ABSTRACT
The plot of Moliere’s play, The Learned Ladies, is role reversal, the problems that occur when women command and men obey, a popular literary plot of the period. The Learned Ladies illustrates the contemporary assumption that women must obey men as the natural order of things. Moliere is ridiculing domineering wives and hen-pecked husbands as a reversal of this order. Women in seventeenth-century France must have arranged family marriages, however, for Moliere’s play to be regarded by contemporaries as funny. The Learned Ladies illustrates the discrepancy between the prescriptive role of women, that is, their culturally determined role in a patriarchal society, and the reality of their daily lives. The legal restrictions on women’s activities increased as the early modern state extended its control over family formation by regulating marriage, separation, divorce, legitimacy and inheritance, usually in favour of male family heads.
