Discourses of Female Education in the Writings of Eighteenth-Century French Women

Abstract

This essay focuses on printed contributions to the eighteenth-century French debate on women’s education. Following a brief discussion of two major male contributors to the field, Fénelon and Poulain de la Barre, it concentrates on a dozen female writers, most of whom published in the second half of the century. These women ranged from high-ranking aristocrats such as the Marchioness de Lambert and the Countess de Miremont to bourgeois women who carved out literary or political careers for themselves, such as Mme de Puisieux, Mme Le Prince de Beaumont, and Mme Roland. The essay proceeds chronologically in order to pinpoint changes occurring over the century. The case for women’s access to knowledge and culture had many adherents by the late seventeenth century but it was to be another two hundred years before lycées (grammar schools) were opened to girls in 1880. Taking up the cause, eighteenth-century French women struggled to move out of the shadow of influential male opinion, but were overtaken in their aspirations by the dramatic intellectual, cultural and political changes of the revolutionary period.