Are Women Human? (Back to the Future, Part 17)

It's been nearly 49 years since the Roe v. Wade decision was issued by the US Supreme Court on 22 January 1973. Norma McCorvey, the "Jane Roe" in the case, lived in Texas, where abortion was was illegal, except when the life of the pregnant woman was at stake. Opponents of abortion have never accepted the court's 7-2 decision, and the efforts to overturn Roe have been unending in the decades since.

Now, with a new Texas abortion law in place--one that clearly violates the Roe decision (and doesn't allow abortion even to preserve the life of a woman), and with the Supreme Court considering a Mississippi abortion case that could overturn Roe, the crazy train to Gilead is picking up steam as it barrels down the track--we're now hurtling back to the future at a breakneck pace. Who is behind the wheel?

Is it Tate Reeves, the governor of Mississipi, who insists on "individual liberty" and "my body, my choice" when it comes to vaccines, but is hell-bent on denying women the same control over their own bodies when it comes to pregnancy? 

Is it Judge Amy Coney Barrett, the most recently installed Supreme Court justice, who blithely hand-waves a woman's autonomy, agency, and self-determination--and who thinks it's perfectly fine to force a woman to give birth because she can just dump an unwanted newborn at a "safe haven" drop-box while she is on her way to the gym or the grocery store and, hey, problem solved!

Or is it Madison Cawthorn, unbelievably an elected member of the US House of Representatives, who has said the quiet part out loud--it's not like women are people, they are just like pickle jars, only made of clay instead of glass, "earthenware vessels," in his words, with a baby stuck inside instead of a dill. (He's so proud of himself he not only repeated his words in a tweet, he included a clip of his speech as recorded on C-SPAN.)

The truth is, no one is driving this runaway train. We're heading not just back to a time before Margaret Atwood's fictional Gilead or even before the U.S. pre-Roe--we're heading back to a much grimmer future.

And so I have posted here an essay I first wrote in August 2012--it was originally printed as an op-ed in my local newspaper, but I had only 800 words, hardly enough for what I wanted to say. I published this more complete piece on my own website in September 2012.

Without any revision, the piece is as relevant today as it was when I wrote it nearly ten years ago . . .*

Are Women Human?

Last March, just a month into the spring semester, a shy student who usually sat quietly in the back row came dancing into the classroom, waving a handful of printed pages over her head. Instead of climbing over chairs and other students and backpacks on her way to her usual retreat in the last row of desks, she came right up to me, where I was standing in the front of the room. What was she so excited about? She had a photocopy of Jessica Winter’s Time essay, “Are Women People?” in her hands, and she was excited because she thought it was a perfect piece for our class discussion.

Christine de Pizan,
from MS Harley 4431
(British Library)

She was right—it was perfect for our discussion. We had just finished reading Christine de Pizan’s fifteenth-century defense of women, The Book of the City of Ladies, on the very day that Winter’s essay had been published. And the question of women's humanity was very much on Pizan's mind as she wrote. 

But the fact that Winter was struggling with that same question more than six hundred years later was deeply unsettling. Are women people, she asks? “I’ve always assumed that women are fully autonomous human citizens—who vote, even!” Winter wrote, “but now I’m not so certain.”

The question of whether women are, rightly considered, “people” has a long history. Winter certainly isn’t the first to ask. And her wonderful piece, which appeared in the midst of the Rush Limbaugh/Sandra Fluke controversy, is smart, articulate, and funny. (Are women people? “Only when they’re pregnant.” “They’re more like really expensive blow-up dolls.” “Not quite—they’re objects with certain people-like traits.”) But Winter doesn’t address the long history of the question she was confronting.

Are women human? Philosophers, theologians, biologists and physicians, lawyers—well, all men, really—have been asking this very question for millennia. And for more than two thousand years, their answer to that question has pretty much been the same. Are women human? Sort of, maybe, well, in a way, but not really, no, I don’t think so.

My students had been shocked when they first began reading The Book of City of Ladies. There, in the opening pages, Pizan’s first-person narrator, “Christine,” is reduced to the depths of self-loathing:

I finally decided that God formed a vile creature when He made woman, and I wondered how such a worthy artisan could have deigned to make such an abominable work which . . . is the vessel as well as the refuge and abode of every evil and vice. . . . I detested myself and the entire feminine sex, as though we were monstrosities in nature.

My students were horrified. How could a woman write such things about women? How could Pizan suggest women were "vile" or "abominable," much less conclude that they were the source of "every evil and vice"? Why would she even suggest the possibility that women were “monstrosities in nature”? And why would “Christine” pray to God in her agony, asking, “Alas, God, why did You not let me be born in the world as a male”? 

That’s when we had to stop to look at the complex, contentious, ugly history of the question to which Pizan was responding in 1405. Are women human?

When Pizan, through her first-person narrator, "Christine," refers to women as “monstrosities in nature,” she’s quoting Aristotle, whose profoundly influential views about women still reverberate in today’s political debates. From Aristotle’s perspective, men and women are clearly so different that it might well be asked whether they even belong to the same species: “One might raise the question why woman does not differ from man in species, when female and male are contrary and their difference is a contrariety” (Metaphysics). Although Aristotle ultimately decides that women do belong to the same species as men, he rejects the views of earlier philosophers that women, like men, contribute “seed” to reproduction. Women are cold, infertile, and passive; they contribute only matter or “stuff” to reproduction. Men alone contribute seed, soul, life force—in other words, the right stuff.

But Aristotle’s most influential “truth” about women is found in his biological work (On the Generation of Animals). A woman may be the same species as a man, but she is by no means his equal:

Just as it sometimes happens that deformed offspring are produced by deformed parents, and sometimes not, so the offspring produced by a female are sometimes female, sometimes not, but male. The reason is that the female is as it were a deformed male.

So there it is. Are women human? To be fully human is to be male. To be female is to be deformed, a failure of the reproductive process. To be female is to be almost human, just not quite.

And thus another question arises. What is the place of this almost-human-but-not-quite creature in society? To be male is to be fully rational—the human species is distinguished by its rationality, according to Aristotle. But to be female is to be irrational. Women have some rational faculties, but only within limits (Politics):

A question may indeed be raised, whether there is any excellence at all in a slave beyond and higher than merely instrumental and ministerial qualities. . . . Since they are men and share in rational principle, it seems absurd to say that they have no virtue. A similar question may be raised about women and children. . . .

Yes, a woman has some rational faculty, Aristotle decides, but her limited rational faculty is “without authority”—the child also has some rational faculty, “but it is immature.” Presumably, a male child’s rational faculty will mature; a girl’s will not. Without authority, a woman is bound to obey. She is a “natural subject”: just as the “free man rules over the slave,” “the male rules over the female” (and “the man over the child”). A woman’s “virtues” are silence and obedience.

The influence of Aristotle’s view of woman is incalculable. The Roman physician, Galen, adopted Aristotle’s conclusions about women. Women were necessary for reproduction, certainly: “there needs to be a female,” Galen concedes. “Indeed, you ought not to think that our Creator would purposely make half the whole race imperfect, and as it were, mutilated, unless there was to be some great advantage in such a mutilation” (On the Usefulness of the Parts of the Body). The “advantage” to her “mutilation” is her role in reproduction. A woman can give birth.

Galen would remain the foremost medical authority well into the early modern world. Aristotle, meanwhile, was so important that he was, throughout the Middle Ages, known simply as “the philosopher.” No name was necessary. Thus Dante does not need to name him in the fourth canto of Inferno—there, in the middle of all the great philosophers, Dante writes, is il maestro di color che sanno, “the master of those who know.”

