ABSTRACT
In 1 720 Mehmed Efendi, ambassador of the Ottoman Empire, visited France on a fact-finding mission for the Sublime Porte. One of the many things that baffied him was the position of women in French society. The women in France, he observed, 'can do what they want and go where they desire . . . so much that France is the paradise of women' . 1 Some twenty-five years before, the Abbe DuBos even saw reason for alarm: 'it seems to me that women have forgotten that they belong to another sex than men, so eagerly are they seeking to adopt masculine manners' . 2 The visitor from the Islamic world and the habitue of the Parisian salons were in many ways worlds apart, but both men apparently felt that the evolution of French manners in the seventeenth century had called into question old patri archical certainties. According to many seventeenth-century feminist authors, that was indeed what was happening, and in their eyes this was, of course, an eminently desirable change in the ways of the world.
