The Preliminaries to Marriage

Abstract

Of all the virtues which pedagogues strove to inculcate into girls, few received more emphasis than obedience, ‘le partage de notre sexe’ in the words of Mme de Maintenon.¹ The reason is not far to seek. The physical, mental and emotional weaknesses of women, as consecrated by tradition and by contemporary legislation, bent them in an eternally submissive posture before the stronger sex from whom they derived all their well-being. They were the dependent sex. ‘Qui dit femme, dit une chose dépendante’, affirmed one moralist.² Women are like vines, declared another: ‘elles ne sauraient se tenir debout, ni subsister par elles-mêmes; elles ont besoin d’un appui, encore plus pour leur esprit que pour leur corps’.³ The notion of female independence was not easily comprehensible to a seventeenth-century mind. At every stage of their life steps were taken to place women under some form of tutelage, ideally masculine. For those unwilling to make a graceful exit into the cloister this normally meant passing straight from the hands of one guardian, the father, into those of another, the husband.