So famous and influential is Aristotle that when Christine de Pizan wrote The Book of the City of Ladies in 1405, she didn’t need to identify the source of the view that women were “monstrosities in nature.” That wasn’t her view, or the view of “Christine,” her first-person narrator—that was Aristotle’s view and the view of all the male authorities who followed him. No matter what else they disagreed about, philosophers, theologians, legal scholars, doctors, poets, and politicians could “all concur in one conclusion.” They all “judged, decided, and concluded against women.” Women were the “vessel as well as the refuge and abode of every evil and vice.” They were “monstrosities in nature.”

And it wasn’t just the Greeks and the Romans, of course—Christian theologians were also pretty clear on the subject. Consider the views of St. Augustine, one of the great Latin "fathers" of the church. On the one hand, he seems to reject a woman’s femaleness as a physical defect, rendering her less than fully human (male). “There are some who think that in the resurrection all will be men,” he writes, considering the view of those Christian thinkers who argued that, in heaven, imperfect women would find themselves perfected, losing their female bodies and becoming male. Augustine disagrees: “I think that those others are more sensible who have no doubt that both sexes will remain in the resurrection” (The City of God). He agrees that, after resurrection, “all blemishes of the body will be gone,” but a woman’s sex “is her nature and no blemish.” Both men and women inherit grace; “You created male and female, but in Your spiritual grace, they are as one” (Confessions).

But what happens after the resurrection isn’t necessarily true in this world, and while spiritually male and female “are as one,” that doesn’t quite translate to full equality. In his commentary on the meaning of Genesis, Augustine clarifies his position. How were Adam and Eve created, he asks. Adam is made in the image of God; he is complete, perfect. Eve, created from Adam’s rib, is not created in the image of God. What is her role? “Is it to work the earth with [Adam]?” Not at all, for “if the need was there, the help of another man would have been preferable.” Is it to be a companion? To be a comforting presence, in case “solitude weighed on him”? No again. “To live and to talk to each other, how preferable is the companionship of two male friends than that of a man and a woman!” Then what is a woman good for? What is her purpose? “I do not see for what goal woman would have been given to man as a helpmate if not for generating children.”

Are women human? Well, if to be fully human is to be made in the image of God, to be a helpmate in work, to be a companion in solitude, then no. A woman is sort of human. She is useful for one human function—she’s necessary for making babies.

In the centuries that followed, Christian bishops debated whether women could be called “human beings” (homines) since the word homo, used in the Latin Vulgate translation of the Bible, meant, strictly speaking, “man” (just as adam is the Hebrew word for “man” of “mankind”) and whether women had souls. Some of these debates may be rumored or mythic—according to one such story, the Council of Nicea (323 C.E.) debated the issue of whether women had souls and took a vote, with the women-have-souls side “winning” by only one vote. Another such account has the Council of Macon (585 C.E.) deciding that women don’t, after all, have souls. Apocryphal or not, these stories were believed, their "truths" about women perpetuated through the centuries.

Meanwhile, Aristotelian “truths” were further melded with Christian thought and belief. The greatest medieval thinker, Thomas Aquinas, asks a question that can at first seem rather startling to a modern reader: “Whether the woman should have been made in the first production of things?” (Summa Theologica). The answer is a foregone conclusion—the Christian God could never have made a mistake. In his answer to this question, which thus really isn’t a question at all, Aquinas replies that woman’s creation was “necessary.” He agrees with Aristotle that women are defective, and that women are “naturally subject to men.” Women are “the occasion for sin,” but if God had “deprived the world of all those things which proved an occasion of sin, the universe would have been imperfect.” God created women so that sin would exist! Oh, and women are also needed to be a “help” to man—their “matter” is needed for men’s “seed” in the process of reproduction.

Of course academics and scholars and linguists have contextualized, rationalized, explained, translated, retranslated, and interpreted these authors, their texts, and even their words for generations. And of course I am pulling quotations out of much larger contexts here. Of course I am not dealing with the nuances of the original Greek, Latin, and Hebrew texts. But what I have indicated here is exactly how these “truths” and authorities have always been quoted, rationalized, explained, interpreted, and understood. That’s why we see them so clearly in Christine de Pizan, who wrote to defend women against such misogynist “truths.”

To the question “are women human,” Pizan responds unequivocally and unambiguously. Yes, women are human: “There is not the slightest doubt that women belong to the people of God and the human race as much as men.” she asserts. They are not “monstrosities in nature.” They are “not another species or dissimilar race,” they are fully human.

But Pizan was fighting a losing battle. Perhaps nowhere is that lost battle more obvious than in an anonymous pamphlet published in 1595, A New Disputation against Women, in Which It Is Proved That They Are Not Human Beings (Disputatio nova contra mulieres, qua probatur eas hominess non esse).** Whether or not it was originally intended as satire, it was not widely read as satire—it was reprinted, answered, translated, plagiarized, and adapted, including a 1647 variation attributed to one “Horatio Plato,” Che le donne non habbino anima e the non siano della specie degli huomini, e vienne comprobato da molti luoghi della Scrittura santa (Women Do Not Have a Soul and Do Not Belong to the Human Race, as Is Shown by Many Passages of Holy Scripture), which itself was then translated and republished. Indeed, the Disputation remained in print well into the eighteenth century (a French edition was published in 1766).

The anonymous pamphlet,
Disputatio nova contra mulieres,
1595

According to the argument presented, not even a woman’s reproductive capacity qualified her as sort of human— “the smith is not able to forge a sword unless he has the help of his hammer,” “the scribe is not able to write unless he likewise has the help of a pen,” “a tailor is unable to darn unless he has the help of a needle.” And, obviously, “a man is not able to beget unless he has the help of a woman.” But just as hammers, pens, and needles are so clearly not human, neither are women. And this is only one of the fifty “invincible” proofs offered to show that “woman is not human, nor is she saved.”

The uncertainty about women’s humanity—or, rather, the certainty that whatever they are, women aren’t fully rational, equally human—is at the root of so much of the institutional inequality that women faced and still face. In the American colonies, when Thomas Jefferson included the claim that “all men are created equal” in the Declaration of Independence, he certainly didn’t mean female persons in his construction of “all men.” 

It wasn’t until the nineteenth century that women gained some measure of legal, political, and economic equality, presumably a measure of their humanity, and not until early in the twentieth that they finally got the right to vote. Reproductive rights took longer yet. At the end of the twentieth century, it almost looked as if, in the United States at least, we were ready to answer the question “are women human” with an unambiguous “yes.” 

But lately things have taken a turn for the worse. Much worse. Here we are now, in 2012, right back where we started. Women have been reduced to their reproductive capacities. They are irrational and incapable of making decisions for themselves about their own lives. They can’t be trusted to know whether they’ve been raped or not—is it really “legitimate” rape? If they wind up pregnant, it's proof that they haven't been raped—women's imperfect, deformed female bodies have magical powers to prevent pregnancy if they are truly victims of rape. (The medical view that pregnancy cannot result from rape goes back to the Middle Ages—at least to the thirteenth century, when Thomas Aquinas was asking whether God made a big goof when he created women.)

If women can't even be trusted to know whether they've had consensual sex or been raped, what decisions can they be trusted to make about their own (imperfect) bodies? If they don't know what kind of sex they've had, surely they can’t properly make decisions about whether and when to have children. Those decisions must be taken out of their hands and placed in the hands of wise (male) humans. Like those of George Bush and the rest of these guys, shown here signing yet another bill limiting women's healthcare and reproductive decisions.

