Quote by Marie de Gournay: “The soul has no sex.”

In three words, Marie de Gournay argues that the deepest part of a human being — the part that thinks, reasons, and chooses — has nothing to do with gender. If souls are equal before God, then denying women education or authority is not natural order; it is arbitrary injustice dressed as theology.

De Gournay published The Equality of Men and Women in 1622, working in Paris at a time when learned women were both celebrated at court and mocked in public satire. The querelle des femmes — the literary debate about women's nature and worth — had been ongoing for nearly two centuries, and de Gournay intervened with philosophical rather than rhetorical arguments.

French writer and editor born in 1565, one of the earliest feminist thinkers of the European Renaissance. She was Montaigne's adopted daughter and literary executor, producing authoritative editions of his Essais. Her own treatises, including The Equality of Men and Women, argued for women's intellectual and spiritual equality on philosophical grounds.