ABSTRACT
Christine de Pizan (b. 1365), the first Frenchwoman to choose writing as a profession, begins her Book of the City of Ladies with a potent description of female representation in male-authored works. Reflecting on a book she has by chance picked up to read, she writes:
.. just the sight of this book… made me wonder how it happened that so many men—and learned men among them—have been and are so inclined to express both in speaking and in their treatises and writings so many wicked insults about women and their behavior … judging from the treatises of all philosophers and poets and from all the orators—it would take too long to mention their names—it seems that they all speak from one and the same mouth. They all concur in one conclusion: that the behavior of women is inclined to and full of every vice. 1
