Born: 24 December 1632, France
Died: 5 March 1703
Country most active: France
Also known as: NA
The following was originally published as “Philosopher Queen of the Amazons” in the Winter 2023 issue of Humanities magazine, a publication of the National Endowment for the Humanities.
Women philosophers were not common in the seventeenth century. Many obstacles stood in the way of women being able to pursue the intellectual life. Deeply entrenched prejudices about women’s moral, intellectual, and physical inferiority generated economic, political, and cultural structures that excluded them from education, civic life, travel, and, most importantly, from freely deciding the trajectory of their adult lives. Women had two options: marry and become mothers or join the convent. For the most part, women philosophers who succeeded in spending their lives reading, thinking, writing, and publishing despite these prejudices and structural disadvantages had one thing in common: a male champion. A father, brother, or husband who brought them books, encouraged their learning, and arranged the publication of their works.
A notable and noteworthy exception is Gabrielle Suchon. Without any support of this kind, Suchon found a way to research, write, and publish works of rich philosophical argument that received significant attention in her day. Suchon’s subject was the political and moral status of women. In her work, she advances arguments for why women ought to be allowed to live freely, exercise their powers of reason, and, crucially, decide their own fates. Suchon wrote what she knew; her texts are a defense of her own life, freely chosen.
Suchon’s much more famous compatriot, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, is well known for the opening line to his 1762 The Social Contract: “Man is born free, but is everywhere in chains.” Almost 70 years earlier, Suchon wrote that women are born free, but are everywhere in chains. Women are bound by the chains of marriage, motherhood, and the convent. They are bound by the chains of ignorance, due to their exclusion from institutions of learning. Suchon spends a great deal of time on diagnosing the oppressions visited upon women, but she also offers a pathway for women’s liberation. Suchon’s solution to the subordination of women was radical in her day and remains so in ours. She thought women who wanted to be free needed to build societies of their own making and live apart from men. On this model, women need to get rid of not only the chains, but also the blacksmiths.
Suchon’s philosophical career was her second act. We can better understand the roots of her ideas of women’s liberation once we consider the details of the first part of her life. As a teenager, she was placed in a convent by her parents. There she stayed for 25 years. From archival records, we know that on at least two occasions Suchon tried unsuccessfully to rescind her vows. At the age of forty-one, under circumstances that remain unclear, she left the convent and entered secular life.
We know next to nothing about her life thereafter, save for her entry in the 1745 literary encyclopedia Bibliothèque des auteurs de Bourgogne by abbé Philibert Papillon. Suchon, Papillon notes, was born in 1631 in Semur, to an upstanding and well-established family of the area. (Suchon’s baptismal record indicates that she was actually born in 1632.) He tells us that she was a cloistered nun in Semur. He notes that she escaped the convent, but that he does not know how. He tells us that she lived with her mother, “and died in Dijon on the 5th of March 1703.”
Without further archival records, which may still be uncovered, it is not possible to come to any definitive conclusion about Suchon’s extraction from the convent. We do know, however, that Suchon, firmly in middle age in the early 1670s, was not in a social or political position to make an autonomous decision about the direction of her life. She needed permission to leave the convent. After spending the first 40 years of her life under other people’s control, Suchon devoted the next 30 years of her life to writing about the wrongs associated with denying women their freedom.
Suchon leaves no question in readers’ minds about the objectives of her writing. Her first book, Treatise on Ethics and Politics, published in 1693, makes its aim immediately obvious with its subtitle: A Little Treatise on the Weakness, Frivolity, and Inconstancy, That Is Wrongly Attributed to Women. Suchon aims to show that the prejudices against “persons of the sex,” that is, women, which take them to be naturally weak, frivolous, and inconstant are just that: prejudices. These prejudices are used to defend decisions to block women from accessing knowledge, from occupying positions of authority, and from exercising their freedom.
