby Rousseau 1762: Émile ou de l’éducation by Rousseau 1763: Entretiens de Phocion sur le rapportde la morale avec lapolitique by Gabriel Bonnot Mably* 1764 Essaipour servir à l’histoire de la putréfaction by Geneviève Thiroux d’Arconville
1772: De l’homme by Helvétius* 1774: Les Conversations d’Émilie by Louise d’Épinay* 1774: Vie de Marie de Médicis by Geneviève Thiroux d’ Arconville 1779: De l’éducationphysique et morale des femmes by Charlotte Cosson de la Cressonière
Years Louise Dupin’s life
Historical Context
general, Jacques Necker
Relevant Publications
1780–1789 1786: Louise’s stepson, Dupin de Francueil, dies 1788: Louise’s grandson, ClaudeSophie, dies, leaving Louise with no direct descendants
1783: Treaty of Paris is signed, ending the American Revolutionary War 1789: French Revolution; Fall of the Bastille, Declaration of “Droits de l’homme”: (August 26)
1782: Adèle et Théodore by Stéphanie Félicité de Genlis 1785: Les Femmes comme ilconvientde les voir, ou Aperçu de ce qu’elles ontétéetde ce qu’elles sontde de ce qu’ellespourraientêtre by Madame de Coicy
1790–1799
1792: Louise abandons Paris for permanent residence at Chenonceau, accompanied by the family of her nephew 1794: Louise’s nephew, Pierre-Armand de Villeneuve, dies in prison in Paris 1793: Citizen Dupin wins right to keep Chenonceau after a National Convention decree confiscated domain properties (she proved it had always been a private property and was thus exempt) 1799: Louise Dupin dies November 20.
1791: Constitution created by National Assembly 1791: Revolution begins in Haiti, against colonial rule and slavery 1792: First Republic of France begins 1793: Reign of Terror begins 1793: Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette are guillotined 1794: Reign of Terror ends 1795: Constitution of 1795 established 1796: Napoleon named General of the army of Italy 1799: Napoleon overthrows the Directory, becomes First Consul
1790: Sur l’admission des femmes au droitau cité by Nicolas de Condorcet 1791: Déclaration des droits de la femme etde la citoyenne by Olympe de Gouges 1791: Discours sur l’étatde nullitédans lequelon tient les femmes, relativementàla politique by Élisabeth Bonaventure Lafaurie 1792: AVindication of the Rights ofWoman by Mary Wollstonecraft 1794: Esquisse d’un tableau historique des progrès de l’esprit humain by Nicolas de Condorcet 1797: Épître aux femmes by Constance Salm (also known as de Pipelet)
Introduction to the Volume
“It is likely that chance laid the foundations, that ignorance supplied the materials, that the desire to dominate began constructing the edifice, and that the design to get away with the injustice [of that domination] capped it off.”1 Louise Dupin imagines the development of inequality between women and men through a construction metaphor reminiscent of René Descartes’s famous architectural analogy in the Discourse on Method (1637). Descartes’s analogy is epistemological. He compares discarding his opinions to razing the ricketty foundations of a city built by many hands. Dupin’s metaphor is ethical. Through a kind of historical speculation practiced before her by the Cartesian feminist François Poulain de la Barre, she asks how it came to pass that men began to see themselves as superior to women, and how it then happened that women became their legal subordinates, excluded from goods both concrete (property) and abstract (knowledge). Whereas Descartes uses the analogy of compromised foundations to justify letting go “all at one go” of what he thinks he knows,2 Dupin uses the metaphor of shoddy construction to reveal the process by which an injustice develops, takes hold, and comes to appear natural. Throughout a work that she herself did not entitle the Work on Women, Dupin sketched out the origin and foundations of inequality between men and women, just a few years before Jean-Jacques Rousseau gained everlasting fame for his Discourse on the Origin and Foundations of Inequality among Men.
The scope of Dupin’s Work on Women is vast; its philosophical edge, sharp. It is a work of political philosophy that does not just recognize marriage as the foundation of society (as almost all early modern political philosophy did), but that describes it as a leonine partnership which assigns all profits to one party, all debts to the
other, and that would under normal circumstances be null and void. The Work is moreover a work of moral philosophy that shows how masculine vanity—Dupin’s expression for that particular form of prejudice that we today call sexism—distorts science, history, and law by aggrandizing men and diminishing women, sometimes to the point of erasing them altogether. And it is a work of feminist philosophy that analyzes the systemic disempowerment of women and attempts to overwhelm the power that subordinates them through a vast program of feminist recovery.
