This book, the second of two volumes, explores and analyzes the dramatic representations of women in power in seventeenth-century France. Key to the analysis is an examination of the ways in which questions of virtue and sexual differentiation are negotiated and how they contribute to the construction of a nascent paradigm of equality. As we will see, the framing of certain moral and intellectual virtues, particularly prudence, as central to dramatic portrayals of government, allows a way in for the ideologists of women's authority, for whom prudence transcends sexual differentiation. On the other hand, in an argument which exploits sexual differentiation in women's favour, the claim is made that it is precisely the qualities perceived as 'female' that are invaluable in government, namely clemency, mercy, humanity – all frequently connoted collectively in the notion of douceur. What emerges in either case is a notion of government, the quintessential public role, as the ultimate site of androgyny.
