- Lived:
- c. 1364–c. 1430 · born Venice, raised and worked in Paris
- Tradition:
- Late medieval French; Europe's first professional woman of letters
- The Big Idea:
- Women only seem lesser because they have been made lesser — deprived of education and buried under a library of slander — and the historical record of what women have actually done refutes every claim about what women by nature cannot do.
- In their words:
- "If it were customary to send little girls to school and teach them the same subjects as are taught to boys, they would learn just as fully and would understand the subtleties of all the arts and sciences."
- If you remember one thing:
- Locked out of the universities, she built a city instead — a fortress of argument and example where every insulted woman in history could live — and in doing so invented a way of doing philosophy from outside philosophy's gates.