Defining womanhood

The eighteenth century was in many respects a good time to be a woman—at least for a female elite. As the Goncourt brothers suggested in a classic work, never before, perhaps, had women appeared to be so powerful or so sexually liberated. ¹ At Court and in the world of the Parisian salons, brilliant society women wielded immense influence in their aristocratic and upper-class milieu. Royal mistresses such as Mme de Pompadour and Mme du Barry, or society hostesses such as the wealthy Mme du Deffand or the scandalous Mme du Tencin, mother of the philosophe d’Alembert, were only the most obvious examples: and to these could be added independent women who succeeded in earning their own living as writers, like the Marquise de Châtelet, the translator of Newton’s Principia and friend of Voltaire, or as artists, like the painter Elizabeth Vigée-Lebrun. Just as men were known (if not expected) to indulge in extra-marital affairs, so too in polite society female sexual infidelity was tolerated, provided it was not flaunted and the honour of a husband not impaired. The French aristocracy undoubtedly practised birth control, which was the main reason that the birth rate in the families of the nobility fell from 6.5 in the seventeenth century to 2 in the eighteenth century, and this in turn could only have diminished women’s fears of the dangers of childbirth, as well as of male sexual aggression. ² In practice, if not in theory, the double standard of morality no longer applied to many women of the French upper classes.