p. 50 Gabrielle Suchon was born in Semur (in Burgundy, not far from Dijon), her parents were of minor gentry and there were numerous jurists in the family. Her father died when she was 13. At a certain point, she entered a convent, and at some other point she left it. Upon leaving the convent, she supported herself as a teacher while living with her mother, and led what has been described as a studious life. She died in 703 at 72…. In each of her major works, she inveighs against the institution of marriage and the harm marriage brings to women, so it might well be that she refused to marry. But she also attacks the oppressive conditions of convents, especially for those without vocation.
p. 51 Such authored two major works: 1 Treatise on Ethics and Politics Divided into Three Parts: Freedom, Knowledge and Authority, where it is shown that person of the [female] sex have a natural capacity that enables them to exercise these three prerogatives now denied them. It was originally published in 1693 under the pseudonym ‘GS Aristophile’ then reprinted in 1694, with a slightly modified title. And 2. On the Celibate Life Freely Chosen, or Life without Commitments was published in 1700 under her own name. The latter work was reviewed in print, and so, we can assume, read by others, if not widely read. Both works are striking in demonstrating a pointed concern with the situation and status of women, even while they aim to develop an ethical and political theory. That is, Suchon’s theoretical aspirations are intimately tied to her concern for liberating – this is, ensuring genuine freedom for – women.”
“… there are unanswered questions about Suchon’s influence on those who followed her. In her The Sex of Knowing, Michele Le Doueff suggested that perhaps Rousseau plagiarized Suchon. There are passages that support this suggestion. In the Treatise on Ethics and Politics, Suchon talks of women as essentially free, but constrained by chains which they have helped to forge by unthinkingly accepting the institutions and conventions which prescribe their conduct. Rousseau’s oft-quoted opening to The Social Contract that ‘man was born free, and he is everywhere in chains’ echoes Suchon’s language. However, Rebecca Wilkin and Sonja Ruud have found no evidence that either Roussea or Madame Duplin, a woman for whom Rousseau served as secretary while she was writing her Ouvrage sur les femmes, concerning the equality of the sexes, reach Suchon… it might be possible for a thinker to have import without there being a well-established direct causal impact.”
p. 86 “In Hamburg, as the impact of the revolution in France led to civil unrest, Elise Reimarus published a pamphlet, Freihart, which was intended to demonstrate that genuine liberty is only available to those subject to civil law. … A little later, in Naples, the journal of the short-lived republican government of 1799, Il Monitore napoletano, edited by Eleanor Fonseca Pimental, declared: “Freedom consist in this, that every citizen can do whatever is not prohibited by law, and which does not harm others.”
p. 109 “Sophie de Grouchy’s 1798 distinction between negative and positive right, which, upon examination, prefigures the famous distinction between positive and negative liberty.”
p.122 “Because Berlin only had an eye for the ‘fathers’ of the tradition, he failed to live up to the inclusive spirit that is characteristic of liberalism at its best. By ignoring De Grouchy, he failed to give the mothers of this tradition – De Grouchy and her friends Olympe de Gouges, Harriet Taylor, and so on – their due. This is not just a matter of accurate record keeping and historical justice. When the sons and daughters of a tradition are told only about the fathers, their (moral) education gives them not only a skewed narrative of reality, it also limits the possibilities available to the play of their imaginations.”
p. 141 Margaret Cavendish “Her natural philosophy shows the same creativity and willingness to go against the grain of her contemporaries’ views. For example, Hobbes, Descartes, Robert Boyle and other natural philosophers of the 17th century conceived of matter as naturally inert, capable of moving only when moved by some external force. In their view, the motions of this matter are governed by various deterministic laws of nature .. the corporeal world is fundamentally law-governed and predictable… For Cavendish, Nature is one fully continuous, infinite entity, composed of three intermixed types, or ‘degrees’ of matter. Two of these – the ‘rational’ matter and the ‘sensitive’ matter – are intrinsically self-moving, which Cavendish claims entails that they are also perceptive and knowing. The third type, ‘dull’ matter, lacks self-motion; it moves only because it is blended with self-moving matter. The three degrees of matter are completely intermixed, so that every part of Nature, no matter how small, will contain all three types of matter.”
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