George Bush, 5 November 2003,
 signing the Partial Birth Abortion Act--
WHAT IS WRONG WITH THIS PICTURE??

Are women human? The Sanctity of Human Life Act (HR 212), introduced into the 112th Congress by Todd Akin (he of the "legitimate rape" and the magical ability of women's bodies to "shut that whole thing [possible pregnancy] down" if they are raped) and Paul Ryan, among others, declares that “the life of each human being begins with fertilization.” 

According to definitions helpfully provided in the bill, a “human zygote, a one-celled human embryo” has all the legal rights of a “human” or “human being,” by which the bill means “each and every member of the species homo sapiens at all stages of life, beginning with the earliest stage of development, created by the process of fertilization, cloning, or its functional equivalent.”

Is a zygote human? According to this definition, a zygote is clearly and unambiguously fully human.

Are women human? Their autonomy, bodily integrity, and independence guaranteed under the due process clause of the fourteenth amendment? Are they thinking beings? Are they entitled to make decisions about their own lives? That, unfortunately, is not nearly so clear.

The Violence Against Women Act expired at the end of September 2011. After nearly a year of wrangling, it still has not been renewed. Women are apparently not human enough to guarantee their protection from from violence. Sixty-eight U.S. Senators thought women were worth protecting, passing the renewal of the VAWA. In the U.S. House, meanwhile, 221 members, a majority of those voting in May, agreed that, while some women might be human enough to bother about, Native American women, LGBT women, and undocumented immigrant women were definitely not quite human enough to worry about; the House version of the VAWA left them out. If they have to be included, well, it's just better to forget about the whole thing. There has been no reconsideration of the Violence Against Women Act in the House since.***

Meanwhile, the Equal Pay Act was first passed in 1963, its aim to end wage differences based on sex. In that year, women earned 58.9 cents for every dollar earned by men. Today, nearly 50 years later (!), women earn just 77.4 cents for every dollar earned by men, a gain of less than half a cent a year. Are women human? Not according to our value of their work.****

And while they may have been "given" the vote, God forbid women should talk about what and who to vote for. Overcome by the sound of women's voices at the Democratic National Convention, CNN's Erick Erickson [in September 2012] responded, "First night of the Vagina Monologues in Charlotte going as expected." Although more than 30 men also spoke during the Tuesday session, no one tweeted "First night of the Penis Lectures going as expected" or "First night of the Dick Talks going as expected."

Because men are human—they have ideas, opinions, hopes, and dreams. We should listen to them. 

But do women have ideas, opinions, hopes, and dreams worthy our attention? Of course not. They are merely reproductive organs, useful for sexual intercourse and childbirth, not for thinking. Or, God forbid, for talking.

Are women human?

The answer still seems to be sort of. Maybe. Well, in a way, but not really. No, I don’t think so.

Or, as Jessica Winter concludes, “they’re objects with certain people-like traits.”

. . . 

*I've updated the links--some of the original links no longer worked--and added a few others for context (the Sandra Fluke/Rush Limbaugh controversy, for example).

**For the English translation of the 1595 text, see Theresa M. Kenney's edition, "Women Are Not Human," an Anonymous Treatise and Responses. An Italian translation of the 1595 text was published in 1647, which spurred a savage response by Arcangela Tarabotti, Che le donne siano della spezie deglie uomini (Women Are of the Human Species, 1651). Kenney includes a translation of Tarabotti's piece as one of the texts in the volume.

***As indicated in the headnote, this piece was written and first published in August 2012. Since then, unfortunately but not surprisingly, efforts to permanently enact the Violence against Women Act have failed. 

After the VAWA reauthorization failed in 2012, it was temporarily reauthorized in 2013, but it expired once again on 21 December 2018. Reinstated once more in January 2019, it expired again just a month later, 15 February 2019. Another attempt to reauthorize the Violence Against Women Act was made in April of 2019, but negotiations to pass it stalled in November.

HR 1620, the Violence Against Women Act Reauthorization Act, was introduced into the 117th US Congress on 8 March 2021. It passed the House on 17 March 2021 by a vote of 244 to 172 (yes, you read that right--apparently 172 members of the House seemed to think violence against women was okay). The bill was received by the Senate on 18 March 2021. The Senate Judiciary Committee held hearings seven months later, on 5 October 2021. And there it remains . . .

****I have written several posts on the issue of equal pay--to read more, click on the label "pay equity," below. In 2021, women still make only 82 cents for every dollar earned by men--though obviously these broad figures do not take into consideration the wage gape for women of color or the terrible price working women have paid during the global pandemic.

Finally, on this same question--"Are Women Human?"--you might enjoy Charlotte Perkins Gilman's "Consideration of the Major Error in the Discussion of Woman Suffrage" (access here); two essays by Dorothy Sayers, "Are Women Human?" and "The Human-Not-Quite Human," published in a single small volume (click here); and Catharine A. MacKinnon's 2007 collection of essays, Are Women Human? And Other International Dialogues, which puts the question into a global context (her 1999 essay, "Are Women Human?" is available here.) You may also want to read Parul Sehgal's piece on the questtion Susan B. Anthony posed in 1873, "Are Women Persons?" Sehgal's exploration of Anthony's arrest and trial, which led to her question, appeared in the 8 June 2026 New York Times. Click here to read her "Does 'All Men Are Created Equal" Include Women?" 

Update, 11 December 2021: Here's another conductor on the crazy train. Governor Greg Abbott, who signed Texas S.B. 8, effectively banning abortion, strongly supports your right to bodily integrity: "This is whether or not somebody is going to have something put into their body that they do not want put into their body. That’s more than freedom, that’s the right to control and secure your own body. And that’s exactly why we’re winning on this issue." Except, ooops, he doesn't mean women who object to forced pregnancy--he means he doesn't want to have to get a COVID vaccine. These guys just can't help themselves, can they?

Update, 16 March 2022: As if you needed any more information about Republican views of a woman's humanity . . . On Monday, 14 March 2022, the Idaho Legislature, led by Republicans, passed S. B. 1309, which is now awaiting Republican Governor Brad Little's signature--the bill grants the right to control a woman's body to relatives of a "preborn" fetus. But here's the twist on the vigilantism of Texas S. B 8--in Idaho, random strangers can't sue anyone who helps a woman who is seeking an abortion. Nope--as legal experts Dahlia Lithwick and Mark Joseph Stern note, the Idaho law would allow "the father, siblings, grandparents, aunts, and uncles of a 'preborn child' to veto an abortion. The law applies not just to minors, but to any adult seeking the procedure." And no wimpy $10,000 bounty either--in S. B. 1309, damages start at $20,000 (plus, of course, attorney's fees). 

So, no, woman, you're not human, not a grown-up person, capable of making decisions for yourself--crazy old Uncle Harry can make that decision for you and just veto the whole damn thing. 

And, hey, no worries if you happen to be a rapist!!! Be assured, you can still collect: "The bill’s sponsor, Republican state Rep. Steven Harris, has confirmed that if a rapist has 10 siblings, each can sue for $20,000." Not only can the rapist cash in, his family can too: "The bill therefore makes it incredibly easy for a sexual assailant’s family to further victimize the woman by profiting from her pregnancy."

