600 Years of Feminism: Christine de Pizan and the Present Day

It is 600 years since Christine de Pizan, the writer and
poet of the late Middle Ages, first wrote 
in defence of women. The long tradition of hatred of the second sex,
which reached one of its peaks in Pizan’s lifetime, made her decide to confront
a multitude of stereotypes, prejudices and errors of thinking. A number of such
misleading beliefs about women and their assumed nature are quite familiar even
today ... The problem, of course, is not the current value of Christine de
Pizan’s work, her surpassing her time, her modern spirit of argumentation and
shocking similarity to current feminist texts. The problem is, on the contrary,
the persistence of errors of judgement and the almost incredible similarity of
the misogyny our great ancestor had to face and the misogyny we encounter
today. Despite its links to the period in which it was written, The Book of the City of Women, published in
1405, deserves to be regarded as the first fundamental work of feminist
thought, the beginning and the source to which we must be able to return and
should return repeatedly, so that we can see how fundamentally feminist theory
can shake the entire construction of western philosophical tradition. The Book
of the City of Women is not a unique example of a feminist text, but was
followed by a number of others: the works of Mary Wollstonecraft, Virginia
Woolf and Simone de Beauvoir all contribute to the core of what we may call
‘feminist theory’.
The purpose of the round table is to present the work of
Christine de Pizan which has been published by the feminist magazine Delta in a
new series of books. The next book to be published is the feminist manifesto of
the century, Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex.

Participants: Eva D. Bahovec, Zalka Drglin,
Tatjana Jurkovič, Boris A. Novak, Miha Pintarič, Valerija Vendramin.
Organised in collaboration
with: revija Delta.