In 1405, a woman in Paris published a book arguing that women were not intellectually inferior to men, that the misogyny in popular literature was the product of male insecurity, and that the history of civilization was filled with brilliant women whose contributions had been deliberately erased. She did this three hundred years before Mary Wollstonecraft, five hundred years before Simone de Beauvoir, and she did it while supporting three children, an elderly mother, and a niece on her writing income alone. Her name was Christine de Pizan, and she was the first woman in European history to earn a living through her pen.

She Became a Writer Because Her Husband Died and Left Her With Nothing

Christine was born in Venice in 1364 and raised in Paris, where her father served as astrologer and physician to King Charles V. She received an unusually thorough education for a woman of her era. She married Etienne du Castel at fifteen, was happy, and at twenty-five found herself a widow with three children when Etienne died suddenly of plague. The estate was a disaster. Creditors appeared. Legal disputes consumed years of her life. Medieval women's studies scholars at the University of Paris-Sorbonne have documented that Christine spent over a decade fighting legal battles to reclaim property and income that should have been hers by right. The courts, run by men interpreting laws written by men, did not make this easy. She turned to writing. First poetry, which she sold to noble patrons. Then prose. Then political philosophy. Within a decade she had produced over forty works and was the most prolific author in France, male or female. She wrote about governance, warfare, ethics, history, and the status of women. She wrote in French, not Latin, ensuring the widest possible readership.

The Book of the City of Ladies Was a Fortress Built of Evidence

Christine's masterwork is The Book of the City of Ladies, written in 1405. In it, three allegorical figures, Reason, Rectitude, and Justice, help Christine construct an imaginary city populated entirely by accomplished women from history and mythology. The city is both a refuge and an argument: proof that women have always been capable of greatness and that the literary tradition claiming otherwise is simply wrong. Research from the Centre for Medieval Studies at the University of York has described the City of Ladies as the first systematic work of feminist literary criticism in European history. Christine does not merely argue that women are equal. She dismantles specific claims of female inferiority by citing specific historical examples. She responds to Ovid, to Jean de Meun, to the entire tradition of misogynist satire with documented evidence rather than emotion. She was doing what scholars now call evidence-based argumentation, and she was doing it in 1405, in a culture that considered female learning suspicious at best and heretical at worst.

She Predicted Joan of Arc and Then Disappeared Into a Convent

Christine's last known work, written in 1429, is a poem celebrating Joan of Arc's victory at Orleans. She had been living in the convent at Poissy for over a decade, having retreated from public life during the upheaval of the Hundred Years' War. The poem is jubilant. A woman has saved France. Christine had spent her career arguing that women could do extraordinary things, and now one had done the most extraordinary thing imaginable. It is the last we hear from her. She likely died around 1430. Her works were copied and circulated throughout the fifteenth century, then gradually forgotten as the printing press favored newer authors. Scholars rediscovered her in the nineteenth century and have been arguing about her significance ever since. Literary historians at the Bibliotheque Nationale de France have catalogued over fifty surviving manuscripts of her works, a remarkable preservation rate for a medieval author. She was not obscure in her own time. She was famous, controversial, and widely read. The obscurity came later, applied by a literary tradition that preferred to believe the history of women's writing began with someone more recent. Christine de Pizan built a city of accomplished women out of words. Six hundred years later, the city is still standing, and the receipts she kept are still valid.