When, in about 1618, the Marquise de Rambouillet got cheesed off with the stuffy rituals of the French court, she withdrew to the bedchamber of her Paris residence. There she received guests and indulged her passion for good conversation. As often as not, those carefully selected guests sat on chairs in the ruelle - the space between wall and bed - and talked confidentially in an intimate atmosphere.  Thus the Marquise, Catherine de Vivonne, unwittingly became the first salonière, starting a private oral culture that for more than four centuries would have a massive public impact, nurturing the artists, musicians, writers, philosophers and scientists who attended jours fixes in the homes of women. A new exhibition at the Jewish Museum in New York traces the development of the salon and showcases the women who ran them from Paris in the early 17th century to Hollywood in the 1940s when, the curators suggest, the taste for sociable, intellectual conversation in such domestic spaces died. Thereafter salons just became places where you got your hair done.  If the history of the salon is hardly a secret one - salonières such as Gertrude Stein and Madame de Staël were by no means simply handmaidens of their male guests' artistic ambitions - it is one that bears telling now. Today we live in a culture in which the only time people gather on sofas for a jour fixe is when they are summoned by that latter-day salonière Davina McCall for Friday's Big Brother eviction. But the soirées à l'Elstree have yet to produce one good conversation or to catalyse any work of art. Maybe, despite the aura of snobbery that hangs over our perception of the salon, we could do with its civilising influence now.  It's a lovely exhibition in which each room strives to create the intimate, cultured ambience of a particular salon. When you walk into the one hosted by Fanny Hensel in 19th-century Berlin, you activate a recording of a chamber piece by her brother Felix Mendelssohn and are whisked back to her Sonntagmusiken that were attended by Franz Liszt, Niccolo Paganini, Clara Schumann and many of the city's intellectuals, and became a hub for German music-making.  When you go into the room devoted to Geneviève Straus's belle époque salon, you learn that it was she who gave Marcel Proust the five narrow notebooks into which he jotted the first notes for A La Recherche Du Temps Perdu and that her Paris salon not only became a literary, artistic and musical hothouse, luring Debussy, Degas and Zola into a drawing room decorated by paintings by La Tour, Monet and Boucher, but also that it became the intellectual and campaigning centre for the falsely convicted Jewish officer who gave his name to the Dreyfus case.  In the room devoted to Gertrude Stein's salon, you can appreciate two Louis XV fauteuils with needlepoint seats and backs done by Stein's lover Alice B Toklas after designs by Pablo Picasso, a regular attendee.  The room recreating Ada Leverson's 1890s London salon, which was frequented by Oscar Wilde, Aubrey Beardsley, John Singer Sargent and Max Beerbohm, makes one realise that civilised repartee did not expire as it crossed the Channel. At one of her soirées, Leverson suggested to Wilde that he publish a book consisting entirely of margins, "full of beautiful unwritten thoughts, and have this blank volume bound in some Nile-green skin with gilt nenuphars and smoothed with hard ivory". Wilde readily agreed: "It shall be dedicated to you, and the unwritten text illustrated by Beardsley. There must be 500 copies for particular friends, six for the general public and one for America." Wilde thrived in this oral environment; he was, Leverson thought, "greater, perhaps, as an improviser in conversation than as a writer".  Where would such improvisatory art thrive now? Has women's suffrage, greater economic independence, the apparent dearth of moneyed leisure made women's need for salons obsolete? And is that an unalloyedly good thing?  You might well think so. After all, salons were seemingly hosted by moneyed and leisured women prepared to do what women don't want to do any more - help often self-obsessed, insecure men find their way and become geniuses. Were salonières just facilitators? Not always. Arguably, salons sometimes served as universities for women at a time when they were excluded from institutions of higher learning.  They also gave women musicians the rare chance to express their creative talents. Fanny Hensel, for instance, was able to play, conduct and present her own compositions during her Sonntagmusiken . As a woman and a Jew, she was doubly excluded from participating in Berlin's performing arts or indeed any form of public life.  Hensel's case explains why all salons were run by women: women could not vote, were not economically independent, nor regarded as being capable of intellectual reflection or artistic creation. No wonder, then, that some of them withdrew into their domestic spaces and created there simulacra of better societies, ones where people of different economic standings, religions, rank and nationality could exchange ideas and be recognised both as individuals and as part of common humanity. Even if it meant having to listen to men witter incessantly about their sexual insecurities and career goals.  But back to the Marquise de Rambouillet's bedroom. The jours fixes in Catherine de Vivonne's Hotel de Rambouillet resembled the French court, but for the fact that she chose her guests for their abilities to converse and their discernment rather than for their blue blood. The salons that thrived in 17th and 18th-century France thus created meritocratic elites. They became havens for marginalised and unrecognised talent and persons of socially unacceptable ethnicities, sexualities and temperaments. No wonder neurotic gay Jews like Stein and Proust were such keen salon-goers.  With the French revolution the salon became seen as a decadent relic of the ancien régime. Worse yet, they were perverted institutions since they took women away from their roles as wives and mothers and brought them into contact with highly strung artistic types with anti-social ideas and fruity dress codes. And in any case, what did clever men get from talking to women? Jean-Jacques Rousseau, whose ideas more than those of any other philosopher underpinned the revolution's grisly aftermath, wrote: "Women in general, do not like any art, know nothing about any, and have no genius."  Rousseau maintained that male attendees had to "lower their ideas to the range of women". In saying this, Rousseau was worse than a sexist buffoon. He was an ignoramus who failed to appreciate how salons had been important in stimulating the very Enlightenment ideas that made the ancien régime intolerable to the French. Another 18th-century philosopher, Denis Diderot, regarded the sofa as the jurisdictional home of impartial dialogue and attended Madame Geoffrin's salons (writers on Wednesdays, painters and connoisseurs Mondays). Significantly, few salonières used their positions to agitate for the vote; arguably, they were too busy creating themselves as individuals to do so.  But what was it that stopped salons degenerating into chit-chat about tie-backs and servants? Emily D. Bilski and Emily Braun argue in the exhibition catalogue that, though located in the home, the salon shunned the domestic as a subject. Partly this was to facilitate inter-gender conversation: "If men dwelled on their business or their properties, and women on their clothes and their children, the collective dynamic would be lost." Salutary stuff: when did you last go to a dinner party where there was such a commitment to trans-gender intellectual conversation? For some, women's roles as salonières , which often involved them promoting new talent, procuring prestigious commissions through social contacts and brokering appointments, meant that they were the real powers in the land. Proust's contemporary, the Baron de Montesquieu, described the salon as "a state within a state; and anyone at court, in Paris, or in the provinces, who sees the activities of the ministers, the magistrates and the prelates, if he does not know the women who govern them, is like a man who sees a machine at work, but who is ignorant of the springs that move it".  This is undoubtedly going too far for even belle époque Paris, nor do women need to wield power surreptitiously now. Arguably, even if salons are overdue for a revival, it would no longer be necessary for women to preside over them. Unless, that is, you believe that the desirable qualities for a salon host - agreeableness, tolerance and indulgence - are not just stereotypically female ones but really so.  Of course there is another possibility - that the institution of the salon did not die out. It's just that those who lament its passing, people like me and the organisers of this exhibition, haven't been invited to attend.  · Jewish Women and their Salons: The Power of Conversation is at the Jewish Museum New York until July 10, then goes to the McMullen Museum of Art at Boston College from Aug 22-Dec 4.
Stuart Jeffries celebrates the women who, from 17th-century France to 1940s Hollywood, hosted salons to nurture talent and inspire great works of art.