The narrator of André Campra's cantata entitled Les Femmes (Women, 1708) characterizes his tragic love life as a shipwreck. To churning rhythms in the accompaniment, he laments that love's winds and storms have long agitated him. Fleeing from his past mistakes, he seeks tranquil shores far from affairs of the heart. As he sobs through slow melismatic passages, he denigrates love, wailing that its chains weigh upon an unhappy heart. Moreover, the troubling power of women threatens him. The narrator claims that women have usurped authority in courtship, becoming formidable queens who tyrannize men. In turn, men have debased themselves, transforming into their beloveds’ besotted slaves. In quick, incisively articulated phrases, he condemns the courtship games that women play and disparages the stereotypical roles they portray from the coquette to the prude. He argues that the flirt betrays men, while the chaste woman makes men desperate. Jealous women inspire men to chafe at what they should adore. The beautiful woman is capricious, the intelligent woman is bold, and the indolent woman is boring. To escape the pain that inevitably follows love, he prays for indifference to all women. He concludes his tirade against love and the “deadly sex,” bidding them both a final farewell.

This short musical work, comprised of four recitatives and three airs, points in miniature to many of the issues that this book addresses in its investigation of full-length musical and theatrical works. Coquettes, Wives, and Widows examines how composers and librettists grappled with issues first raised in Parisian salons and female-authored literature, in which women imagined new, more flexible roles for themselves in courtship and wedlock. It analyzes comic spectacles to show that plots about love and marriage from 1701 to 1745 portray a complicated web of ideological positions, especially with regard to women. It argues that these plots furnished an important vehicle for negotiating emerging legal, social, and cultural formulations of love and marriage, as well as women's place in the cultural imagination and social hierarchy, which had become contested terrain in the previous century.