869J François Poulain de la Barre, 1647-1723.
De l’égalité des deux sexes, discours physique et moral, où l’on voit l’importance de se défaire des préjugez.
Paris, Jean Du Puis, 1676. Price $4,500
Duodecimo 14 x cm. Signatures: â8 A-x8/4. A very nice clean copy, bound in contemporary calf gilt spine. Second edition ( title page re-issue).
Simone de Beauvoir in The Second Sex quotes this book:
“Everything that has been written by men about women must be suspect, because they are both judge and jury”,
This book marks a very special position in the origins of the Enlightenment, the history of Feminism, the emergence of Rational Christianity, and the influence of Descartes’s philosophy the social and political spirit of the lat 17th century. This groundbreaking work is the first comprehensive rational philosophical study of the the biology and psychology of Gender. Poulain, brings to life the men and women of the Radical Enlightenment, who pioneered ideas about equality that would shape humankind to this day.
At the very beginning of the preface to De l’égalité des deux sexes, Poulain writes that the best idea that may occur to those who try to acquire genuine knowledge, if they were educated according to traditional methods, is to doubt if they were taught well and to wish to discover the truth themselves. As they make progress in this search for truth, they cannot avoid noticing that we are full of prejudices, and that it is necessary to get rid of them completely in order to acquire clear and distinct knowledge. (T1en 119; TTfr 53)[1] (perhaps a lesson which still needs to be learned).
In short Poulain uses Descartes’ method for of doubt , critical rationality as tools in the search for truth and it is presented in all of major works.
In the second part of De l’égalité, Poulain postulates that “the mind has no sex” and loosely connects his claim to Descartes’ dualism (T1en 157–158; TTfr 99–100). The claim in itself was not new—we find it already in the theological doctrine of Augustine, who holds that the rational souls of women and men are equally created in the image of God (De trinitate XII 7.12), and in Poulain’s time it had recently been stated, with strong feminist emphasis, by Marie le Jars de Gournay (G-EMW 65; G-OC 978). Still, many of Poulain’s contemporaries as well as modern scholars agree that Descartes’ dualism strengthened the idea that the mind has no sex.
François Poulain [Poullain] de la Barre rejected the dogmatic reasoning style of his scholastic education in writing this foundational feminist text. It is the first of three works, published in succession between 1673 and 1675, in which he makes an argument for the equality of the sexes. De l’Égalité des Deux Sexes was followed by De l’éducation des dames pour la conduite de l’esprit, dans les sciences et dans les moeurs: Entretiens (1674). The trio concludes with De l’excellence des hommes, contre l’égalité des sexes (1675) in which Poulain responds to and refutes his own counterarguments to gender equality.
While other feminist writers before him called upon religious and philosophical authorities, Poulain was the first to base his argument on (Cartesian) reason alone. “Poulain borrowed from Cartesians of the 1670s the idea that many common beliefs are ‘prejudices’, i.e., ‘judgements made about things without having examined them’” (Clarke, François Poulain de la Barre in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy).
In this sense, l’Égalité can be seen not only as a turning point in feminist thought and argumentation, but also one of the first truly philosophical feminist works.
Albistur and Armogathe, Poulain’s involvement with Cartesianism as a catalyst in feminism:
“Without Descartes there would not have been Poullain de la Barre; without Poullain de la Barre, the history of feminism would have gone nowhere for a long time. Undeniably, he must be considered the theoretician for women’s emancipation, the most important that we had from the Middle Ages to the middle of the nineteenth century” (Histoire du féminisme français, p. 84, as translated in Three Cartesian Feminist Treatises, fn. 104, p. 33).
“Poulain changed the focus of the debate about women in the seventeenth century… He challenged the factual claims on which opponents of sexual equality relied, rejected the value of appealing to women’s nature as if it were something that could be known independently of the properties that were predicated of it, and rejected as invalid any inference from established customs (as mere facts) to a moral or political justification of women’s status… Poulain may be described as the first Cartesian feminist” (Clarke).
National union catalog (pre-1956 imprints),; NP 0525175 (vol. 468, p. 73). Reuter, Martina, “François Poulain de la Barre”, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2025 Edition), Edward N. Zalta & Uri Nodelman (eds.), ; cf. H. Grappin, A propos du féministe Poullain de La Barre (in Revue d’hist. litt. de la France, 1914, p. 387). Histoire du féminisme français. by: Albistur, Maïté. Publication date: 1977
https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2025/entries/francois-barre/.
A book which also addresses the Physical and Biological relations of the sex is 759J M. Jean Châstelain ±1715 (professeur de l’Université de Montpellier1697-1715).
Traité des convulsions et des mouvemens convulsifs qu’on appelle à présent vapeurs, par M. Chastelain.
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