The different religiocultural events that marked the years 1526–1680 clearly affected the course of female education in France. However, their impact on educational expansion and egalitarianism should not be exaggerated. Mixed attitudes on the advisability of teaching women persisted throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Women did not gain access to the secular centers of higher learning (colleges, universities, and academies) until the mid-eighteenth century. While women were shut out of the humanist classroom, they found ample space within and outside the household affording them the opportunity to study and to write. Early modern French women were prolific writers. They expressed their views about practically everything and experimented with a diverse number of genres. Those who engaged in authorship would simply circulate their manuscripts. Relatively few of them went so far as to publish their works themselves. Motherhood was a recurrent strategy employed by women throughout the centuries to negotiate their way into print.