In case you were wondering--Republicans hold a 28-7 majority in the Idaho Senate and a 58-12 majority in the Idaho House of Representatives. S. B. 1309 passed in the Idaho Senate by a vote of 28-6 and in the Idaho House of Representatives by a vote of 51-14 (also good to know--a couple of House Republicans voted against the bill because they wanted to ban abortion from the moment of fertilization, and this bill doesn't do that . . . ) 

Update, 22 March 2022: Are women human? Another big answer in the "NO" column. This time it's Oklahoma, where many Texas women have been seeking healthcare after the passage of Texas S. B. 8. No fooling around with a six-week time limit for women to exercise their control over their own bodies. Nope. Oklahoma House Bill 4327 grants full personhood to an "unborn child" that is "in any stage of gestation from fertilization until birth," and bans abortions "at any point during pregnancy."  And, by the way, according to the bill, "pregnancy" is understood to be "calculated from the first day of the woman's last menstrual period," but the bill bans any abortion counting "30 days after a person’s last menstrual period." 

Ha ha ha! Fooled you there! That word "person," as in "after a person's last menstrual period"? That's from reporter Mariel Padilla's piece posted at The 19th News. The only time "person" is used in the Oklahoma bill is in the bill's lengthy discussion of the way the law will be enforced: "This act shall be enforced exclusively through private civil actions." As in the Texas bill, a person can bring a civil action and sue everyone and anyone involved in an abortion. Yup. Another one for vigilante "justice." 

Anyway, I've been a woman for 70 years, and the confusing way this bill calculates when pregnancy begins just doesn't make logical sense--much less medical sense--to me.

Update, 23 March 2022: Calling it "unwise" (no kidding), Idaho Governor Brad Little--a Republican, in case I need to spell it out for you, signed Idaho's S. B. 1309. What the fuck, Brad? He believes that "this legislation risks retraumatizing victims by affording monetary incentives to wrongdoers and family members of rapists," but he signs it anyway? Because women can't be trusted to make sensible decisions?

Update, 5 April 2022: And now it's Oklahoma, with the state house passing S. B. 612, a total ban on abortion. The bill passed without any questions being asked, much less floor debate. An update to the update: the bill was signed into law by the governor on 12 April.

Update, 13 April 2022: Kentucky's H. B. 3, vetoed last week by the state's governor, overrode that veto and takes effect immediately, banning all abortions. In addition, 

the law institutes new regulations for patients who have abortions, including requirements that many patients with abortions file “birth-death certificates.” Physicians who perform abortions also have to report each procedure to the state, along with the method of abortion and substantial biographical detail about both the person who received the abortion and their sexual partner, including their age, race, ethnicity, hometown and health information.

HB3 also enhances the state’s power to audit abortion providers, create a state website that publishes the names of all physicians who provide abortions in Kentucky, bans telemedicine for medication abortion, further restricts the circumstances under which minors can get abortions. There are no exceptions for rape or incest.

Go, Kentucky, first state in the nation to go all-in on denying women personhood.

Update, 14 April 2022: Okay, no surprises, I guess, but today it's Florida. I would say it's the same old, same old, except this ban has an extra-dose of cruelty: no exceptions for rape, incest, or human trafficking. (Although maybe, in the deluge, I've just missed that in other laws.)

There seems to be no point any more in keeping up these "updates." Let's just say that, soon, the question "Are Women Human" will be answered, in a majority of states, with a big, fat "NO."

Update, 2 May 2022: That didn't take long. This answer from the Supreme Court is clearly "NO."

Update, 2 May 2022: And now, Louisiana has decided that "equal protection of the laws" should be granted to "an individual human being" from the "moment of fertilization"--though, obviously, this law does not apply to a female human being. House Bill 813 would also classify abortion as a homicide, allowing for women to be charged with murder, and would limit birth control options (such as oral contraceptives that prevent implantation and IUDs). Also, good to note: Louisiana has the highest maternal mortality rate in the U.S. 

Bottom line: women aren't real people, but a fertilized egg is. 

And if women aren't real people in Louisiana, god help Black women, because the state sure won't. In an interview for the Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health (19 May 2022; the series is called Public Health on the Brink, I kid you not), Senator Bill Cassidy had this to say about the state's horrific maternal mortality rate: “About a third of our population is African American; African Americans have a higher incidence of maternal mortality. So, if you correct our population for race, we’re not as much of an outlier as it’d otherwise appear.” Yeah, he actually said that--just don't count Black women. He's a fucking doctor! M.D., Louisiana State University--for shame. Best online comment in response to Cassidy's dumbassery: "Prostate cancer death rates are only bad if you count men."

Update, 3 May 2022: Oklahoma again. This time a vigilante law--S. B. 1503 "would also allow private citizens to bring a civil lawsuit against a person who performs or induces an abortion, intends to perform an abortion, or knowingly aids or abets an abortion, such as paying for the procedure. Under the bill, relief would include at least $10,000 in statutory damages for each abortion the defendant performed or aided in violation of the act, legal fees and compensatory damages." At least this Oklahoma bill doesn't allow a woman's rapist to collect the bounty. (Looking at you, Idaho.)

Update, 10 May 2022: In the U.S. Senate today, Steve Daines (Republican, Montana), compared women to sea turtles and eagles, arguing that if we protect "pre-born baby turtles" and "pre-born baby eagles," we should ban abortion. Or something like that . . . Pretty sure that he must think that women are animals, just not human animals. (Neither a turtle nor a bird is a mammal, so I'm not even sure what class of animal women might be . . . )

Update, 19 May 2022: Jeez, Oklahoma is back at it, adding even more draconian measures just for shits and giggles. As if the two previous bills passed in the last month+ weren't bad enough, the Oklahoma House today passed S. B. 4327, this one banning abortion "from the stage of 'fertilization.'" In case you were in any doubt, Governor Kevin Stitt signed it into law.

Update, 26 May 2022: What is going on in Oklahoma????? Just a day after the state enacted a law that bans all abortions from the moment of fertilization, now gubernatorial candidate Mark Sherwood claims that life begins before conception: "I believe life begins in God before it begins at conception.” And as if the new Oklahoma law isn't enough, he wants to enact some kind of law that will increase punishments for abortion. WHAT????? The chyron running under his interview, broadcast on Real America's Voice, identifies him as a doctor--he's a doctor of naturopathy. Evidently naturopaths don't study biology. Or is he saying that men who masturbate will now be punished for abortion? I could almost get on board the crazy train with good old Mark Sherwood if that were what he was claiming . . . 

I suppose this doesn't really have anything to do with the "are women human?" question any more, but somehow I can't quit.

Is it time to quit now, when Roe is overturned? (click here)

Update, 26 October 2023: I obviously haven't updated here for a while, but I thought I had to insert this clip of the new Speaker of the House of Representatives weighing in on the question? Are women human? Not if it means that they have rights and stuff, obviously. Women are only useful to be forced to produce more "able-bodied workers"!!!!!!

Update, 2 November 2024: Here it is, straight from the horse's mouth ass. Donald Trump: "He was hit by some of the strongest, not human beings, women."

The French Historian Louise-Félicité Guynement de Kéralio

Louise-Félicité Guynement de Kéralio (19 January 1757-31 December 1821)

I've been reading Carolyn Harris's recent book on Henrietta Maria, queen of England, and Marie Antoinette, queen of France. In her discussion of Marie Antoinette's woefully poor education, Harris notes that, nevertheless, she acquired many books for her personal library. 

In addition to popular novels and dramatic works, Marie Antoinette also subscribed to Louise de Kéralio's five-volume Histoire d'Élisabeth, reine d’Angleterre, published between 1786 and 1788. 

As Harris observes, "Karalio was one of the first recognized French female historians, and Marie Antoinette's purchase of the book suggests that she was interested in promoting female writers, just as her patronage of Elisabeth Vigée LeBrun encouraged the acceptance of women artists."

