A Cyclopaedia of Female Biography/Guillaume, Jacquette
GUILLAUME, JACQUETTE,
A French lady of the seventeenth century, who wrote a work entitled "Les Dames Illustres: où par bonnes et fortes Raisons, il se prouve que le sexe feminin surpasse en toute sorte de Genre le sexe masculin." In this performance, published in 1665, the writer attempts to prove the superiority of the female over the male sex, through the whole human and animal creation. The style is elegant and unaffected, and the examples and observations shew knowledge and research. She did not, however, dwell sufficiently on the kind of superiority she claimed for woman over man—that it was moral, not mental or physical power which the female sex was ordained to wield. Nor did she distinguish sufficiently between the manifestations of the distinctive characters of man and woman: that the power of the first was centred in the reason and the will; of the last, in the conscience and the affections. She had never studied the Bible, which is the grand charter of woman's rights, and the only true expositor of her duties.