Louise Dupin’s WorkonWomenis, at the same time, a story. It is a story of the interplay of hands and minds in intellectual creation. A story of the benign neglect that envelops women’s writing and leads to their exclusion from the stories told by entire traditions of knowledge. A story of auctions, archives, and painstaking reconstruction. And a story that is hopefully just beginning. In its broadest outlines, the story of the Work on Women is one that has been told before and will be told again by overlooked and undervalued classes of people, who force scholars to confront the injustices of the present, and to revise the narrative of how our uneven skyline emerged. But the characters, the circumstances, and the plot points of this story are absolutely unique. The opening premise of the story of Louise Dupin’s Work on Women is that it is only thanks to Rousseau that any of it still exists. Well, thanks to his handwriting. Jean-Jacques Rousseau was Louise Dupin’s secretary.
Reappearing Ink
“3000 pages of Rousseau dispersed in auctions!” announced Bernard Gagnebin in the April 26, 1958 issue of the JournaldeGenève.3 The conservator of manuscripts at Public and University Library of Geneva devoted over half a page of the paper to informing the public of the contents of the Hôtel Drouot’s sale of thousands of pages featuring Rousseau’s handwriting in five auctions in 1951, 1957, and 1958. But the headline was the equivalent of clickbait. Gagnebin’s main worry is that “an unscrupulous or simply ignorant bookseller [might try to]
pass off as Rousseau’s what is really only Dupin’s!” In the face of a false alarm, the 1958 reader of the Genevan weekly might have let their attention wander to the bottom third of the page, where Marcel Raymond reviews Jean Starobinski’s Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Transparency and Obstacle (1957).4 That instant classic uplifts Rousseau’s ideal of transparency, his lament of its impossibility, and the motif of the veil throughout his work.
One of the secrets Rousseau veils in his autobiography, the Confessions (1782, 1789), was a project that occupied almost six years of his life (1745–1751). He describes his secretarial work for Dupin in a single sentence: “She never used me except to write under her dictation, or in research of pure erudition.”5 Dupin likely requested his discretion; members of her inner circle were aware of her project, and others seem to have had an inkling of it,6 but she had neither published it, nor circulated pieces of it in manuscript form. In any case, Rousseau had no desire to flaunt his participation in a feminist project.7 “To maintain vaguely that the sexes are equal and that their duties are the same,” he declares in Emile, or On Education (1762), “is to lose oneself in vain declaiming.”8 Declamations were rhetorical exercises of praise and blame typical in the Renaissance Querelle des femmes that Dupin aspired to transcend: “Wouldn’t we do better to seek to understand [men and women] equitably without making declamations?”9 We wonder how Dupin responded to her former secretary’s veiled slight that the entire WorkonWomenwas nothing but vain declamation.
Rousseau’s silence about his work for Dupin set the stage for the nonreception of her Workfor the next two hundred years. Poulain de la Barre imagines that learned women in the past disappeared from historical record because “the demands of etiquette” prevented them from acquiring “any disciples or followers,” so that all of their learning died with them.10 But the phenomenon of women’s “disappearing ink” required the complicity of subsequent generations, Dupin argues (Art. 12).11 The fate of the Work on Women itself exemplifies the “process of submersion” that “later male gatekeepers” visited on early modern women’s accomplishments.12
In 1884, Gaston de Villeneuve-Guibert, Dupin’s great grandnephew published a prized portion of his inheritance: the contents of a “portfolio in red Morocco leather of the time, all stamped with fine gold ornamentation and fastened with a charming closure of chiseled silver.” Villeneuve-Guibert confirms his great-great aunt’s wit as a salonnièreand affirms her lesser-known credentials as a writer: She had conceived the project of defending and avenging her sex in a work on women. To that end, she had assembled countless documents, rummaged through many libraries, consulted all the books dealing with illustrious women; and more: she scrutinized laws and decrees that set out the rights of women from the most distant past. [ . . . ] She approached this gigantic task with great ardor, and Rousseau made himself useful to her.13
But this work existed only in “discontinuous scraps,” and VilleneuveGuibert judges them “too disjointed for us to reveal more than the result of her research and the general work plan were we to try to assemble them.” Instead, he publishes Dupin’s “little light writings on several moral subjects” deemed acceptable for women: friendship, happiness, and sentiment.14 On record as a salonnière with a few musings to her name, Dupin is absent from the first histories of feminist thought written two decades later, despite having written the most in-depth feminist work of eighteenth-century France.15
The auctions deplored by Gagnebin dispersed Dupin’s papers to a multitude of libraries, as well as to private collections. Yet if Dupin’s papers were only preserved thanks to Rousseau’s monetizable handwriting, it was only thanks to their sale that they became public knowledge. In preparation for the auctions of 1957 and 1958, Dupin’s heirs commissioned Anicet Sénéchal, a teacher at the Lycée Buffon in Paris, to produce an inventory of the papers to be sold. That remarkable document, published in the annals of the Jean-Jacques Rousseau Society, provides a complete sketch of Dupin’s work (see Appendix B).16 The biggest portions of papers relating to the Workon Women ended up at the Public and University Library of Geneva; at the Harry Ransom Center in Austin, Texas; and at the Musée JeanJacques Rousseau in Montmorency. Smaller pieces of the Work on Women are in the collections of a half dozen other libraries. As
librarians and curators cataloged and organized these manuscripts, fragments became accessible to scholars, who made sense of them, traced their location and chronology, and edited pieces of them.17 In 2022, when this book was in press, Frédéric Marty made the Workon Womenavailable in its entirety in French for the first time.18 Through our own labor of reconstruction, translation, and annotation, we have removed obstacles that hinder access to Louise Dupin’s feminist thought.
