City of Women is a space devoted to women’s lives, work, ideas, and place in the world.
Some entries will take the form of interviews with women whose gifts, talents, time, successes, or platforms create opportunities and care for other women. Others will be essays, observations, and reflections on the forces that shape women’s lives: culture, work, art, language, power, equality, and the institutions in which we move.
The common thread is simple. I am interested in women who build, women who question, women who create, and women who challenge the structures that diminish us.
I was inspired to build this City of Women by a historic figure who has long been my muse in both calligraphy and writing: Christine de Pizan, the medieval scribe, poet, author, and political thinker. In The Book of the City of Ladies, written around 1405, de Pizan imagined women constructing a metaphorical city together, using reason, learning, and the written word as their building materials. She urged women, in one especially beloved passage, to mix the mortar in the inkpot and undertake the masonry with great strokes of the pen.
The image has always stayed with me.
De Pizan was a prolific professional writer who used ink and pen to challenge the misogyny embedded in the literature and thinking of her age. Remarkably, she also earned her living through her work, an uncommon achievement for a woman in medieval Europe. She argued, centuries before the language of modern feminism existed, for women’s intelligence, dignity, education, and moral equality.
Christine de Pizan inspires me because she did more than object to the world as she found it. She imagined another one and began constructing it.
That is the spirit of this City of Women.
I use the word “women” intentionally. “Lady,” however appropriate to de Pizan’s medieval context, carries distinctions of class and social status that do not belong in the community I hope to create here. This city has wider gates.
It is a place to introduce remarkable women, certainly, but also to examine the ideas, customs, language, images, and institutions that affect women’s lives. Sometimes that will mean celebrating what women have built. Sometimes it will mean questioning what society has accepted for too long. Sometimes it will simply mean noticing something and refusing to look away.
The pen has always been one of the tools with which women have claimed a place in the world.
This is where I intend to use mine.
Welcome to the City of Women.
“I am trying to make art that relates to the deepest and most mythic concerns of humankind, and I believe that, at this moment of history, feminism is humanism.”
Read More“If it were customary to send little girls to school and teach them the same subjects as boys, they would learn just as fully and would understand the subtleties of all arts and sciences.”
