ABSTRACT
“It is not so extraordinary to encounter the hi/stories of men … but few women venture to reveal what happened to them in their lifetime. I shall be part of that small number,” declares Catherine Meurdrac de La Guette in the opening phrases of her memoirs. a 1 Publishing her work at the Hague in 1681, this 68-year-old widow could rightly consider herself one of a select few, in comparison to some 440 memoirs written by seventeenth-century men who, as she states, “made themselves commendable to posterity by great feats or outstanding virtues or who were raised up or brought down by the whims of fortune” (LG 41). b 2 Despite the fact that—or perhaps because—dominant gender norms privileged the active, dramatic lives of men, La Guette endorses the idea that women should describe what “happened to them in their lifetime,” in her passive formulation, and thus challenges the androcentricity of memoirs at a moment when no female autographic tradition existed. For as Hortense Mancini (1646–1699) noted in the opening pages of her memoirs (1675), to speak of oneself or to be spoken about transgressed the seventeenth-century code of decorum for le sexe: “I know that the glory of a woman lies in ensuring that others never speak of her.” c 3
