The Women Who Ran the Rooms Where It Happened

Or... More salons, please!

It’s 1510. In a room in Mantua, Isabella d’Este is holding court. Isabella, the Marchioness of Mantua, is the wife of Francesco II Gonzaga (currently a political hostage in Venice), and arguably the most brilliant and influential woman of the Italian Renaissance. She is about 36 years old, in full command of her intellect, taste, and power.

The sounds of lute music, hooves tapping on cobblestones, and servants calling out orders to each other drift through the windows. The room smells like incense, lake water and beeswax polish. Around her she has gathered, the good and the great of the time and place.

Leonardo da Vinci is showing her sketches. The poet Ariosto is reading from his latest canto. A visiting ambassador is debating Plato with a humanist scholar.

Isabella finally takes a seat at the center of the group. She’s steering the conversation, deciding who speaks next, determining which ideas get air and which get shut down with a raised eyebrow.

This isn’t a book club, or a networking event. And it’s certainly not rich women making small talk over wine.

This is where the Renaissance actually began.

Isabella ran what we’d now call a salon*, though the Italians called them conversazioni. And she wielded more intellectual power from that room than most men wielded from their university positions.

While men controlled the academies, women controlled many of the conversations that shaped Western thought.

Before Paris, There Was Italy

The salon tradition started in Renaissance Italy, because women with resources, education, and ambition had nowhere else to go.

Isabella d’Este (1474-1539) built her studiolo (her private study) into the intellectual center of Renaissance Italy.¹ She brought together artists (including Leonardo da Vinci, Titian, and Mantegna), writers (Ariosto, Castiglione), musicians, philosophers, and diplomats.² She commissioned art that defined the era. She arbitrated taste. When Baldassare Castiglione wrote The Book of the Courtier describing the ideal courtly conversation, he taught what he’d learned in Isabella’s circle and modeled his fictional Duchess of Urbino partly on her.³

The Italian conversazioni model worked because Renaissance humanism valued individuals over credentials, and wealthy women had the resources and time to gather those individuals together and watch their brains collide.

The French Perfected What the Italians Invented

Catherine de’ Medici brought Italian salon culture to the French court when she married the future Henry II in 1533.⁴ By the early 1600s, Madame de Rambouillet (Catherine de Vivonne) had deliberately modeled her salon on the Italian conversazioni, creating what became the template for French salon culture.

This is when salons became systematic, influential, and arguably most powerful.

The golden age: 17th-18th century France.

Madame de Rambouillet’s chambre bleue (blue room) ran from approximately 1620-1665 and set the standard for intellectual rigor and wit.⁵ Madame Geoffrin (1699-1777) hosted the Encyclopedists—Diderot, D’Alembert, and the philosophers compiling the Encyclopédie met in her salon twice weekly.⁶ Madame du Deffand (1697-1780) hosted Voltaire and created a rival intellectual circle known for particularly sharp wit.⁷ Julie de Lespinasse (1732-1776) split from du Deffand’s salon to create her own, taking many prominent intellectuals with her.⁸

These weren’t social gatherings that occasionally touched on ideas. These were intellectual laboratories with structure and rigor.

What made them powerful:

• Mixed company - Class boundaries blurred (in today’s terms, Substack follower counts were ignored). If you were brilliant, you got invited, regardless of birth.

• Women as arbiters - The female host controlled the room, steered discourse, and decided what mattered. There was no mansplaining derailing the conversation, or sucking the air from the room.

• Rigor over politeness - Ideas were interrogated, not just shared. Bad thinking got called out.

• Cross-pollination - Scientists met poets met politicians. Salons were interdisciplinary before that was a word.

• Ongoing dialogue - Weekly meetings built on previous discussions. Participants focused on deep rather than broad.

If you contrast this with the Universities of the time, you can imagine the draw, especially for women. Like today, credentials were the gatekeepers for Universities, and back then they were male-only (the Sorbonne didn’t admit women until 1880s). Students were rigidly siloed by discipline (no such thing as a “liberal arts” degree), and study was focused on preserving knowledge rather than generating new ideas.

Taste and intellect were the gatekeepers for the Salons. They were inclusive (for the era). They were interdisciplinary. And they generated the new thinking that shaped the Enlightenment.

The Encyclopédie (This was the project that tried to compile all human knowledge, if you’re a Gen X lady or older you surely had a set in your living room bookshelf. My Dad was so proud he could buy them for us.) was conceived and debated in Madame Geoffrin’s salon. Political philosophy that led to revolutions got worked out there. Scientific discourse happened there before formal scientific institutions existed. Literary movements were born there.⁹

The rooms where it happened? Women ran them.

