Comment on Ferber's "Women and Work: Issues of the 1980s"

Abstract

significant, I think, that Christine addressed herself to both the politics and the psychology of female literacy: to the controllers of her culture, she argued the case for women's education; for her sisters, however, she illuminated the psychological dynamics women might expect to experience as they advanced onto the male terrain of letters. I have focused here on the conflict between authority and experience that Christine recognized and resolved because I think it is a conflict we still know, even if female literacy itself is no longer rare. Its resolution is also the wellspring from which many other aspects of Christine's feminist theory flow, including her analysis of violence against women, rape, and the situation of widows, as well as her methodology of reading herself into in order to reread the authoritative texts of her day. At the same time, Christine's feminism requires a deliberate refusal to resolve apparently contradictory attitudes and values; she wrote both a treatise praising peace and, as her last work, a lyric celebrating Joan of Arc's martial valor. This willingness to tolerate apparent contradictions remains, I think, one of the strengths of feminist theory-another reason Christine de Pisan and her colleagues, whom I have not been able to discuss here, deserve our attention. Joan Kelly's Early Feminist Theory opens up this new chapter in our history and shows us how to being rereading it.