As a result of many factors, among them the writings of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, late eighteenth-century France had become a fiercely pronatalistic culture; women were valorized essentially through their fertility, that is, through maternal production. Having openly espoused Rousseau's ideas on the proper social roles for women, Cottin understood well that there was little use for barren women like herself in post-revolutionary French culture. Caught between the ideological positions she had embraced and the reality of her sterility, she cast about for alternatives. In the early years of her widowhood, she took up writing in a serious way, admitting that she found writing therapeutic.