But, while Marie Antoinette may have subscribed to Kéralio's publication of her history of Elizabeth Tudor's reign in order to support a woman writer, Kéralio was not a supporter of the French queen. Rather, she wrote and published a scathing denunciation of  Marie Antoinette.

Louise de Kéralio was the daughter of the Breton nobleman Louis-Félix Guynement de Kéralio, a soldier, writer, and translator; her mother, Françoise Abeille, the daughter of the engineer and architect Joseph Abeille, was also a writer and translator. 

Kéralio began her literary career early; her first translation, Les nouveaux extraits des mémoires de l’Académie de Siennes, was completed when she was sixteen, her first novel, Adelaide, by the time she was seventeen. Kéralio was also a resident of the court at Versailles between October 1777 and April 1782.

A 1777 visit to Paris by the noted English historian Catharine Macaulay may have inspired the young Louise Kéralio to turn her attention to the writing of history--when publication of her history of Elizabeth Tudor began, she noted that the project was the result of ten years' of work. 

Between 1786 and 1789, Kéralio published fourteen volumes* (of a projected forty) of edited works by French women writers, Collection des meilleurs ouvrages françois, composés par des femmes, dédiée aux femmes françoises--including a sizable number of extracts from the work of Christine de Pizan, who is one of the founding mothers of this blog. And today is also Christine's birthday: she was born on 11 September in 1364. (Kéralio thought that Pizan, "as superior as she may have been to women in her century," was nevertheless "very inferior to Heloise.") 

In August 1789 she founded the Journal d’État et du Citoyen, becoming the first French woman to edit a political journal. The following year she married the political revolutionary Pierre-François-Joseph Robert.

In 1791, Kéralio published a scathing five-hundred-page attack on French queens, in particular Marie Antoinette: Les crimes des reines de France, depuis le commencement de la monarchie jusqu'à Marie-Antoinette (Crimes of the Queens of France, from the Beginning of the Monarchy to Marie-Antoinette). Kéralio depicted Marie Antoinette as a monster. She calls her a "political tarantula" that weaves a web to catch her prey and a tiger that, having tasted blood, can never be satisfied.

Frontispiece to The Crimes of the
Queens of France

A frontispiece to the volume is notable: at the center of the scene is a monstrous, fish-tailed woman wearing only a crown. With her left hand, she stabs a male ruler, lifeless on the throne; with her right, she offers a cup of hemlock to three wise men. A leering satyr hovers over the scene. 

Underneath the image, the frontispiece caption reads: "A people is without honor and merits its chains when it lowers itself beneath the scepter of queens."

Well, there you have another view of the "monstrous regiment of women"!

You can view the entire 1791 Crimes of the Queens of France online, via the Bibliothèque nationale de France, by clicking here. (There you can see a much clearer, full-size  image of the frontispiece.)

An excellent analysis of Kéralio's life and work during the French Revolution, by Annie Geffroy, "Louise de Keralio-Robert, pionnière du républicanisme sexiste," is available here. 

*Numerous sources give the number of volumes as twelve rather than fourteen, but the entry for Kéralio at the Bibliothèque nationale de France indicates that fourteen volumes were published.

Many thanks to the commenter, below, with clarification about the number of volumes and with information about the disputed authorship of the Crimes of the Queens of France. After a bit of research, I am adding a link to this essay, by Éliane Viennot, on the question of attribution. This is an accessible .pdf published online--the piece is a chapter from Femmes des Lumières, recherches en arborescences, ed. Huguette Krief, Marie-Emmanuelle Plagnol-Diéval, Michèle Crogiez Labarthe, and Edith Flamarion.

Anne of France, "Madame la Grande"

Anne of France, duchess of Bourbon and regent of France (died 14 November 1522)

One of the most powerful women of the late fifteenth century, Anne of France is relatively unknown today, at least to those of us whose first language is English.* While she is occasionally mentioned in the political biographies of her father, Louis XI of France, and her brother, Charles VIII, her own story remains unfamiliar--there have been no lavish feature films, costumed television dramas, or best-selling novels about her life, as there have been for her contemporaries in England, who fought so savagely during the Wars of the Roses.

Anne of France, detail,
Master of Moulins

Yet in the waning years of the fifteenth century, Madame la Grande, as she was known to her contemporaries, controlled the government of France for eight years, guiding it through a series of political crises that threatened the state from without and, perhaps more ominously, from within. 

Born in 1461, Anne was the third child of Louis of France and his second wife, Charlotte of Savoy, but the first to survive more than a few months after birth. Although we know where she was born—at the chateau of Genappe, some thirty miles north of Brussels—we do not know exactly when, only that her birth preceded the death of her grandfather Charles VII on 22 July of that year. 

Only a few months after her father became king, he began the process of securing political alliances through her marriage. On 27 November 1461, Louis betrothed his only child to Nicholas, the grandson of René of Anjou; by the end of 1462, that alliance was abandoned in favor of an Aragonese match, that project, in turn, giving way to proposals for her marriage to Edward IV of England, then to Francis of Brittany, and even to the French king’s own brother, Charles, duke of Berry.

Meanwhile, we have very few details about Anne’s childhood. On becoming king, Louis XI had installed his mother, his wife, and his infant daughter in the chateau of Amboise; there, the princess was attended by a demoiselle d’honneur, at least two chambermaids, several nurses, and a woman hired to rock her cradle. This female household has not been kindly assessed by Anne’s French biographers, who variously describe Amboise as a prison, an isolated fortress, or as a “royal gynecium”; we might instead regard it as a kind of “city of ladies,” a remarkable environment that made possible the development of a remarkable woman. 

Just as little is known about Anne’s life at Amboise, little has been written about her mother, Charlotte of Savoy, but that “little” is very negative. One contemporary noted that while she was “an excellent princess in other respects,” she was “not a person in whom a man could take any great delight,” another that she failed to inspire the king’s sexual desire. 

Modern historians, at least the few who have mentioned her, have been no more kind, dismissing her as a charming but lifeless non-entity, as a sad, prematurely aged romantic, as a saint-like figure “crowned with a halo of sweetness and modesty” who knew nothing about politics, or as “feeble in health and weak in character.” But surely she was something more. As the daughter of Anne of Lusignan, Charlotte of Savoy was raised by a mother of considerable political influence and skill, while the contents of her personal library indicate the breadth of her intellectual interests. 

Louis XI’s mother, Marie of Anjou, was also part of the Amboise household for the first years of Anne’s life. The dowager queen was the daughter of the formidable Yolande of Aragon, who for fifteen years ruled Anjou as its regent; while Marie may have been “delicate,” as one modern biographer has described her, she is also credited with having been the source not only of her son’s good sense but also for the “discreet work” of diplomacy that reconciled her husband and her brother.

Whatever else happened in the chateau of Amboise during Anne’s childhood, her biographer Jehanne d’Orliac seems rightly to have concluded that her intelligence was “ripened” there. Meanwhile, her father may certainly have abhorred the “intrigues” and “coquetries” of women in general, and the person of his wife in particular, but he must also have recognized both the political expediencies of a female regent and the ability of women to succeed in such a role. 

His paternal grandmother, Isabeau of Bavaria, had been regent of France, and, as we have seen, his maternal grandmother had ruled Anjou for her son. One sister, Yolande of Valois, was regent of Savoy for her son, Philibert, another, Madeleine, was regent of Foix for her daughter, Catherine, who inherited the throne of Navarre as queen regnant; in England, the king’s cousin Margaret of Anjou played an active role in the battle to preserve the throne of England for her son, Edward.

