Christine De Pizan

Christine de Pizan

The poor little, rich girl, would probably be the modern term some might use for describing Chistine de Pizan. Although she was one of the first women to speak out on women’s rights, it is easy to dismiss her as a privileged woman with various rants that was basically ignored. She was well educated and her family was well connected, politically, socially and intellectually, with those who held power and influence in France in the early 1400s, and she did write about women’s issues at a time when most women were not educated and could not read her work (Bizzell 540). However, to only see this part of her life would not be a fair depiction of de Pizan or her contribution to rhetoric. She not only wrote about a better life for women in her society, but she also lived it. Her writings on misogynistic behavior in writing, and in society as whole, inspired future generations stimulated (with a few centuries delay) the women’s movement and defined feminist rhetoric.

To begin let’s take a look at her life. She was born in Venice in 1364, to a father who was well educated, and soon became the court astrologer and physician to King Charles V, of France (Bizzell 540). She received an exceptional education, being tutored by her father and various court tutors in Latin, French, Italian and the use of rhetoric. She also later married a legal secretary of the French court and learned about ars dictaminis (the art of composition) and legal script (Bizzell 540). This certainly put her in a category of privilege that most women, including those of any wealth, did not have access to. But, I would argue that it was because of this privilege that she was able to make the statements that she did. If she were one of the more common women of the time, the class that might have been more identified with the lower status of women, then she would not have had access to education or the ability to write eloquently. So, basically, for any woman to have written in opposition of the subjugation of women, and written it in a manner to be taken seriously, she would had to have been one of privilege. Therefore, the argument that she was too privileged to know about the lower status of women is mute. No one else at this time could have been able to do what she did.

However, she wasn’t all talk (or writing for that matter). She not only wrote about empowerment for women, she lived it. She was the first woman to support herself and her family by writing (Ritchie 32). When her father and husband died suddenly, she was left without any means of income to support her mother and children. She took to writing poetry and ballads for members of the court of France in order to support them all (Ritchie 32). Once again, it was privilege that put her in the position to do this, but that privilege enabled her to make a ground breaking move that no other woman, wealthy or not, was able to accomplish. This certainly opened the door for more women to follow her in the future.

This leads to my point of her inspiring future women writers. Joy Ritchie and Kate Ronald mention that, “The Book of the City of Ladies, modeled on Augustine’s Civitate Dei, expands her arguments against the anti-woman writing of her time and joins a tradition of women’s writing that would continue throughout the Renaissance and into the seventeenth century with Jane Anger, Rachel Speght, and, in the Americas, Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz” (Rithchie 32). When de Pizan writes, in The Book of the City of Ladies, “Those men who have attacked women out of jealousy are those wicked ones who have seen and realized that many women have greater understanding and are more noble on conduct that they themselves, and thus they are pained and disdainful” (Ritchie 41), she is making a statement that is almost echoed by Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz, when she said, “Oh, that all men—and I, who am but an ignorant woman, first of all—might take the measure of our abilities before setting out to study and, what is worse, write in our jealous aspirations to equal and even surpass others” (Bizzell 786). While de la Cruz is a little more sarcastic, it must be noted that she didn’t have the same privilege, so she could say the things that de Pizan did, but she had to be a little less obvious about it. I can be argued that de la Cruz probably didn’t read de Pizan, but whether