From their stories, she would build a city fit for the Queen of Heaven.Įlizabeth Cady sat quietly in her father's law office listening to the complaints of his widowed clients.
Guided by her three visitors, Christine went back to books and discovered the lives of worthy women-queens, princesses, warriors, poets, inventors, weavers of tapestries, wives, mothers, sibyls, and saints. Together they would restore the reputations of those unjustly accused.
"Come back to yourself, recover your senses, and do not trouble yourself any more over such absurdities." She told Christine that she and her companions, Lady Rectitude and Lady Justice, had come to help her build a city in which the fame of good women would endure against all assailants. "Dear daughter, do not be afraid, for we have not come here to harm or trouble you, but to console you." Identifying herself as Lady Reason, the specter held up to Christine the mirror of self-knowledge. Terrified, she made the sign of the cross. Looking up from her shadowed corner, Christine beheld a vision: standing before her were three radiant women. As she sat with her head bowed, tears streaming from her eyes, she discerned a beam of light falling on her lap just as a ray of sun might have done if it had been the right hour of the day. In her despair she began to pray, asking why she could not have been born male. "I could hardly find a book on morals where, even before I had read it in its entirety, I did not find several chapters or certain selections attacking women, no matter who the author was." She began to think God had made a vile creature when he created woman. Men's opinions spilled out like a gushing fountain, filling her with doubt. Even the sight of the book made her wonder why so many learned men had "devilish and wicked thoughts about women." She took more volumes from their shelves. She knew better than to take its diatribes against women seriously, yet somehow its arguments disturbed her. Weary of serious reading, she opened a satire someone had given her for safekeeping.
The problems they faced were surprisingly-disturbingly-the same.įor each, a moment of illumination came through an encounter with an odious book.Ĭhristine de Pizan sat in her study. The settings in which they worked were radically different. None was a historian in the conventional sense, but all three were determined to give women a history. One was a poet and scholar attached to a French court, another was an American activist, the third an English novelist. Here are the stories of three women making history.
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