The Book of the City of Ladies

"Yes, I think she was. It was hard to pick out the key books in the history of women readers because there are such a vast number. But I wanted to pick them from different periods. Christine de Pizan was one of the earliest women authors to challenge the misogyny of the day. She identified all sorts of differences between the way girls and boys and men and women were treated, and felt that any inferiority that one could legitimately allocate to women was really a function of their lack of education. She wrote about some of the most important women in history that she knew of to demonstrate that women could be remarkable figures and remembered in history for their exceptional contributions – Dido of Carthage, Lucretia, Medea and, of course, Sappho. She also wrote courtly poetry and in it she included women who were rather stronger than in the tradition of her day. So she provides role models of women who aren’t passive in every respect but have their own ideas about things. She was widely respected by both men and women but, of course, there were men who didn’t like what she was writing about. The so-called war between the sexes begins this early. There were a lot of people who vilified her and felt she was stepping completely out of line in writing about the things she wrote. Not in any formal sense, but they certainly tried to shame her in a way that might silence her. But they were unsuccessful."