The Paradoxes of Religion in Gabrielle Suchon

Abstract

Gabrielle Suchon’s reliance on religious texts and authorities to support and legitimise the arguments she makes in her two texts Traité de la morale et de la politique (1693) and Du célibat volontaire (1700) has sometimes been perceived as running contrary to its defence of female freedom. Suchon’s use of religious texts will be examined here as a corner stone of her attack on male hegemony and crucial to her argument, which rests in large part on the distinction between divine law and social customs. The article will focus specifically on how Suchon uses the paradoxes and contradictions found in her extensive corpus of references to advance the notion that the subjugation of women is a political strategy to support male power rather than the result of a natural and divinely ordained hierarchy of genders.