PERHAPS A GIFT VOUCHER FOR MUM?: MOTHER'S DAY
Julie Candler Hayes is Professor Emerita of French at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where she served first as department chair and later as dean of the College of Humanities and Fine Arts from 2010 to 2020. Her research interests include early modern philosophy and literature, theories of language, literary theory, and translation studies. A Chevalier dans l'Ordre des Palmes Académiques since 2010, she is past president of the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies and has held fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Humanities Center, the Huntington Library, and the William Andrews Clark Memorial Library.
Women writers seldom appear in accounts of the early modern response to the intellectual, political, and cultural changes characterizing the period. Hayes offers a persuasive rethinking of these accounts through her insightful analysis of women moralists' writing. Hayes perceptively demonstrates how these writers' wide-ranging exploration of women's experience contributed to women's self-construction and sense of agency, as well as to the philosophical tradition and its understanding of the human condition. This book offers a valuable reference point for understanding the early modern. * Daniel Brewer, Professor of French Emeritus, University of Minnesota * Women Moralists in Early Modern France is an important book for its breadth of scholarship and the remarkable narrative framework it constructs of philosophical inquiry in 17th and 18th century France. Hayes shows how women authors across generations treat six themes-knowledge of self and others, friendship, happiness, marriage, age and experience, and women's natural capacities-in the distinctive genre of moralist writing that was devalued as moral philosophy took a turn towards systematicity. It will be an essential resource for those of us working to recover the philosophical work of women and tell new histories of European philosophy. * Lisa Shapiro, Professor of Philosophy, McGill University * Hayes makes an important contribution to one of the great projects of contemporary scholarship: the expansion of the humanities canon to include the voices of hitherto neglected women authors. She provides a unitary interpretation of several early modern French women authors by showing their common roots in the moraliste genre of the period. By doing so, she reveals the philosophical significance of their work. Dealing more specifically with gender, Hayes demonstrates how these treat the issues of friendship, marriage, aging, and women's rational capabilities. Her careful analysis shows how a woman-authored set of texts, often dismissed as light literature, wrestles in depth with perennial philosophical issues. * Rev. John J. Conley, Knott Professor of Philosophy, Loyola University Maryland *
