Christine de Pizán's Thinking: Educating to Build a Women's City

Abstract

Christine de Pizan, a Renaissance author, is recognized in the field of literature as a professional writer, proposing a frontal critique of the dominant misogynist tradition of the time. We investigate here some central points of her literary work The Book of the City of Ladies (Le Livre de la Cité des Dames, 1405) as data of her life directly related to her possibility of being an author and of thinking about the condition of women. In this case, we understand her discourse as an action through which she makes visible the construction of a new role for women in the new place that is the city, being the common education for women an essential point in her proposal. That is, education, which in her case was exceptional and privileged compared to that of the women of the time, in this city will be common for all and therefore fair. Thus, she will build it using a rhetorical resource such as allegory to give life and dialogue with three virtuous ladies: reason, right and justice who will help her to challenge the doxa of her epochal context, believing in herself and laying the foundations of the new city that would enable the emergence of a place conducive to freedom, equality and emancipation of women.