Beata Rosenhane

As a Swedish diplomat, her father was stationed abroad at several occasions, and it is believed that it was during his visit to Paris in France during the age of the Précieuses, when it was the fashion in France to educate females, that he decided to give his daughters equal education to that of his sons, something unique at the time at least in Sweden.

The result was that his daughters are counted as the most learned and educated females in 17th-century Sweden alongside Queen Christina.

From the age of seven onward, she was trained in rhetoric by conversation and by writing essays in various subjects in which she was also, in parallel, educated.

Before her marriage, she pointed out to her brother, that she gave in and agreed to marry only because as a spinster, she would not have the power to live by herself and do as she pleased, and that she would have been able to so, had she been born a male.

She admitted that between the alternative of a wife and a spinster, the former was the better of two evils: "You do of course find it necessary to realize, that an unmarried woman would be far worse off than an unhappily married one".