What Happened? (And What We Lost)

Universities eventually, slowly, painfully opened to women. Professional credentials became gatekeepers. Specialization replaced interdisciplinary thinking. “Serious” intellectual work got moved to institutions. Social gatherings and intellectual gatherings seemed to get separated. You either had dinner parties or attended academic conferences, rarely both.

The salon tradition faded.

And we lost something:

• Women as intellectual arbiters with actual power

• Cross-disciplinary discourse (scientists talking to poets talking to philosophers)

• Merit-based rather than credential-based gatekeeping

• The salonnière’s curatorial judgment

• Space for ideas too new, too dangerous, or too interesting for institutions

Isn’t it ironic that for some of us it felt like we gave up our seats in the rooms women ran, for seats in the rooms men ran.

And now? It’s hard to find a place where we can explore ideas (ideas, issues and events that are relevant to us, in this phase of our lives). Academic journals are paywalled (I cried when I lost my password) and mostly unreadable (yes, sometimes you really do have to read a sentence three times to understand it, and they are written that way on purpose). Any education or expertise could be labeled suspect. And the internet has flattened intellectual discourse into hot takes and engagement metrics.

Meanwhile, the skills the salonnières had (curation, synthesis, taste, judgment, the ability to facilitate nuanced conversation) those are exactly what we need now.

Why Now: Three Reasons We Need Salons Again

1. AI is coming for credentialed work.

The things universities teach, like information transfer, technical skills, even a lot of specialized knowledge, are being automated. What can’t be automated? Taste. Judgment. Curation. Synthesis. The ability to hold multiple perspectives simultaneously. The alchemy of human embodied conversation that generates insights no AI could produce.

AI can’t replicate a conversation amongst committed passionate women, bashing ideas against each other and making sparks.

2. Intellectual discourse has been flattened.

Social media rewards hot takes and memes, not nuanced thinking. “Thought leaders” are focused on their “brand” and mostly performing, not thinking. We’ve lost spaces for actual intellectual exchange. We need those places where you can think out loud, get pushed back on, refine your thinking in real time with other minds.

Podcasts and Substacks help, but they’re still mostly a one-way broadcast. We need the salon model: structured conversation, mutual interrogation, ideas that evolve through discourse.

So we’re not trying to break into institutions anymore, but those of us in our 40s, 50s, 60s (our second coming-of-age) are hitting peak intellectual power. We are our own wise women. We have knowledge, resources, networks, and the hard-won clarity that comes from living long enough to see patterns.

What we need is the room. And the permission to run it our way.

Just like 18th-century salonnières wielded power through curation when formal institutions excluded them, us 21st-century women can build a space that prioritizes what institutions can’t: human judgment, embodied presence, cross-pollination of ideas, and the irreplaceable alchemy of real conversation.

What We’re Building: The Heroine’s Salon

This isn’t historical recreation. This is evolution.

What we keep from the historical salon model:

• Curator (host)

• Rigorous discourse, not just sharing

• Mixed perspectives in conversation (with written contributions curated from varied submissions)

• Ideas examined from multiple angles, not just presented

• Ongoing community, not one-off events

What we update for 2025:

• Virtual (location-independent, global access)

• Submitted essays (writers contribute, not just attend)

• Recorded (accessible, though live participation is where the magic happens)

• Explicit monthly themes (focus + discoverability)

• Hybrid panel + group discussion format

What makes our salon different from “women’s circles” or book clubs:

This is not support, healing or formalized debate. There are no winners, or losers.

Our salons are for complication, not resolution. We want graduate seminar energy, not group therapy. This is the room where thinking happens, not the room where we affirm each other’s journeys.

That’s what historical salons were, and that’s what we’re rebuilding.

So Here’s What I Need From You

Historical salonnières didn’t just host—they curated. They knew the difference between social chatter and intellectual discourse. They knew which ideas deserved the room and which didn’t. They had taste, judgment, and standards.

I’m hoping to do the same.

This month’s salon theme is “The Woman You’re Becoming vs. The Woman You Were Raised to Be.” We’re looking for essays that do what the best salon conversations always did: open complex questions, hold multiple truths, examine rather than resolve.

If you’ve lived through transformation but haven’t wrapped it up neatly, if you can hold ambiguity and contradiction, if you want to think deeply rather than inspire broadly, please submit!

But first, let me tell you what salon-worthy writing actually looks like.

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What Makes a Good Salon Submission

The historical salons weren’t support groups or inspiration circles. They were intellectual laboratories where complex ideas got examined from multiple angles, where certainty was questioned, and where the best thinking happened in the tension between competing truths.

That’s what we’re building here.

Your Submission Should:

1. Stay in questions, not arrive at answers

• Strong: “I don’t know if this was right, and here’s why that uncertainty matters...”

• Weak: “Here’s what I learned and now I’m sharing it with you...”

