 During the early decades of the twentieth century there was a new interest in what was seen as the history of feminist thought, actualized by the hotly debated question of women suffrage, and this resulted in some early scholarly essays on Poulain (Grappin 1913, 1914; Lefevre 1914). In 1949 Simone de Beauvoir made Poulain’s name known when she (rather freely) cites his phrase “one should be suspicious of everything that men have said about women because they are both judges and litigants” (T1en 151; TTfr 93) as a motto for her Le deuxième sexe [The second sex]. Poulain is more than a motto for Beauvoir and when discussing facts and myths about women, she describes his analysis in the following words: