In analysing her Equality of Men and Women we find that Marie de Gournay has nothing good to say of those men who think women fit for the spinning wheel alone.
According to such men, the highest excellence to which women may aspire is to resembls the average man, (le commun des hommes). Whereas these are boasters, (vanteur) whom women wish least to be like; little men who will not listen to reason, declaring themselves, as if by edict lords of the earth.
Marie de Gourney goes on to say that great men of all time have had faith in the ability of women. Socrates and Plato granted them equal rights with the men in their Republic, and elsewhere.
These two philsophers, miracles of nature, thought to give more lustre to their weighty discourses if they were pronounced by the lips of Diotime and Hypathia, Diotime whom Socrates was not afraid to call his teacher and preceptress in some of the highest sciences, though he himself was the teacher and preceptor of the race.
At this point, she concedes, however, that though some women have excelled, yet it is a fact that they are few in number compared to the men who have done great things in the world. Why is this true? And, here, to my mind, our author voices the great truth of her Essay, a truth not accepted in her age and generation, or indeed for several generations after. She cries out:
It is not surprising that women have arrived so seldom at a point of excellence, considering the lack of instruction which they receive. The wonder is, that with everything against them, they have arrived at all. When they have, it is because they have received, to a small degree, some opportunity of education. This accounts for the difference among women themselves. Women in France and England are admitted into society (le commerce du monde) and are called pretty, polished, refined in conversation, while the Italian women, who live a secluded life, lack these qualities which they have had no occasion to cultivate.
She concludes then, that if the difference in the bringing up, and the lack of opportunity of using gifts born in them, accounts for the difference among women, it is the difference in the education and opportunities of both sexes which is responsible for the divergence in the present ability of men and women.
Having reached this conclusion, Marie de Gournay strikes out boldly to her second principle, though she does not enlarge upon this either, as we wish that she had. Granted equal education with men, women will, she maintains, be as fit to occupy