St. Anne, Anne of France,
Suzanne of Bourbon,
part of triptych
by the Master of Moulins

Whatever he felt about his queen, Louis left his son, the dauphin Charles, in the female universe of Amboise, while his daughter Anne became part of his court at Plessis-les-Tours; after her marriage to Pierre of Beaujeu in November of 1473, Anne seems to have spent much of the next ten years in the company of her father. “She is the least foolish of women,” he is famously to have said, “—and as for wise women, there are none.” 

When Louis XI died in 1483, his son and heir Charles was thirteen years old, arguably old enough to succeed to the French throne in his own right, but the aging king circumvented the argument. Just before his death, Louis transferred custody of his son to his daughter and her husband. His son-in-law was a loyal and firm presence, but lacked political skill or insight; Louis named Pierre of Beaujeu lieutenant-general of France. 

The twenty-two-year-old Anne, on the other hand, was different. To this “least foolish of women,” he entrusted the dauphin’s care and education, leaving to her the responsibility to govern France, if not the title of regent. Lacking the name of regent, Anne of France was nevertheless recognized as controlling the person of the king, the finances of the state, and the power of the realm. In his account of her role during the period from 1483 to 1491, historian John Bridge concludes, “We can affirm . . . that the lady of Beaujeu really governed France during the first years of the nominal reign of her brother.” 

When Anne of France left the court in 1491, she was thirty years old, but rather than retiring, she was, instead, beginning a new phase of her political career. In the years following her marriage, she and her husband had been rewarded and enriched first by her father and then by her brother; when the duke of Bourbon, Pierre of Beaujeu’s oldest brother, died without an heir, she acted quickly and ruthlessly. In securing the title for her husband, she “gave herself alone the duchy of the Bourbons.” 

In gaining Bourbon, she secured independence for herself, and for her daughter, Suzanne, who was born on 10 May 1491. In her chateau of Chantelle, not far from the Bourbon capital of Moulins, Anne reigned as sovereign, signing acts with the royal formula Car tel est notre plaisir (“for such is our pleasure”) and reorganizing and codifying the laws of the Bourbonnais. 

She also recreated the “city of ladies” of her childhood at Amboise, educating and training a generation of young girls as they grew into women. As the inveterate gossip Pierre de Brantôme noted, “there were no ladies or daughters of great houses in her time who did not receive lessons from her, the house of Bourbon being one of the greatest and most splendid in Christendom”; on this point he had good authority, since his grandmother Louise de Daillon was among those daughters who had been brought up by Anne of France. 

And she also remained involved in affairs of state. When her brother invaded Italy in 1494, he arranged for his sister, not his wife, to manage in his absence, and like his father, in making this unorthodox arrangement he avoided the official designation of regent; instead, by the “express order of the king,” his queen Anne of Brittany was placed in his sister’s guardianship, and the government of France was “transported” to her court at Moulins. 

By the time the king returned from Italy in 1495, his son, the French dauphin, was dead; three years later, Charles VIII of France, not quite twenty-eight years old, was also dead. The new king was Louis XII, whose rebellion in the first years of Charles VIII’s reign had culminated in the aptly named “Mad War.”

At least one observer thought that Anne of France might intervene in the succession—it was reported that “she thought for a moment to claim the crown for herself, saying that ‘she was the first among the descendants of the kings of France.’” Although she had no such intention, the new king decided “to call his old adversary to his aid”; in exchange for her support, he awarded her more land, more titles, more revenue and, more important, the assurance that her daughter Suzanne would inherit Bourbon after Pierre’s death.

Although Anne of France would also survive Louis XII, we will end our discussion of her life here. It is important to note, however, that she never withdrew entirely from the political center of government; she regularly attended affairs of state, like Louis XII’s entry into Paris, to name only one example, and in 1503, when he fell ill, it appeared as if the king might called upon her to take control of the government of France once more. 

Although he survived this illness, when his death was imminent in 1514, he designated Anne of France to take charge of any posthumously born prince. She was in Paris in 1515 when Louis XII died, and it was again said that she would take control of the government herself. But that was just a rumor; she was in Reims for the coronation of Francis I and in Paris to witness his entry into the city. She herself would live until 1522, her life spanning the reigns of four French kings. 

By the time she died at the age of sixty-one, on 14 November 1522, Anne of France had outlived all her contemporaries, and Madame la Grande had become Madame la Vielle, “the old Madam.” Her brother had died in 1498, her sister Jeanne in 1505. Isabella of Castile, with whom Anne had conducted business for eight years, died in 1504. Ludovico Sforza, who had lured her brother to Italy and who had tried to arrange for the marriage of one of his sons to Suzanne, died in 1508. Anne saw her one-time enemy Louis of Orléans succeed her brother as king of France; Louis died in 1515. Anne of Brittany, married first to Charles VIII and then to Louis XII, was also gone; she died in 1514. And in what must have been a terrible series of blows, Anne’s grandson François, born in July 1517 and named after his royal godfather, died within months of his elaborate baptism. Just a year later, Suzanne gave birth to stillborn twins. Suzanne herself died in 1521, just thirty years old.

Her biographers have viewed the last months of Anne’s life as a period of “darkness and despair”: “She fell victim to the blows of a malady that remains mysterious to us,” comments one, adding that it was a malady “doubtless fed by grief.” Another concludes that “agony of mind and heart finished her off.” 

But one of Madam’s formidable contemporaries faced her own losses and defeats with the unflinching gaze so characteristic of Anne herself. “I am habituated to grief,” wrote Caterina Sforza, “I have no fear of it.” Surely Anne of France would have agreed.

And at some point in her life, probably toward the end of the fifteenth century, Anne of France composed a series of enseignements, or "lessons" for her daughter, Suzanne. Several years ago, as I was working on an English translation of her Lessons, I found myself remembering the words of Virginia Woolf.

In A Room of One’s Own, Woolf suggested that “we think back through our mothers if we are women.” I found myself thinking of this claim as I was at work translating Anne of France’s lessons for her daughter. The process was a strangely intimate one: slowly, word by word, sometimes even letter by letter, I was deciphering the admonitions, advice, and warnings a fifteenth-century princess directed to her daughter, all the while and against all logic hearing my own mother’s voice in my mind. 

And then one day, midway through the process of turning French into English, I looked away from my pile of dictionaries to the framed portraits of Anne and Suzanne that sat on the desk where I was working. Studying their faces, I knew I had to find the quotation that I remembered. 

I did find it, about three quarters of the way through the slim volume, as Woolf was describing the struggle of women writers. Although they were confronted by “discouragement and criticism,” Woolf wrote, “that was unimportant compared with the other difficulty which faced them . . . when they came to set their thoughts on paper—that is that they had no tradition behind them, or one so short and partial that it was of little help.” And then the sentence: “For we think back through our mothers if we are women.”

Anne of France’s text seems at first to challenge Woolf’s claim, for in composing a series of lessons for her daughter, Anne did have a tradition of women behind her, and a rather long one. As she wrote, she could “think back” to Christine de Pizan’s The Treasure of the City of Ladies, written a hundred years earlier, a book that Anne had owned and read, a book that, in fact, she had inherited from her mother, Charlotte of Savoy, queen of France. 

And, although Anne addressed her lessons to her daughter, she clearly came to see herself contributing to the tradition she inherited, since her book was passed on to other daughters of other mothers: her lessons were published “at the request” of Suzanne, doubtless with her mother’s approval.

The opening page of the
first printed edition
of Anne of France's
Enseignements

This first edition, printed between 1517 and 1521, was followed by a second printing in 1534. A third edition was published the next year, this time dedicated to Marguerite of Angoulême, a daughter of another powerful mother, Louise of Savoy, and herself the mother of Jeanne d’Albret, who would become queen regnant of Navarre.