The central claim that Suchon uses to drive her argumentation is that all human beings have a natural capacity for freedom, knowledge, and authority. And, because women are human beings, they have this natural capacity. Suchon grounds the claim about the natural capacity of human beings in God’s divine plan for his creation of the world. God created everything with a purpose, writes Suchon. God created human beings, which are rational creatures. So, rational creatures have a purpose, and that purpose is to pursue rational ends. Pursuing rational ends, Suchon continues, involves satisfying the innate desire for truth and goodness. This means that, as human beings, women have an innate desire to search for the true and the good. And, because this search is part of God’s plan, to prevent women from effectuating their search is to thwart God’s plan. Searching for the true and the good requires education, in her view, and so denying women entry into spaces of learning is, in effect, to oppose God. Suchon invites us to infer that women who are weak, frivolous, and inconstant have had their desire to seek the true and the good derailed, demeaned, or otherwise dampened. All women are born free.
That Suchon’s argument for the natural capacities of women is ultimately grounded in the divine plan for creation leaves little room for objection. Someone resistant to the idea of women’s natural capacity would need to claim that women are not rational beings, which would suggest that men and women are different kinds of humans. This would be a difficult position to defend. Yet evidence abounds of the subordination of women on precisely these sorts of grounds.
The opening lines to her Treatise on Ethics and Politics read:
It is not without reason that Plato, the divine philosopher, thanked the gods for making him a man, not a woman. The hardships and humiliations that persons of the sex endure are so numerous that to be free of them would be to enjoy singular good fortune. This commonplace truth has convinced everyone. Since there would therefore seem to be no need to write about this truth, I feel obliged to indicate the basic reasons for this treatise. I maintain that it is not enough to know in a vague way the affronts that women encounter every day, but that we must examine them in detail and divide them into different parts and articles.
The constraint, ignorance, and dependence in which persons of the sex spend their lives encompass all the hardships that make them inferior to men; for being denied freedom, knowledge, and authority, they do not partake of the greatest advantages we can gain from politics and ethics.
Women are everywhere in chains. One way to liberate women from the chains of constraint, ignorance, and dependence would be to convince men of these harms and encourage them to change the way that they treat women. Suchon might have argued that men should allow women into their schools, allow women to serve in politics and occupy positions of power in the Church, give women more authority in their families, and so on. This is not the direction she takes. Instead, she is explicit that her audience is women. She writes:
My sole intention in this entire treatise has been to inspire generosity and magnanimity in persons of the sex so that they can protect themselves against servile constraint, stupid ignorance, and base and degrading dependence.
Suchon wants to shake women from their dogmatic slumbers. Appealing to the most awesome and formidable group of women in the early modern imagination, Suchon offers this exhortation:
May heaven ensure that just as in the time of Alexander the Great when the Amazons appeared in Asia and in Europe, free, learned, and magnanimous women will appear on France’s stage in the reign of Louis the Great, Louis the August, Louis XIV, the marvel of kings, and rise up from the ignorance in which their sex has so deeply fallen.
She attempts to lay the groundwork for such an uprising of free, learned, and magnanimous women by offering her chronicle of the contemporary abuses women suffer and her arguments detailing why those abuses are not only unjustified, but immoral and unnatural. This is a feminist manifesto.
To be free, for Suchon, is to think and act in a way that is guided by reason. She takes knowledge and education to be required for such reason-guided action. Learnedness is thus required for freedom. But the sites of learning and education—schools, universities, libraries—are closed to women. When Suchon speaks of magnanimity in women, she means something like what we would today call the absence of internalized sexism. A magnanimous person, in Suchon’s view, does not depend on the opinion, will, or treatment of others for their own contentment. Their contentment is derived from knowledge of their own power and perfection. For Suchon, education and magnanimity are mutually reinforcing; the more we exercise the mind, the greater our confidence in our own power. The greater our confidence, the more learning we will attempt. But even if women were given the opportunity to access a school or a library, learnedness, magnanimity, and reason-guided action cannot give rise to a generation of seventeenth-century French Amazons if they are living under constraint.
Suchon expends a great deal of ink to delineate the harms associated with the particular constraints of heterosexual marriage and motherhood, and the life of the veil.
