Marie de Gournay(1565 — 1645)

« Most of those who take up the cause of women, against the arrogant preference that men claim for themselves, pay them back in full.»

At just eighteen or nineteen years old, Marie de Gournay was utterly captivated by Montaigne's *Essays*. She was, it is said, so overwhelmed by reading them that those around her feared for her health and had to give her hellebore, a plant then believed to calm troubled minds. This encounter with a book shaped the whole course of her intellectual life.

When she finally met Montaigne in Paris in 1588, the aging philosopher was so moved by this young admirer that he symbolically adopted her as his “covenant daughter.” It was a rare relationship for the time: neither blood kinship nor marriage, but a chosen kinship built around thought and writing.

After Montaigne's death in 1592, his widow entrusted Marie with the manuscript of the *Essays*. Marie devoted decades to editing and re-editing the work, adding a long, impassioned preface. It is largely thanks to her relentless labor that the *Essays* have come down through the centuries in the form we know today.

A learned woman living alone and writing under her own name, she was often mocked by the witty minds of her day, who jeered at her poverty, her cats, and her “old-fashioned” language. Far from staying silent, she struck back with biting writings defending women's right to knowledge.

In her treatise *The Equality of Men and Women* (1622), she argues that if women appear inferior, it is not by nature but because they are denied an education. It was a strikingly modern argument, made more than three centuries before the great contemporary debates on equality.