Quote by Christine de Pizan: “I am bewildered and astonished that men can be so wrong about women.”

Christine de Pizan is not angry — she is genuinely puzzled. How can so many intelligent men believe such demonstrably false things about women when women are right in front of them, contradicting these claims every day? The astonishment is its own form of critique, and it stings more than outrage.

Christine de Pizan wrote The Book of the City of Ladies in 1405 at the court of Charles VI of France, a court convulsed by political crisis, including the king's bouts of madness and the beginning of the conflict that would become the Hundred Years' War. She wrote professionally to support herself and her children after her husband's early death.

Italian-born French poet and court writer born in 1364, one of the earliest known professional female writers in European history. Her Book of the City of Ladies, completed in 1405, systematically refuted medieval misogynist literature by cataloguing the achievements of historical women. She is considered a precursor to feminist thought.