In marriage, writes Suchon, women’s “suffering surpasses anything we can imagine.” A bad husband means a situation that is “a painful and rigorous kind of purgatory in its own right, if not sheer hell.” Suchon makes note of the dictum from St. Paul that married people do not have power over their own bodies. While the dictum indicates that each party in a marriage has power over the other’s body, Suchon points out that this rule was “in truth, made for the first sex,” men, and leads to “extreme abuse” against which women have no defense except to “suffer with patience.” A situation of this sort, an evil for which there is no remedy, is one “for which death is the only solution.” At this time in France, wives were not permitted to seek divorce, a fact that Suchon laments.
In addition to the absence of bodily autonomy, wives experience the pain that comes from the obligation to seek their husband’s permission before they do anything. While a kind husband can attenuate the pain of such constraint, Suchon is careful to note that even a kind and tender master remains a master. No matter the temperament of a husband, a wife’s situation is one of dependence. The burdens of motherhood and household management only serve to augment a wife’s suffering by placing enormous demands on her time.
Suchon’s critique of the convent is more tempered than that of marriage, perhaps because she had firsthand experience of the variety of women who take that path. The primary evil that she sees in that vocation is that women are often forced into it. Living the cloistered life without having a true inclination for it is to be condemned to a life of intolerable constraint. But all who end up in the convent, whether called to that life or not, live under a kind of domination. They cannot act independently, that is, without seeking approval.
The dependence that comes from needing to seek permission or approval for executing one’s wishes is, for Suchon, an impediment to self-mastery. Neither the wife nor the nun can independently determine their own movements and interests. In such situations, the dominated person cannot follow the direction of their own minds and wills. Rather, the will of someone else becomes the rule by which they act and to which they must submit. No situation of this sort is conducive to being free. All the personality flaws that Suchon’s contemporaries identify in women—vanity, coquetry, silliness, etc.—are solved, in her view, by education. Women need to read, converse, travel, and then read some more. This will broaden their views, engage their minds, and show them the power of their capacity to reason. But life under constraint, life in chains, the hallmark of women’s condition, cannot support this sort of self-improvement and self-mastery.
Suchon is careful to say that both marriage and the cloistered life are holy and divine institutions. But how ought we think of women who are positively inclined to these institutions? Do they willingly cede their freedom and thus act contrary to their rational natures? Does Suchon think that they are to be pitied? She does not tell us. But the path she outlines for women’s freedom strongly suggests that it is the one and only way for women’s liberation. She calls it the celibate, or neutral, life.
If the Treatise on Ethics and Politics is a feminist manifesto, On the Celibate Life, Freely Chosen, published in 1700, is a handbook for how to live the liberated life. The neutral life is a life without commitments. For Suchon, the “neutralist” individual remains neutral with regard to any decision that would require them to remain in the same state or condition and perform the same duties across the course of their lives. The only commitment the neutralist makes is to remain absolutely “indifferent” to any permanent state. We can see very clearly how taking vows of marriage or religion, especially without the possibility of rescinding them, is antithetical to the neutral life. While Suchon does not go so far as to say that the neutral life is a holy and divine institution, just like marriage and the religious life, she insists that God destines some women to the neutral life, and gives them the inclination to pursue it. The neutralist’s lack of commitments allows her to read, pray, help her community, converse with friends, and write books to help teach others. Not being under the dominion of another person means that the neutralist is self-governing; she can make and manage her own money as well as decide how to live her life.
Given what we know about Suchon’s flight from her religious vows and the life she lived thereafter, it is hard to avoid thinking that her description of the neutral life is the one to which she herself is called.
Suchon is well aware that not all those who are called to the neutral life can live it in the same way. Some may live together in communities, some may be widows who live alone or with family, some may be too young to leave their parents’ control, and others, due to necessity, may work for a living and not be able to retreat from society. Suchon considers all these women neutralists, so long as they are resolute in their commitment to a life of indifference even if their circumstances make it impossible to retreat from society. The ideal, Suchon writes, is for neutralists to form voluntary societies away from religious and secular societies in order to have the space to pursue their ends. There is a precedent for these kinds of voluntary societies, Suchon notes, and we can see historical examples of such communities in France and other places throughout Europe.
