The City of Ladies

In the winter of 1405, Christine de Pizan sat alone in her study, surrounded by manuscripts and the weight of grief. Her husband had been dead for fifteen years, her father for even longer. The widow's black she wore had become as familiar as her own skin. Yet on this particular evening, she was not copying someone else's words for pay—she was building something entirely new. With each stroke of her pen, she laid another stone in her imaginary City of Ladies, a fortress where women's achievements could stand protected against the assault of centuries of misogyny.

"Where are the women?" she had asked herself, reading through the works of learned men who seemed to agree on only one thing: the inherent wickedness and weakness of her sex. From Aristotle to her own contemporaries, the chorus was deafening. Women were lustful, deceitful, intellectually inferior—barely human at all. But Christine knew better. She had supported three children and her widowed mother through her writing. She had advised princes and composed poetry that made nobles weep. If she could do this, what else were women capable of?

That night, she imagined three allegorical figures visiting her: Reason, Rectitude, and Justice. Together, they would help her build a city populated by history's greatest women—warriors, scholars, saints, and queens. This City of Ladies would stand as eternal proof that women's supposed inferiority was not natural law but human prejudice.