Gabrielle Suchon: dal discorso del potere al discorso sul potere

Gabrielle Suchon, from the discourse of power to the discourse on power · The French philosopher Gabrielle Suchon (1632-1703) published two philosophical wor- ks: the Traité de la morale et de la politique (1693) and Du célibatvolontaire (1700). Un- der the pseudonym G. S. Aristophile (literarily ‘lover of excellence’), she offers a detailed analysis of women’s oppression, rejecting the pervasive prejudice against female intellectual inferiority. She argues that numerous examples of remarkable women throughout history show that women are naturally as free and independ- ent as men. However, although both women and men have inherently similar in- tellectual and corporeal capabilities, men intentionally leave women in a state of ignorance, which is a sort of slavery. Thus, she advocates for equality of education- al opportunities as the only way to escape gender oppression. Her philosophy was strongly influenced by her life story. She was educated in a convent and, perhaps, she was forced to take her vows. As a nun she could read the Bible and the works of Aquinas, and, secretly, the proto-feminist treatise De l’égalité des deux sexes by Poullain de la Barre. At a certain stage of her life (but we do not know precisely when), she escaped from convent and travelled to Rome, where she filed a peti- tion to the Pope to renounce her vows. Her courage to claim for the right to be a lay unmarried seventeenth-century free woman makes Suchon a ‘philosopher of freedom’.