❶ Dinner Parties, Narcissus and the Power of a Hypothetical
❷ I Sure Love Scrolling
❸ Motherhood and Creativity
❹ Slate
❶ Dinner Parties, Narcissus and the Power of a Hypothetical
❷ I Sure Love Scrolling
❸ Motherhood and Creativity
❹ Slate
Did French Women Exist Before Beauvoir?
by Jay Varnes
“We see more and farther than our predecessors, not because we have keener vision or greater height, but because we are lifted up and borne aloft on their gigantic stature.”
Bernard of Chartres
Bernard of Chartres
It is daringly essentialist, but history suggests: yes. Archive-dwelling medievalists and placard-shaking postmodernists have named them ‘protofeminist’, a blatantly anachronistic and implicitly dangerous label - backdating feminist histories by turning radical voices into precursors, and resistance into foreshadowing.
These were not women asking to enter male-dominated spaces—hardly more than desired being made passive or powerless. The trobairitz were not asking to join the world as it was — they were imagining something else; a vivid example of modern misreading comes from these female troubadours, active in twelfth-century Occitania.
Their lyrical compositions, written in Old Occitan and performed in courtly settings, are commonly celebrated (as early feminist statements) for their centring of female desire and reversal of dynamics typical of male troubadour poetry, namely fin’amor and l’amour courtois (courtly love). To view the trobairitz as nothing more than early feminists asking to be heard by nobles through patronage, or imitating male poetic conventions, is to ignore the past’s meaning, overlooking what made their work meaningful in its specific context.
For instance, in the poetry of the Comtessa de Dia (c. 1140-c. 1212), the female speaker expresses unreciprocated love with disarming directness:
“for I love him more than anything…
my beauty, or my rank, or my mind [do not help me];
for I am every bit as betrayed and wronged
as I'd deserve to be if I were ugly.”
The tone is frank, loaded with unreciprocated love and the pain of betrayal, yet structurally confident through thinly veiled allegory, which is to say nothing of how the Comtessa boldly assumes the male role, “not in any single reversal, but in a complex of different ways.” The figure is neither submissive nor idolised, decidedly defined by her virtues, those listed and by her fidelity doubly so in contrast, but also as a woman who actively accuses and judges. Principled upon disappointment, endurance, and pride, it is an explicit refusal of mystification.
In contrast, within male-authored contemporary poetic renderings, of courtly love in particular, the woman was essentially distant. As Dani Cavallaro excellently puts it: “the idealized lady is precious because she is unattainable and that the male lover should be inspired precisely by her unavailability…. [thus] Unfulfilment is glorified as an achievement intrinsic to the rules of the game, not merely tolerated as a failing.”
Manipulating a cultural tradition that permitted partial space for the female voice, the trobairitz should be seen not to invert, but subvert the master–slave relationship extrinsic to their gender.
Remembrance: the pleasant pretence of appropriation and destruction
From person into precursor and deconstruction into foreshadowing, through this, her posthumous appropriation, Christine de Pizan (c. 1364-c. 1430) has been rendered a featureless opinion leader—a standard-bearer for a movement for which she never authored. In being ‘honoured’ as the first professional woman writer of France, her mission and her achievement are untenably reduced to matters of access and textual survival.
In the early fifteenth century, de Pizan composed the most ambitious architectural project in all of medieval European literature: The Book of the City of Ladies. Nowhere therein does de Pizan posit the equality of women and men, but rather hypothesises a politics of difference; hers was an alternative moral and symbolic order in which women’s virtue, intellect, and historical agency are foundational, not exceptional.
The work imagines an allegorical city founded on the “sure ground of reason, rectitude, and justice.” These virtues, she contends, are not simply shared by women, but in many cases exemplified by them — a claim supported by the period’s widespread veneration of the Virgin Mary, whose cult saw the elevation of feminine virtue to divine ideal as axiomatic. A reading of this view will find that the text is not merely a literary allegory, but a sacred counter-history. Crucially, as with the Comtessa de Dia, Christine de Pizan does not argue that women deserve inclusion because they resemble men; each instead refuses the fundamental premise that female legitimacy must be modelled on masculine norms. Neither sought entry into hegemonic frameworks by sacrificing their intrinsic differences; each, in her own way, desired to reshape these structures from within. The former— or rather, all trobairitz—epitomised an embodied resistance towards objectification. They did so by satirising masculine literary traditions, particularly troubadours and the conventions of courtly love; however, their candid declarations of moral autonomy were never contingent upon male voices. Likewise, the latter did not argue for equality through likeness, but envisioned a city where justice, reason, and honour were feminine foundations, not borrowed ideals. For the sake of feminist memory today, protofeminism must never be reduced to some primitive iteration of liberal equality, but something subtler — a profound movement for the transformation of the terms by which values are recognised and validated, a parity in, and of, disparity.
Look Down Below - A Faceful of Metaphor
Our discussion has cautioned against the monistic impulse of Anglo-American feminism(s), the reflex to reduce historical women to precursors of modern ideals, collapsing complexity into continuity. We are all atop the shoulders of giants, and that it is hard to see even a great pillar—Christine de Pizan’s City of Ladies—as anything other than distant. However, the risks of ambivalence are twofold: the first that we may mistake de Pizan’s city—built in celebration of justice, reason, and honour, things in constant redefinition— for a neutral column in the
monument of progress, thus unexamined. Worse yet we might become that inadvertently destructive giant who, with a step, renders the city, however brilliant in its aberration, nothing more than history, dismissed for its discomfort underfoot and thus unseen altogther.
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Bibliography
Bruckner, Matilda. “Fictions of the Female V oice: The Women Troubadours.” In Medieval Woman's Song: Cross-Cultural Approaches, edited by Anne L. Klinck and Ann Marie Rasmussen, 127-151. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002.
de Pizan, Christine. The Book of the City of Ladies. Translated by Earl Jeffrey Richards, New York: Persea Books, 1998.
Cavallaro, Dani. French Feminist Theory : An Introduction. London: Continuum, 2003.
Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, folio 217r. Accessed 29 June 2025.
https://parker.stanford.edu/parker/catalog/fs743fm9703
Irigaray, Luce. I Love To You: Sketch of A Possible Felicity in History. Translated by Alison Martin. London: Routledge, 1996.
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