The Book of the City of Ladies (Penguin Classics)

In The Book of the City of Ladies France's first professional woman of letters confronted head-on the misogyny of fourteenth-century Europe. Here, with the help of Reason, Rectitude, and Justice, Christine de Pizan constructs an allegorical city in which to defend womankind, using examples of female virtue and achievement both from the past and her own day as the stones with which to build the city's walls and towers.