While Suchon does not name them, it is likely she had in mind the Béguines, a twelfth-century medieval western European women’s movement aimed at spiritual autonomy. This movement saw hundreds of thousands of women within mainstream Catholic orthodoxy in northern France, Germany, and the Low Countries leave society to form their own communities. They remained spiritual but took no formal vows. In Suchon’s terms, they remained indifferent to the commitment of professing vows. And, like Suchon’s neutralists, they prioritized their independence, managing their own material and financial affairs, and performing acts of charity and service. The Béguines offer an empowering historical example for the kind of life that Suchon envisions for the neutralist. We can imagine her thinking something like: We’ve done it before. Why can’t we do it again? Perhaps she sees the Béguines as operating according to an ideology that shares at least some elements in common with how the Amazons were imagined to run their societies. But while the story of the Béguines is inspiring, the threat that such an independent community of women posed to male-dominated social structures proved too great. Though initially tolerated by the Church, the Béguines were eventually charged with the “free spirit” heresy in 1311. The Church and the crown were equally concerned about a large group of women over whom they had no formal control. Their communities were ordered dissolved on the heels of the charge.
Rebecca M. Wilkin, a professor of French at Pacific Lutheran University, asks: “What could possibly pose a graver threat to the social order than an utterly unsubjected subject?” While she refers here to Suchon’s neutralist, the rhetorical question applies equally to the Béguines. Wilkin’s question reminds us of the immense obstacles that face Suchon and anyone who wishes to escape the set of paths prescribed to them. Those who benefit from the status quo, Suchon reminds us, will never agree to remedy the situation of someone whose subordination is essential to that status quo. To stay in business, blacksmiths need a market for the chains they forge. The Béguines were able to live apart for about 200 years before being forced to return to their prescribed paths. This must have given Suchon hope. But she would surely be dismayed to see that today, more than 300 years after she drafted a road map for women’s freedom, significant obstacles continue to make it difficult for women and other marginalized and vulnerable people to live the lives they choose for themselves.
When her first book appeared in print, Suchon was sixty-one years old. She published On the Celibate Life when she was sixty-eight. She thus showed it’s never too late to live the life to which you are called. Writing both these books over eight years in her sixties would be an impressive feat. But the Paris booksellers guild indicates that Suchon was even more prolific during this period; she received permission to publish another three-volume treatise in 1699, entitled Treatise on the Excellence of the Vocation of Nuns. Unfortunately, we currently have no evidence that it was ever in print. Further archival research, one hopes, will yield a manuscript.
Véronique Desnain, a lecturer at the University of Edinburgh, has proposed that the missing treatise suggests an arc for Suchon’s philosophical narrative. The Treatise on Ethics and Politics chronicles women’s natural capacities and the harms associated with not allowing those capacities to be exercised. This text demonstrates the innate freedom of women and the socially constructed chains that bind them. The Treatise on the Excellence of the Vocation of Nuns may have been a demonstration of the virtues of the cloistered life for those who were called to it. Such a treatise would shed much needed light on how Suchon understands the inclination to religious life and its obvious tensions with the conditions she identifies for freedom. And, finally, On the Celibate Life offers a defense of and a guide to the neutral life, a life that is not only a legitimate alternative to the secular or religious life, but also the only one, it seems, that leads to freedom. This text tells us how to break the chains and escape the systems that benefit from narrowly circumscribing the lives of women.
The history of feminism is political and cultural history. Changes in politics and culture tend to be slow-moving. Suchon’s vision of an uprising of free women in the era of the Sun King did not come to pass. But her ideas remain living through her books, which can and should populate the libraries of political and cultural history. Suchon’s work may yet seed an Amazon revival.
This biography, written by Véronique Desnain, has been republished with permission from the Dangerous Women Project, created by the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities at the University of Edinburgh.
From the late 1200s to the end of the 1600s, there raged in France a debate known as the ‘Woman’s quarrel’. The arguments between attackers and defenders of women go back and forth, mostly in texts written by men, with a few exceptions like Christine de Pizan (1364 – c. 1430, The Book of the City of Ladies) or Marie de Gournay (1565 –1645, The Equality of Men and Women). While it is not surprising (given the level of education they were usually afforded) that few women took part in the debate, it seems astonishing that one of the most complete and convincing works by a woman published on the ‘woman question’ has been all but forgotten. Or perhaps it is entirely unsurprising, given the dangerous nature of Gabrielle Suchon’s text A treatise on Morality and Politics (1693). Behind this rather neutral title hides a remarkable attempt to address the legal and cultural subjection of women, as revealed by the subtitle: ‘Freedom, Science and Authority. Where we see that women, despite being deprived of them have a natural aptitude for them […]’.
