The Radical Feminism of a 17th-Century Priest

 Judith Shulevitz,  "The Radical Feminism of a 17th-Century Priest,"  September 2021, Atlantic pp. 94-101.

I stumbled upon Poulain at the Barnard library in 2016.  I was reading up on feminists of the past because I felt stifled by the feminism of the present, particularly the kind just then embodied by Hilary Clinton, whose presidential campaign leaned hard on the notion that she would shatter the glass ceiling -- never mind that most American women were just trying to get by.  I wasn't struggling to get by, but I wasn't soaring either. 
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Fully forgotten by the 19th century, Poulain took a long time to resurface.  In 1902, a young French graduate student named Henri Pieron pulled Poulain's dusty books of the shelves of the French National Library, apparently by chance (the copy of On the Equality of the Two Sexes had likely never been opened, since the pages were uncut).  Pieron recognized the significance of his find: He was something of a radical himself, and precociously well read in philosophy.  In a pioneering essay, he described the experience or reading Poulain: "Sometimes the astonishment is such that you feel the need to return to the first page and make sure that the Roman numerals really do say 1673."

COMMENT

A radical feminist book from 1673 is re-discovered twice-- once by the author who feels that there is something missing from "glass ceiling" feminism, and once in 1902.  Shulevitz says that instead of crediting Poulain's ideas, other writers simply adopted them with their own modifications.  Returning to the original source re-introduces caregiving as a feminist issue and one that had been utterly  left out of much contemporary feminism until COVID exposed the lack of support for mothers and other caregivers.