2. Examine complexity, not resolve it

• Strong: Holds multiple truths simultaneously (I was right to leave AND I might have been wrong AND it’s not that simple)

• Weak: Presents transformation as straightforward journey from problem to solution

3. Complicate rather than inspire

• Strong: “Here’s what this cost me that I’m still sitting with...”

• Weak: “Here’s my journey and I hope it inspires you to...”

4. Bridge personal story with intellectual inquiry

• Strong: Uses your specific experience to open larger questions about identity, power, choice, meaning

• Weak: Stays in “this is what happened to me” without examining the patterns

5. Make room for other perspectives

• Strong: “My family saw this differently, and I can’t dismiss that...”

• Weak: “My family was wrong and I was right and here’s why...”

Self-Check: Is Your Piece Salon-Ready?

Ask yourself:

1. Can I hold criticism of my own narrative? If someone suggested you might be wrong, or that there’s another way to see this, would you get defensive or could you explore that possibility?

2. What am I still figuring out? If your answer is “nothing really, I’ve worked through it,” your piece probably isn’t ready. Salon needs ongoing questions, not resolved stories.

3. What did this transformation cost me? If you can only name gains (freedom, authenticity, self-knowledge) and not real losses (relationships, security, belonging), you’re not examining honestly.

4. Would this work without my personal story? The best salon pieces use personal experience to illuminate larger questions. If you removed your specific story, would there still be an intellectual framework worth discussing?

5. Am I willing to be wrong? Not about what happened to you, but about your interpretation, your choices, your conclusions. Intellectual discourse requires holding your ideas lightly.

What Salon Is NOT

• Not a support group - We’re here to think together, not heal together

• Not a coaching space - We don’t give advice or tell you what to do

• Not a blog platform - This isn’t exposure for your Substack or business

• Not validation - We won’t tell you that you’re right and they’re wrong

• Not inspiration - We complicate stories, we don’t resolve them into neat lessons

What Salon IS

• An intellectual laboratory - Where we examine transformation without romanticizing it

• A space for complexity - Where you can say “I did this AND I’m not sure it was right AND I can’t undo it”

• Serious discourse - Graduate seminar energy, not TED talk optimism

• Collaborative thinking - We explore your questions together, we don’t solve them for you

Finally: Who Salon Is For

You might be ready for salon if:

• You’ve lived through transformation but haven’t wrapped it up neatly

• You can see multiple sides of your own story

• You’re comfortable with ambiguity and contradiction

• You want to think deeply, not just share your journey

• You’re ready to have your narratives complicated, not affirmed

The most important thinking happens in rooms where minds gather, and ideas get interrogated rather than performed.

I’m building that room. Please join us. Either by submitting a piece of writing, watching the free panel discussion (live or recorded) on youtube, or participating in the salon discussion as a paid subscriber.

Submit by October 15th (no exceptions).

Everyone who submits:

• Free salon pass

If your piece is selected:

• Exposure to the salon audience in the monthly Salon Stories post

• Permanent salon panel video on YouTube with your bio and links

• Inclusion in the Salon Stories anthology (edited version)

• Plus: 3-month free paid membership (free subscribers) OR $50 (paid subscribers)

Paid subscribers (whether selected or not):

• Writing critique available

Submit here.

*The word is derived from the Italian “salone”, which was the large reception hall of Italian mansions. “Salone” is actually the augmentative form of sala, room. We have a sala in our house in Italy - we aren’t lucky enough to have a salone.

1. Deanna Shemek, “Isabella d’Este and the Properties of Persuasion,” in Women’s Letters Across Europe, 1400-1700, ed. Jane Couchman and Ann Crabb (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005), 123-141.

2. Julia Cartwright, Isabella d’Este, Marchioness of Mantua, 1474-1539: A Study of the Renaissance (New York: E.P. Dutton, 1903), vol. 1, 145-178.

3. Baldassare Castiglione, The Book of the Courtier, trans. George Bull (London: Penguin, 1976); see also Virginia Cox, “Castiglione’s Cortegiano and the English Courtesy Book Tradition,” The Italianist 17, no. 1 (1997): 5-28.

4. R.J. Knecht, Catherine de’ Medici (London: Longman, 1998), 34-52.

5. Benedetta Craveri, The Age of Conversation, trans. Teresa Waugh (New York: New York Review Books, 2005), 45-72.

6. Dena Goodman, The Republic of Letters: A Cultural History of the French Enlightenment (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994), 90-135.

7. Benedetta Craveri, Madame du Deffand and Her World, trans. Teresa Waugh (Boston: David R. Godine, 1994).

8. Dena Goodman, “Enlightenment Salons: The Convergence of Female and Philosophic Ambitions,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 22, no. 3 (Spring 1989): 329-350.

9. Daniel Gordon, Citizens Without Sovereignty: Equality and Sociability in French Thought, 1670-1789 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), 45-78.