How women fought back
1 They weren’t afraid to pass judgment
In 1588, a group of women led by the wife of Guillaume des Arènes and her neighbour Marguerite gathered outside the house of Vidal Raymond, a maker of pack-saddles living in Nîmes. These women were his neighbours. They beat their fists on the door and cried out to Raymond to let them in, saying that they knew he kept a woman inside. Raymond refused, so the women forced an entry and found a woman trying to hide herself beneath a pile of straw. They called her a ‘whore’ and chased her out of town. The women then went on to report the matter to a church elder.
2 They could force men to marry them
In 1598, Catherine Lamberte, a Catholic, told the Montauban consistory that she and a Protestant cordswain called Jehan Picard had made promises to marry, and that she had given him 100 livres towards her dowry. Jehan had since contracted marriage with another woman, and denied receipt of the dowry, but did admit that they had drawn up a contract. He said that, as Catherine had refused to convert to Protestantism, the contract was null.
Catherine next appeared brandishing the contract of marriage, and a receipt for 60 livres of the dowry. It predated Jehan’s other marriage contract, so the consistory deemed that the marriage to Catherine should go ahead.
3 They humiliated philandering husbands
In Montauban in 1595, Anne de Valaty twice discovered her husband, Pierre Cordiny, trying to have sex with their maid. The first time she cried out to her neighbours on the street that she had found her husband lying with the maid on a sack, and wailed: “I would never have thought my husband would do this act.” She told a friend that “she should keep watch on her maid so that her husband does not do [with her] as Cordiny did with his”.
When Anne found the couple together again, she hit the maid with a sieve, and threw her out of the house. Anne’s distress at her husband’s infidelity manifested itself in angrily denouncing him, and using her power as a housewife to dismiss the servant.