What 17th-century Paris can teach us today

On the women who built Salons, held the standard of conversation, and helped shape the idea behind Kith Salon.

Catherine de Vivonne was twelve years old when she was married into the French nobility. She was Roman-born, educated well beyond what most women of her era were permitted and by all accounts thoroughly unimpressed by what she found in Paris.

The French royal court in the early 1600s had its own machinery of gossip, political manoeuvring and social performance. Catherine was unimpressed by it. She had a different idea about what people might do when they gathered and I've found myself thinking about that idea more than is probably reasonable for a woman living in the twenty-first century. History has always had this way with me, the right story finds a quiet place in me and refuses to leave. This one has been with me for years.

In 1607, Catherine opened her home to a carefully curated guest list and set about creating the kind of conversation she believed was worth having. The Hôtel de Rambouillet, near the Palais du Louvre, became the first of what would eventually be called Salons and what happened inside those rooms, across two centuries of French intellectual life, matters more than most people realise.

For almost two hundred years, the Salon was one of France's most influential cultural institutions. It was invented, run, and sustained almost entirely by women. The Salonnières didn't merely gather interesting people together, they held a standard. They curated the guest list, hosted the conversation and cared deeply about the quality of what got said in the room.

Historians have called this era “the age of conversation.” In the Salons, ideas were not simply performed, they were tested in the room. The presence of women changed the terms of intellectual life. Complex ideas had to become clearer, warmer, and more human.

Women weren't softening intellectual life, they were sharpening it, insisting that rigour and warmth were not opposites, that depth and accessibility could exist in the same room.

By the late eighteenth century, these spaces had become de facto Universities for women, the only ones available to them at the time. The ideas that circulated inside the Salons helped shape the intellectual climate that made revolution thinkable.

The rooms I've spent my career in have been rather different, moving between the inside of organisations, consulting rooms and coaching spaces and for much of that time, I was the only woman at the table. I've watched organisations work hard and sincerely at advancing women in leadership. The care and the effort has been real. We've built real things, sponsorship programs, mentoring structures, leadership cohorts, better promotion practices and I've seen them make a genuine difference.

What I've also started to think is that we've underestimated the room. Not the boardroom, something quieter than that and perhaps harder to name. A room where a woman can think out loud without first calculating what it will cost her to be wrong. Where the conversation is substantive enough to genuinely stretch her and honest enough that she'll say what she actually thinks rather than what reads well. Where she's alongside women who are genuinely trying to grow, doing something harder and more private than managing impressions. For me, a book is often a doorway into that room. Not because the book is the point, but because the right book, at the right time, gives a meaningful conversation somewhere to begin.

Once through the doorway, the room you enter matters just as much as the book that brought you there. The conversation needs to be held. There needs to be someone tending not only to the gathering itself, but to the quality of thinking inside it. The Salonnières understood this. They knew that the quality of the space sets the terms for everything that happens within it. A room does not become that kind of room on its own. It requires someone who cares enough to hold a standard for who is invited in, for what gets said, and for the level of conversation the room will allow.

When I was naming Kith Salon, I kept coming back to Catherine de Vivonne and the women like her.

Kith, from Old English, means one’s own people, those who truly know you. Salon, in the historical sense, means a space built with deliberate intention around the quality of thought, conversation and connection that happens when women gather well.

That's what Kith Salon is, a curated reading community for women, built around the quality of the conversation and the standard of the room. The books we read together are chosen because they move something in the women who read them. The conversation around them is held to a standard because what gets said in the room matters.

You don't need to be a historian, an academic, or the kind of person who already has a reading life arranged neatly beside the bed. You only need to want a conversation that asks more of you, and gives more back.

What I have come to understand, across many years and many conversations, is that women are often looking for a room where they can be met as they are and held with care to become all they might be. A room where honesty and growth can exist together.

The Salonnières were building it in 1607. Kith Salon is building it now.