Women in seventeenth century France enjoyed few rights, particularly regarding the choice of a husband. This book explores how Molière's comedies presented women using one of the few assets they had: their mastery of words, particularly the rhetoric of irony, to frustrate the plans of fathers, guardians, and other authority figures. Lyons's lucid study is structured in such a way that individual plays receive their own chapter, making it an instructive scholarly and pedagogical companion that will enable less-known plays by Molière to be taught and studied and new light to be shed on his canonical works.