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Reading group: Christine de Pizan and Mary Astell, two arguments from reason three centuries apart

Valentina Ríos Fellow
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Gender, race & identityMedieval ChristianModern EuropeanFeminist philosophyChristine de PizanMary AstellMary Wollstonecraft#city-of-ladies#education-of-women#reading-group#serious-proposal
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Women who claimed the right to think in earlier centuries kept reaching for the same tool against their opponents: argument from the opponents' own premises. I'd like to read two of them side by side.

Christine de Pizan, The Book of the City of Ladies (1405). She opens alone in her study, having read a misogynist book, and is close to despair at how many learned men agree that women are defective. Three allegorical ladies, Reason, Rectitude and Justice, appear and help her build a city out of counter-examples: women of learning, courage, prudence and virtue. Weeks 1 and 2: Part I (Reason), then a selection from Parts II and III.

Mary Astell, A Serious Proposal to the Ladies (1694; Part II 1697) and Some Reflections upon Marriage (1700). Astell, a High Church Tory and a sharp critic of Locke, argued that women are rational beings who deserve an education, and proposed a kind of academic retreat for them. In a preface to a later edition of Reflections, she asked, in effect, how it could be that if all men are born free, all women are born slaves. Weeks 3 and 4.

Any modern English translation of Christine is fine; Astell is in English already, though the spelling is old. Question to carry: is the argument from consistency (‘you say all humans are rational; are women not human?’) enough, or does it leave too much of the opponents' framework standing?

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5 replies

  1. Siobhán Keane

    Fellow

    Part I. What struck me is how Christine uses the authorities. She doesn't dismiss the learned men; she out-reads them. Reason tells her to trust her own experience of herself over the books, which is a startling instruction for 1405. And her method is a catalogue, like the medieval lives of saints, turned into a proof by counter-example.

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  2. Giulia Ferrante

    Fellow

    Parts II and III. As a Latin teacher I recognise the exempla tradition, and I notice how many of her women come from classical sources: she's taking Boccaccio's book on famous women and correcting its spin. That's a wonderful scholarly move: same evidence, different conclusion. Also note how early she is. She'd already argued in letters against the Romance of the Rose a few years before.

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  3. Hessa Al Mazrouei

    Fellow

    Week 3, Astell's Proposal. I keep thinking about Ibn Ṭufayl and education without teachers, and Astell interests me because she wants the opposite: a community of learning, retired from the world, where women can think together. She's not asking for women to join men's universities. She wants a separate institution designed for them. I can't decide if that's realism or a missed chance.

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  4. Femke Bosman

    Fellow

    Week 4, Reflections upon Marriage. Astell is fascinating because she's politically conservative. She uses the language of the Whig contract theorists against them: if absolute power is wrong in the state, why is it right in the family? She doesn't conclude that wives should rebel. She concludes that women should choose very carefully whom to marry. Wollstonecraft, a century later, takes a similar consistency argument much further.

  5. Valentina Ríos

    Fellow

    To my own question: the consistency argument wins the first battle, women's rationality, and leaves the rest of the framework (marriage, church, hierarchy) standing, sometimes by the author's own choice. Christine and Astell both accept their world's order and argue for women's minds inside it. Sor Juana did the same. It's tempting to call that a limitation. I'm starting to think it was the condition of being heard at all.

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