But, despite the status of Anne of France and her daughter Suzanne, and despite the fact that the book went through three editions within thirty years of its composition, her work disappeared. The tradition she had inherited was also lost—Christine de Pizan’s Treasure of the City of Ladies, composed in 1405 and widely circulated in manuscript, was printed in Paris in 1497, 1503, and 1536, but, in the words of Sarah Lawson, who published the first translation of Christine’s work in English, “by the seventeenth century hardly anyone had heard of her.”

We almost surely would not be able to “think back” to Anne’s text today if it weren’t for the work of one man, a nineteenth-century scholar named A. M. Chazaud. Chazaud never tells us how or why or when he became interested in Anne’s lessons for her daughter—it’s not even clear that he knew of the existence of her work before he traveled from France to the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg. 

As archivist of the department of Allier, formed from the old province of Bourbonnais, he may have gone to the Hermitage to work with a manuscript of the chronicles of Louis I, first duke of Bourbon; Chazaud returned to France to publish an edition of that fifteenth-century text in 1876. Whether or not he knew about Anne’s work before he arrived in St. Petersburg, while there he transcribed not only the chronicles of the duke of Bourbon but her text; he added an introduction, appended a discussion of her language, compiled a glossary, and published Les Enseignements d’Anne de France . . . à sa fille Susanne de Bourbon in 1878. 

While he does not tell us how he came to edit Anne’s text, Chazaud does explain how the book that Anne had given her daughter came to be in Russia, for the manuscript he found there was, in fact, Suzanne’s own copy of the book: Ce livre est à moy, Susanne de Bourbon, et l’ey eu de la meson de Bourbon was written on the first folio (“This book is mine, Susanne of Bourbon, and it comes from [literally 'I have had it from'] the house of Bourbon”).

The story of the manuscript’s journey from France to St. Petersburg is fascinating, and starting from the information Chazaud supplies, we can fill in a few more details of the manuscript’s odyssey. After the death of Suzanne’s husband in 1527, the Bourbon library became the property of King Francis I and was transferred from the library of Moulins to Fontainebleu. 

Later, the manuscript was a gift to Diane de Poitiers, who had been educated by Anne of France, and it became part of the library at her chateau of Anet. Diane de Poitiers (1499-1566) was not only raised by Anne of France, but her marriage was also arranged by Anne; after the death of her husband in 1521, Diane became the mistress of Henry II of France, son of Francis I, who probably presented her with the manuscript. There is no indication when she received the gift or when the manuscript left her library at Anet. 

Two brief notes in the manuscript indicate that on “the last day of the month and year of 1632” a certain Monsieur Baillet de Sainte-Barbe from the town of Dreux gave the book to an unnamed but very happy recipient who lived on Chantre street in Paris; once in Paris, the manuscript passed to the library of Pierre Séguier, chancellor of France under kings Louis XIII and Louis XIV. 

From the library of the chancellor, the book passed to his grandson, Henri-Charles du Cambout de Coislin, bishop of Metz, and from him to the library of the abbey of Saint-Germain-des-Prés. In 1791, in the midst of the French Revolution, some fifty of the Saint-Germain manuscripts were acquired by a Russian diplomat, Peter Dubrovsky, who was in Paris purchasing books for Catherine II, empress of Russia, and, ultimately, for his own growing collection. Anne’s manuscript was among Dubrovsky’s acquisitions; in 1805, it was transferred to the Imperial Public Library. 

And there it remained, at least for a time. The few scholars who have written about Anne’s text have assumed that the manuscript is still there, preserved for us, waiting for us to pick it up and touch the very pages that Suzanne turned as she read her mother’s words. But the manuscript is there no longer—it was sold at some point during the 1930s, and its current location, if it still exists, is unknown.**

And so, in the end, Anne of France’s book seems to illustrate rather than to challenge Woolf’s view that the “tradition” women have inherited is a fragmented and disrupted one. Like so many medieval texts, the survival of her work seems entirely a matter of chance—passed from hand to hand, the manuscript copy of her lessons also passed through more than four centuries of disaster, war, and revolution, only to be sold and then to disappear. 

And yet, despite the odds, her text did survive—one copy of the first printed edition, one of the second, two of the third, and, luckily, a careful edition of the manuscript itself, made before its disappearance. Chazaud’s 1878 edition, which itself survives in only a handful of copies, was reprinted in 1978, ensuring that Anne’s lessons could be passed on to a generation of scholars intent on recovering women’s history and enabling them, in Woolf’s words, to begin rewriting the “short and partial” tradition they inherited. 

From Anne of France to Suzanne of Bourbon to Diane de Poitiers to Catherine the Great to us. 

*This post has been adapted from material in The Monstrous Regiment of Women: Female Rulers in Early Modern Europe (Palgrave Macmillan) and from Anne of France: Lessons for My Daughter (Boydell & Brewer).

** For the specific date the manuscript came into the possession of the Imperial Public Library, I am indebted to A. P. Romanov, Chief of Foreign Acquisitions, National Library of Russia, personal letter, 22 July 2002.  According to Romanov, the manuscript (then catalogued as MS. Fr. Q.v.III.2) remained at the Imperial Public Library from its receipt until 1849, when a group of illuminated manuscripts was transferred to the Hermitage Museum as part of a display. The manuscripts remained there until 1861 when, Romanov writes, “all illuminated manuscripts were returned from the Hermitage to the Public Library.” Then, according to Romanov, the manuscript was sold “through the ‘Antiquary,’” which was either “an antique store or an auction”; the library knows “nothing about its location.” 

One further query produced a confirmation from Marie-Elisabeth Boutroue, Institut de Recherche et d’Histoire des Textes (Centre Nationale de la Recherche), Section de l’Humanism (Paris), who indicates that nothing further is known of the manuscript, but who holds out the hope that “with luck” it may perhaps be found someday (Email, 17 January 2003). 

Moderata Fonte and a Paradise for Women

Modesta di Pozzo di Zorzi, "Moderata Fonte" (died 2 November 1592)

Born in Venice in 1555, Modesta Pozzo, the daughter of Girolamo Pozzo, a lawyer, and Marietta dal Moro, would rename herself when she began to write. In Italian, her birth name means a “humble, unassuming [modesta] well [pozzo].” But she playfully recreates herself as “Moderata Fonte,” the “well-regulated [moderata] fountain [fonte].”*

A portrait of Moderata Fonte,
c. 1588-89

Orphaned in 1556 when she was just a year old, Modesta was raised by her maternal grandmother, Cecilia di Mazzi, and a step-grandfather, Prospero Saraceni. After several years of education at the convent of Santa Marta, she returned home, where Saraceni encouraged her to read widely in his library and encouraged her interest in writing.

Modesta Pozzo's friend, uncle, and mentor, Niccolò Doglioni, who would later write a brief biography of her, also tells a delightful story about the young girl, who would waylay her brother as he returned from school so that he would repeat his lessons to her--thus she learned Latin. It is a memorable story, but it is also one that shows how a bright girl still had to come by an education second-hand.

In her twenties, Pozzo met Doglioni, who was her uncle by marriage, and he encouraged her to write. Her earliest work, a chivalric verse romance, Tredici canti del Floridoro (Thirteen Cantos of Floridoro), was published in 1581 under her pen name, "Moderata Fonte."

