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Life
Widowed at twenty-five with three children and no income, she became Europe's first known woman to earn her living by writing, and used that living to argue, book after book, that women's supposed inferiority was a slander invented by men.
She took the Enlightenment's own arguments and turned them on the people who made them. If reason is the basis of rights, she asked, why does it stop at women?
Connection
Christine de Pizan a proto-feminist argument anticipated Mary Wollstonecraft — Three and a half centuries before Wollstonecraft, Pizan had already argued that women's apparent inferiority reflects lack of education rather than lack of natural capacity — the same structural argument Wollstonecraft would make the philosophical center of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, though no direct textual link between them is documented.
Ideas
Words
“If it were customary to send little girls to school and teach them the same subjects as boys, they would learn just as thoroughly.”
“All evils which are in the world come from women, so certain men claim. Yet there are many good women, and this can be proved.”
“I do not wish women to have power over men; but over themselves.”
“My own sex, I hope, will excuse me, if I treat them like rational creatures, instead of flattering their fascinating graces.”
Key Moments
1401–1402
Debates the Quarrel of the Rose
1405
Writes The Book of the City of Ladies
1759 CE
Born in London
1792 CE
A Vindication of the Rights of Woman
1792 CE
Witness in Paris
1797 CE
Death in London
Works
The Book of the City of Ladies
A Vindication of the Rights of Woman