Bookends to a Book That Wasn’t
Accomplishing anything in the realm of knowledge requires access, education, and skills, which women in Dupin’s time were systematically denied. Since men were the gatekeepers to institutions and the discourses they produced until the middle of the twentieth century or later, most women who managed to achieve intellectual distinction in France in the eighteenth century did so with the support of men.19 Two men were crucial supporting actors in the story of the Work on Women: Dupin’s mentor, Charles-Irénée Castel de SaintPierre, known as the Abbé de Saint-Pierre, and her secretary, Rousseau. Their contributions bookend the story of the book that was not to be. Saint-Pierre provided a blueprint that Dupin did not follow, and Rousseau provided the labor to support her own plan.
Saint-Pierre found his way to Dupin’s salon by the early 1730s.20 A half-century older than Dupin, he had learned the art of politesse in the salons of Madame de Lafayette and the Marquise de Lambert. Passionate about politics and systems, reforms and fairness, he had a plan for any social or political problem. He proposed a Hobbesian social contract between countries for peace in Europe21 and lost his seat in the Académiefrançaisefor portraying Louis XIV as a despot.22 A devotee of utility, Saint-Pierre strove to be useful to Dupin. Familiar with her “complaints against the injustice” of men, he penned an essay on women for her. He calls it a “canvas, that you are infinitely more capable of filling out than me with historical facts.”23 Saint-
Pierre follows up ancient examples of women rulers with modern ones, and Western examples with Asian ones, a program Dupin would indeed follow in Part II. But his canvas was too small, too old, and not sufficiently philosophical for the tableau Dupin had in mind. Saint-Pierre celebrated “warrior virtues” reminiscent of the femme forte ideal of the seventeenth century and applied his erudition to accumulating women’s names without distinguishing legendary figures from historical ones. Moreover, he neglected causal analysis. How did inequality come to be, if men and women were naturally equal?
In an early document which we call the long “Preliminary Discourse,” Dupin establishes her own blueprint in a prospectus of the whole work.24 This document very rough and all in her hand— shows her to be deeply engaged with François Poulain de la Barre’s On theEquality of the Two Sexes (1673). She narrates humankind’s emergence from the state of nature; finds no significant physical differences between men and women; describes the education of boys and the noneducation of girls; and discusses “the manner in which the idea of the inferiority of women is continually reinforced” in the discourses of history, law, and politics—subjects she would develop into multiple chapters. Did she assign her newly hired secretary to read this “Preliminary Discourse”?
It was a different Castel—Louis Bertrand Castel—who sent Rousseau to Dupin, impressing on him that “one does nothing in Paris except by means of women.”25 The thirty-year-old interloper from Geneva was not finding a receptive audience for his musical annotation system and was in dire straits. On Father Castel’s suggestion, Rousseau visited Madame Dupin and became friendly with her stepson, Louis Dupin de Francueil, Claude Dupin’s son from a first marriage, and a fellow music lover. In March 1743, the three of them—Rousseau, Dupin, and her stepson—attended GuillaumeFrançois Rouelle’s chemistry lessons.26 Just a few weeks after Dupin’s mentor, Castel de Saint-Pierre, died (April 1743); Rousseau had his first job for the Dupin family. Madame Dupin hired him to chaperone her thirteen-year-old son, Jacques-Armand Dupin de Chenonceaux, for a week until a replacement could be found for the boy’s
