During the oppressive reign of Louis XIV, Gabrielle Suchon (1632-1703) was the most forceful female voice in France, advocating women's freedom and self-determination, access to knowledge, and assertion of authority. This volume collects Suchon's writing from two works-"Treatise on Ethics and Politics" (1693) and "On the Celibate Life Freely Chosen; or, Life without Commitments" (1700)-and demonstrates her to be an original philosophical and moral thinker and writer.

Suchon argues that both women and men have inherently similar intellectual, corporeal, and spiritual capacities, which...