Christine de Pizan’s The City of Ladies starts with the heroine reading a cleric’s Matheolus’ attack on women and falling into despair. She comes to the realization that all men – writers, philosophers, orators, and poets – speak ill of female nature, and being a woman herself she knows that they are wrong and full of lies. Christine reflected on herself as well as other women in her life and concluded that her experience, knowledge, and observations contradict all the misogynistic accusations from male authors. First, says Pizan, just because so many men are spreading lies and misconceptions about women doesn’t mean you have to rely on their opinions. In fact, you should probably do the opposite since the male philosophers are constantly contradicting each other and “correcting each other’s opinions”. For example, Aristotle rejected Plato’s theory of forms, while later Doctors of the Church and St. Augustine criticized Aristotle’s teachings on certain matters. In response to male authors’ depiction of women, Christine de Pizan describes female merits and virtues. She reasonably values the good female nature, and to support her argument she gathers and presents numerous examples of great, brave, noble, and strong women in history.
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Christine de Pizan wrote a bold piece for the 14th century, where the ideas presented in The City of Ladies were nonconforming to the social standards at the time. She protects her character by providing the religious authority of the three Goddesses, who lead the heroine to the conclusions that women are not as vile as men make them out to be. Furthermore, she uses the logic that they cannot even agree amongst themselves, so it is not unreasonable that she will also not agree with them. She does not need to attack men, nor does she do that, in order to persuade her audience, including women who have been misled like herself, through her recollections of strong women’s contributions to humankind.