In it, Suchon analyses and responds to the arguments that have been used over the centuries to justify women’s inferior position, whether in religious texts, law or literature. She puts forward the stories of women of note from antiquity to her own time and enjoins her female contemporaries to educate themselves in order to fight their oppression. Most subversive of all though, she suggests that to be free, women must live alone (ie out of marriage or religious ties) and in her second book, Celibacy freely chosen (1700), gives practical advice to women on how to achieve this.
Her work is unique in many respects and represents an important contribution to the discourse on women which occupied much of the early modern period and to our perception of women’s own take on it. As a vast overview of some of the most crucial social and theological issues of its time, this work is an important historical document, as well as a literary and philosophical one. The two treatises she writes between 1693 and 1700 quite simply constitute the most extensive text on la condition féminine written by a woman at the time. Suchon’s work is important because it is part of the growing body of evidence which proves that, although they may not have been deemed worthy of entering the ‘canon’, although we may not yet have heard of all of them, women have always taken part in cultural production. It also shows that women have been aware of the mechanisms used to keep their experience hidden and have attempted to counteract men’s efforts to exclude them from history.
Even from a purely anecdotal perspective, it seems astonishing that a figure such as Suchon should have made so little impact: here is a woman who writes philosophical treatises when most women have little or no education. She dares to criticize the institutions of marriage and convents at a time when the catholic church is clamping down on ‘dissidents’ after the threat of the Reformation. As church and state insist on keeping women under control and strictly subdued to male power, Suchon demands the right for women to be educated, independent and free in all aspects of their lives, before moving on, with her second treatise, to a defense of female celibacy outside the Church. With this, she posits, in essence, a new legal status for women. So the fact that few of us will have heard of her until very recently seems incongruous.
Yet the reason for this is simple: Suchon was dangerous because she was writing in the hope that her work would encourage women to demand equality. One crucial difference between Suchon and her predecessors is that she does not affirm the superiority of either sex. Instead, she relies in a ‘different but equal’ position and argues that each individual should be dealt with in accordance to their abilities rather than their gender. She argues that female subjection is part of a social and political order, rather than a natural one. The notion was a threat to male hegemony but also entirely novel. Perhaps Suchon’s work found few echoes in her own time because of its very originality: as pointed out by Elsa Dorlin: ‘Only texts that theorize the natural inequality between men and women are made public and commented. Only those are deemed true and taught. Thus it is not the relative value of arguments or their scientific rigor which determines whether they are discussed, but their position in relation to a specific order of knowledge and power.’
Indeed a number of features clearly distinguish Suchon’s work from what had come before. Unlike the male writers of the Quarel, Suchon is more interested in the topic than she is in demonstrating her rhetorical skills and dismisses the essentialist views of both detractors and advocates of women. Unlike Christine de Pizan, she does not address women as wives and mothers but as autonomous individuals who may dedicate themselves to any vocation they choose. And unlike Marie de Gournay, she does not primarily address an audience of educated male readers but makes it very clear that her intended audience is composed of women. In all those respects, her work can be seen as far more explicitly subversive as that of her predecessors. Her advice on practical issues meanwhile could be read as an encouragement to actively resist male supremacy.
Beyond its content, the very existence of Suchon’s writing is significant. For too long we have been told literature, philosophy, sciences and the arts in general were overwhelmingly male domains simply because women had not produced any work of note. The obvious response to this is that female access to such practices has been restrained until recently, not by lack of talent, but by lack of education and by the practical obstacles put in their way. But recent research has demonstrated, quite convincingly, that there is an even more insidious reason for the perceived absence of women from the history of literature, philosophy and the sciences: even when they were there, we do not hear about them. They are marginalized from the discourse of history; they are erased from history itself.
