Female Education: dialogues among Christine de Pizan, Mary Wollstonecraft and Jane Austen

Abstract

Christine de Pizan was an intellectual woman in the Middle Ages, an exception if we consider that education was a field of men for men. Her work The City of Ladies (1405) presents the utopia of building a city in which women would be free from men's misogyny. We observe that to build the city, the author is helped by three allegorical ladies, Reason being the first of them. At the end of the 18th century, Mary Wollstonecraft published A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), demonstrating that women, like men, are endowed with reason and therefore have the right to quality education. At the beginning of the 19th century, Jane Austen published Pride and Prejudice (1813), a novel whose protagonist is an icon of reason and intelligence. That said, this article seeks to identify the reason in the writings of the three authors who claim for their sex the nobility of thinking and deciding for themselves as rational subjects in a patriarchal world that considered them objects of male desire. The theorists Virginia Woolf, Simone de Beauvoir, Gerda Lerner, Silvia Federici, Sandra Vasconcelos, Luciana Calado Deplagne, Lucimara Leite, among others, help us in this dialogue.