I Found the Feminism I Was Looking For in the Lost Writings of a 17th-Century Priest
This article was published online on July 28, 2021.
What if I told you that the first modern feminist was a man, lived in the 17th century, and was a priest? I’m guessing you’d be especially skeptical about the priest part, so I’ll add that when this father of feminism wrote his vindications of women’s rights, he wasn’t a priest yet. He became one later, probably because he was broke.
His name was François Poulain de la Barre (actually, he added “de la Barre” later in life, and “Poulain” was sometimes spelled “Poullain”), and he grew up in Paris. His parents decided early on that he would become a priest, preferably with a doctoral degree so that he could rise through the ranks in the Church. He began his schooling at 9 and at 16 entered the Sorbonne, where he was force-fed a dry, Scholastic, all-Latin curriculum straight out of antiquity and the Middle Ages, with a special emphasis on the classics and Saint Thomas Aquinas. We know that Poulain excelled in his studies, and we also know that at 19, armed with his bachelor’s, he left school rather than acquire his doctorate, at which point his parents may have cut him off. For the first half of the next decade, he seems to have been an intellectual-about-town. He immersed himself in the free-for-all of the “Radical Enlightenment,” a more intensely anti-authoritarian strain of the early Enlightenment.
We don’t know much about the young Poulain’s daily activities, but we do know that, even before he left school, he was frequenting a freethinkers’ debate society that sometimes took on topics such as “whether women’s passions are stronger than men’s” and “whether the study of the arts and sciences is useful to women.” He may have gone to salons where the elites of the day gathered to expound upon new ideas and discuss novels, and perhaps even read their own work aloud. Aristocratic or well-to-do women hosted these affairs—some evidence suggests that he may have been a distant cousin of one eminent salonnière—and because Poulain probably hadn’t met many women in school, their presence would have offered its own kind of education. He was a man in search of a new worldview, and when he finally came up with one, it was audacious.
While still in his mid-20s, Poulain wrote three books in quick succession (1673–75). They constitute the first rigorously reasoned attack on the patriarchy. Before that, proto-feminist women (there were more of them than you’d think) tended to defend their sex by citing the accomplishments of queens and heroines of history and myth. Poulain instead used logic to demonstrate the absolute equality of women and men, and to make the case for their right to equal treatment under the law, equal access to education, and equal professional opportunities. (He saw no reason women couldn’t occupy high clerical positions, putting him a good 350 years ahead of a still-resistant Catholic Church.) Poulain rejected a marital contract that granted men dominion over women; he declared that marriage should be between equals, like friendship, and that husbands forced wives into a submissive role for no better reason than that they were “out-and-out