Writing then, not just fiction but any form of writing which illustrates her own experience becomes, for a woman, ‘the power to give shape and impact to one’s being through words; … It is the power not only to comprehend the past but to validate and justify the present, and to project oneself into the future. It is the power to create a precursor for those who will come after, to establish a pattern, to invent appropriate names and images corresponding to one’s knowledge of oneself, and to leave these names and images as beacons for others.’
Indeed, Suchon’s whole project can be seen as such a ‘beacon’ which she consciously leaves for her successors. She has little hope to see change in her own time but seems to have anticipated future social shifts: ‘Women in my time will never attempt to dispossess men of their might and authority’ she says, perhaps reassuringly for the potential male reader, but the restrictive ‘in my time’ makes it clear that she thinks, and hopes, that others will in future.
Perhaps one of the most modern and subversive aspects of Suchon’s writing is that it identifies the mechanisms of oppression and the more practical issues behind the theoretical discourse. As such, her method and arguments are relevant to the examination of any form of oppression and the implications of her writing may be rather more radical than they first appear. Indeed, despite the need to remain within the orthodox doctrine in order to avoid censorship, especially when her arguments find their source in religious texts, the attentive reader soon discovers ‘the existence between the lines of a hidden, far more fascinating side, which is revealed by the agressivity of some of her statements and to which Suchon refers through allusions to corrosive and dangerous ideas left unspoken.’
While her contemporaries may have preferred to ignore those ‘dangerous ideas’, her absence from modern philosophy or feminist history is more surprising.
Eileen O’Neill offers a number of reasons for the ‘disappearance’ of women from the history of philosophy which may well apply to Suchon. She states:
One such reason I called “the purification of philosophy”. The bulk of women’s writings either directly addressed such topics as faith and revelation, on the one hand, or woman’s nature and her role in society, on the other. But the late eighteenth century attempted to excise philosophy motivated by religious concerns from philosophy proper.’
It is also the case that modern critics are still in many ways influenced by the assumption that, to be valid, philosophy must distinguish itself from religious concerns. Suchon’s defense of women is deeply enmeshed with issues of faith and theological discussions regarding the distinction between human and divine, the nature of vocation and the relationship between God and his creatures. Whereas the gender of the author may have been enough reason for many male critics to ignore her work, the religious nature of her writing is sometimes seen as a disappointment by feminists.
Yet Suchon’s reliance on Church authorities in her project is both to be expected in the context of her times and a useful rhetorical strategy which should not distract from the subversive potential of her texts. Brought up in a society in which the church is at the heart of all social interaction, having spent many years in the convent (she was made to enter orders as a teenager and did eventually get released of her vows in her forties) , it is unavoidable that the author should perceive religion as an integral part of life, yet all the more remarkable that she should use, as the corner stone of her defense of women, the distinction between genuine faith and the repressive institutions which use it for their own benefit.
What’s more, her theological position allows Suchon to construct a logical demonstration that operates in the same realm as those of detractors of women. She bases her arguments on her interpretation of authorities which have been acknowledged as valid by those whose arguments she is attacking. Tackling this issue within their own frame of reference enables her to expose the flaws and fallacies of their arguments.
It may also be that, in the wake of the Reformation and the Catholic Church’s attempt to reassert its control, there may have been a greater need for female believers such as Suchon to profess their faith and demand the means to practice it according to their own spiritual needs. While this may be obvious in terms of doctrine, the androcentric nature of religious institutions means that women had long been left out of the equation. Suchon reduces female inferiority to a custom and contrasts it with vocation. Her defense of women is therefore based on an opposition between the secular and the divine, between historical specificity and the immutability of divine purpose.
In this context, to see Suchon’s use of religion merely as rhetorical or as a smoke screen for radical ideas about gender, or indeed as irreconcilable with such ideas, would be tantamount to dismissing historical circumstances and imposing an anachronistic frame of mind on her work. It would also to a large extent posit female spirituality as a mere adjunct of male spirituality and deny the very possibility that women could take a position on dogma and spiritual practices, as opposed to being passive followers of an institution which oppresses them.
All the factors above ensured that Suchon’s legacy remained hidden for 300 years. Perhaps now is the time to re-discover her. We may well find that this woman is still dangerous.
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