Marie de Gournay’s Use of Skeptical Strategies

This chapter offers a new interpretation of Marie de Gournay’sMarie de Gournay use of skeptical strategies in The Equality of Men and Women in light of her discussion of prejudicePrejudice in The Ladies’ Complaint. Readers of The Equality of Men and Women have often been puzzled by an apparent tension in Gournay’s methodologyMethodology. On the one hand, she suggests that she will prove the equalityEquality of men and women by means of arguments; on the other hand, she suggests that she can only establish her conclusion through appeal to theological authorityAuthority. Eileen O’Neill offers one influential solution to this puzzle, interpreting Gournay as a Pyrrhonian skeptic and a Catholic fideist. In this interpretation, Gournay’s arguments are equipollent arguments aimed at showing the inability of reasonReason to settle the equalityEquality question, and her appeals to theological authority are based on a fideistic understanding of the relation between faith and reason. In this chapter, I will argue instead that Gournay is not a skeptic regarding the powerPower of reason, and that her appeals to theological authority are not a response to the fideistic conclusion that the equality thesis is accessible through faith alone. Instead, I will show that Gournay’s adoption of skeptical strategiesSkeptical strategies can be better understood in light of her analysis of prejudicePrejudice in her other feministFeminist work, The Ladies’ Complaint. Concretely, I will show that the problem to which Gournay’s skeptical arguments respond is not a problem with reason itself, but with the socialSocial situation in which philosophical conversation occurs.