The Querelle des femmes and Nicolas Boileau's Satire X: Going Beyond Perrault

Critics from Joan DeJean to Marina Warner and Jack Zipes have lauded Charles Perrault's Apologie des femmes for its supposed defense of women against Nicolas Boileau's misogynous Satire X. Although Zipes wonders ‘[w]hether these works can be considered pro-women today,' this essay asks: can these works indeed be considered pro-women in the period in which they were written? Scholars studying the quarrel over Boileau’s Satire X tend to limit themselves to the response of Perrault, completely ignoring the more clearly pro-women reactions of writers and playwrights like Nicolas Pradon, Pierre Bellocq, Jean-François Regnard, Claude-Ignace Brugière de Barante, Marie-Jeanne Lhéritier, and Jean Donneau de Visé. This study thus asks a second question: are we basing our ideas about the epistemological limits of a period on the full array of actual discourses available, or on what we have assumed to be the available discourses of the period, which far too often is limited to what has become the classical canon?