Fonte's verse romance was followed by two more publications the next year. A dramatic dialogue Le feste (Celebrations), an example of a popular short dramatic form, the representazione, was performed before the Doge on 31 December 1581. She also published a narrative poem, La passione di Christo (The Passion of Christ), in ottava rima. 

In recounting the biblical narrative of Christ's Passion, Fonte focuses attention on the female figures of the Virgin Mary and Mary Magdalene--while this work can be compared to Vittoria Colonna's 1557 Pianto sopra la passione di Christo, a prose work in which Colonna joins the Virgin Mary in weeping over Christ's body, it also calls to mind in fascinating ways Aemilia Lanyer's later Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum. 

Fonte's work is also represented in a 1583 anthology of poetry praising the king of Poland, Stephen Bathory, which indicates something of Fonte's reputation in Venice.

The composition of these works dates to the period when Doglioni was Fonte's guardian. Before she joined his household, he writes, “her talent had been lying buried, but I immediately recognized it and determined, as a lover of excellence, to reveal it to the world.” He not only encouraged her, but he says he “started arranging for the publication of her works.” 

Her marriage in 1583 to the lawyer Filippo de’ Zorzi and the pregnancies that soon followed disrupted her literary career. Doglioni seems to suggest that after her marriage she no longer had the time for writing: “[Moderata Fonte] was extremely good at running her household . . . so good, indeed, that her husband scarcely needed to give it a thought and confessed on several occasions that he had no idea what it felt like to have the responsibility of a home and family, for she took everything out of his hands and did it all herself. . . .” Perhaps it is the lack of a room of her own—a room with a lock on the door—that prompted Fonte to create a private space for women as a retreat from the demands of men and marriage.

Despite Doglioni's assertions, however, there were further publications--though certainly the pace of publication seems to have slowed. In 1585, a lyric was published on the occasion of the death of the Doge; a second religious narrative, La resurretione di Christo (The Resurrection of Christ) was published in 1592, the year of her death.

The Worth of Women,
published posthumously, 1600

We know little about what in particular might have prompted Fonte to write what has now become her most most well known work, Il merito delle donne, oue chiaramente si scuopre quanto siano elle degne e più perfette de gli huomini (The Worth of Women, Wherein Is Clearly Revealed Their Nobility and Their Superiority to Men), but her daughter tells us that the book was finished on the day before Fonte’s death; it was “brought to the present stage of completion the very day before her death in childbirth, so that she was unable to reread or revise it,” Fonte’s daughter, Cecilia, writes. 

Doglioni supplies a few more details. He notes that Fonte died on the morning of All Souls’ Day (2 November, the day following All Saints’ Day) in 1592. He also says that, on the “very day before she died,” she had finished the second part of the work “which she had titled The Worth of Women.” 

Whatever the specific prompt that caused her to begin her book in the first place, Fonte’s son indicates that his mother’s purpose in writing served a larger end. She intended to write back to men for all the “undeserved abuse, both spoken and written,” that they had “long showered on women”—men who “never believed they would ever have to suffer any punishment that corresponded even partially to the severity of the offense.” What his mother accomplished is extraordinary: “here we see, contrary to all expectations, a woman restoring her sex to its rightful honor and, moreover, exalting women to the skies by the power of her pen.”

In The Worth of Women, Fonte creates something of a smaller version of the "city of ladies" imagined by Christine de Pizan nearly two centuries earlier. The space Fonte’s women occupy is smaller than the city Pizan imagines, but, like her City of Ladies, their private retreat is both in the world and yet separate from it. In this private space, the women who are privileged to gather together are protected. 

Fonte’s “city of ladies” is a walled garden inside a palazzo along the Grand Canal of Venice. The garden, which the women inside regard as their Paradise, is enclosed by the walls of the palazzo, while the palazzo is enclosed within a city which itself is well-defended. In fact, Fonte’s work begins with a paean to the “most noble city of Venice,” la serenissima, a city that “lies wondrously” on the sea that “surrounds her,” behind walls and fortresses that “guard her,” and within gates that “enclose her.”

This Venice, emphatically figured here as female, is a unique city “as everyone knows”; she is “both adored and respected, both loved and feared.” The citizens of the city are praised, both male and female: the “courage, good sense, and courtesy of the men are remarkable, as are the beauty, intelligence, and chastity of the women.” Our narrator describes Venice as a city notable for “the remarkable freedom enjoyed by its inhabitants.”

The city of Venice is undeniably real, but the women who gather together in this “truly divine city, abode of all celestial graces and perfections,” seem to occupy a kind of once-and-future moment: “there was once not long ago (and indeed there still is) a group of noble and spirited women,” our narrator begins, as if to emphasize the fantasy of what follows. 

The seven women “often steal time together for a quiet conversation; and on these occasions, safe from any fear of being spied on by men or constrained by their presence, they would speak freely on whatever subject they pleased.” Thus “stealing” a moment of freedom in a city that has just been described as “free as the sea itself,” the seven “noble and spirited” women we meet are emblematic of the very restricted status of women not only in the republic of Venice but virtually everywhere in western Europe.

While Fonte's published works were in genres that were more open to women writers in the late sixteenth century—verse romances, lyric poetry, and religious narrative, for example--The Worth of Women represents a genre that not only silenced women but that usually excluded them altogether. The Worth of Women is a literary dialogue, an extraordinarily popular Renaissance form perhaps best known by its preeminent example, Baldassare Castiglione’s The Book of the Courtier. 

Like Renaissance comedy and tragedy, the literary dialogue looked back to the ancient Greeks for its model, to Plato’s dialogues, in particular, which largely excluded women. In the Republic, the characters Socrates and Glaucon debate women’s ability to act as guardians in the utopian “republic,” and although “Socrates,” of course, wins the argument (yes, some women are capable), no women are present at this debate. In Plato’s Symposium, the character Diotima of Mantinea plays a role, although it is not clear whether she is a historical figure, like his “character,” Socrates, or is the female personification of wisdom. Still, she gets to participate in the conversation. 

By comparison, there are no women present in most Renaissance literary dialogues. Castiglione does include women in his fantasy, but they are largely silent, even when the conversation takes a break from its discussion of the perfect courtier to design the perfect lady of the court, a female parallel to the court gentlemen. 

In The Worth of Women, Fonte turns the tables on her male contemporaries. Not only are men silent, they are completely absent. In the absence of men, these women don’t design a perfect man to fulfill their dreams, nor do they feel any need to defend women—women’s “worth” is a given, signaled by Fonte’s title. While the “worth of women” is not debatable, the “worth” of men is, so these friends decide to entertain themselves by debating the good and bad qualities of men. 

I could go on and on here--but, looking back over this, I think I've gone on long enough already. I will close by saying that I have taught The Worth of Women to students many times--not to literature majors, but to students taking a course to fulfill a core requirement. It is, hands down, one of the most enjoyable and thought-provoking texts I've used in literature classes.

As one testament--a student last spring confided in a writing assignment that she never ready anything for fun. But she loved Fonte's work so much that, instead of just finishing the first day's reading assignment, she stayed up late and read the entire book! (Even the pages I hadn't assigned!) What better testimonial than that?

Il merito delle donne was published posthumously in 1600.

An excellent biographical essay by Virginia Cox is posted at Italian Women Writers. If you can read Italian, the site links to digitized versions of some of Fonte's published work. Otherwise, you will find Cox's English translation of The Worth of Women very affordable. Fonte's chivalric romance, Floridoro, is also available in English.

*Portions of this brief essay have been adapted from Reading Women's Worlds from Christine de Pizan to Doris Lessing: Six Centuries of Women Writers Imagining Rooms of Their Own (Palgrave Macmillan).