Women’s Political Writing

In Philosophy and the State in France (1980), Nannerl O. Keohane states that she ‘take[s] an ironic pleasure in writing about men who thought women incapable of participating in or discoursing about politics’; ¹ accordingly, none of the political thinkers she discusses are women. Her chapter on the Fronde – the series of civil wars between 1648 and 1653 in which the nobility and the Parlement (law courts) opposed the de facto rule of Cardinal Mazarin and the regent Anne of Austria – includes discussion of the memoirs of Cardinal de Retz, but not any of the memoirs authored by women: Madame de Motteville, Mademoiselle de Montpensier or Madame de La Guette. This omission is particularly notable, since the Fronde provided the arena in which many noblewomen – collectively called the frondeuses – achieved political prominence: not only Montpensier, called the ‘Grande Mademoiselle’, who opposed her father Gaston d’Orléans, brother of Louis XIII, but also Madame de Longueville, the sister of Condé, the leader of the frondeurs, who acted on his behalf after his imprisonment. The fact that Keohane, who herself served as president of Wellesley College and Duke University, did not discuss in her book women who indeed ‘participat[ed] in or discours[ed] about politics’, indicates the strength of the prevailing assumption that excludes women from political discourse as recently as the late twentieth century.