Building the City of Ladies

Asking the question, "What is a woman?"

by Jillian Schroeder

“I love the Woman,” my niece says when she wakes up. “I want to watch the Woman again.”

She’s referring to her new favorite hero, whom we watched save the world on my last birthday. Wonder Woman. Until recently, she was all about “Spi-man,” the web-slinging boy from New York, but since then she’s more interested in swords and lassos and The Woman.

Perhaps she responds this way because there is something about Diana Prince that is just so deeply womanly. Sure, she’s saving the world and showing up armies of men in battle, but those things don’t make her inspiring. We’ve seen heroines beat up the bad guys on screen before - we haven’t seen them do so with gentle confidence and the desire to give life instead of death.

I understand how my niece feels. When I first watched Wonder Woman, I felt the same. A little piece of me mourned that it had taken 25 years for a story I needed so badly to get to me. Because if my life was a story, it would begin “Once upon a time, there was a little girl who was ready for battle.”

You don’t have to dig far in my family archives before you find a picture of me decked in warrior garb. A revolutionary war musket. Bow and arrows. In this picture, I am five or six and clothed in the armor of God. I still remember what it felt like to wear this suit - as if the whole weight of the world would come up against me, but I was ready for it.

When I was a little girl, I often pretended to be a boy. I was Robin Hood, not Maid Marion. I was King Arthur (or one of his knights) and most certainly not Guinevere or the Lady of Shallot. “Boys have better stories,” I told my mom in frustration. I didn’t understand why boys went on quests and saved kingdoms and women…got married? I didn’t even like dresses or quiet tea parties, and I certainly wasn’t planning my perfect future wedding.

Stories are how we learn to inhabit the world. They are the realm in which we develop the voice of our personhood. Most of the stories where I saw examples of tenacity and strength and cleverness were about boys. Even Joan of Arc had to pretend to be a boy in order to achieve something great. And like Jo March, I did so want “to do something splendid…something heroic, or wonderful.” So I pretended too.

It seemed to me that everyone thought women didn’t fit into adventure stories. It’s an easy jump from Jo March’s “disappointment in not being a boy” to something much stronger. It begins to feel unjust that you were born a woman. It begins to feel lonely that you want a different narrative. And you begin to wonder whether being a woman is just…a mistake.

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This wasn’t just an erroneous childhood feeling. It was true. There is a limit to the stories which the world is comfortable giving to girls. She is an artist or a mother. She is a career woman or a wife. There’s no nuance to the paths available to her. And if you don’t fit into those narratives, there must be something wrong with you.

Don’t believe me? When my married younger sister became pregnant in college, she had multiple people ask if she was going to drop out, as if it were her only option. The assumption no doubt comes from statistics - but statistics aren’t people. A young woman with drive and determination and intelligence could conceivably try for both - so why didn’t anyone think she would?

I don’t think the assumption is about statistics at all - it’s the story we tell ourselves about young women who get pregnant. Girls who get pregnant at an inconvenient time abort the child or quit school, the narrative says. We’ve seen those two versions of the story in films and books, on the news and in common gossip after a community potluck. I can’t think of one of these stories that tried for both.

Greta Gerwig’s Little Women, of all the book’s many film adaptations, is the one most preoccupied with this question within the book. Each March sister has a narrative by which she is expected to live - by relatives, by neighbors, even by each other. Instead, we watch them quietly living according to their conscience and their courage. The film even leaves you with the question - will Jo marry the professor? Or will she write for a living, all alone? The film asks us to choose because, well, doesn’t the world?

Here’s the truth about women and stories. We’ve got a strict idea of what age she can have a career, when and how many kids she should have, how long she should go before her hair goes gray. We tell stories about mean girls who destroy each other at work or school, but we can’t seem to tell good stories about sisterhood. In the name of feminism, we turn male heroes into women, but we don’t tell the stories about the women who are heroes.

And often, the narrative is just plain wrong. I thought Joan of Arc was pretending to be a boy, but she was only dressing as one. She remained a woman, a gentle one who brought life to her nation and sacrificed her life to do so. Once I got the story straight I saw that was the heritage I could have - if I wanted it.

It’s not that other, truer narratives for women don’t exist. They are everywhere if you look hard enough. Women like Diana Prince do exist, ones who do things that are splendid and heroic. A host of unseen women. We don’t tell the story of the college mom who graduates with honors, holding her two-year old son, even though she exists. I think women, and especially girls, need her story. How else will they learn how capacious and wonderful the nature of womanhood truly is?

Today is July 1st, a very special birthday to me. Today a girl was born who thought she wanted to be a teacher, but ended up following a different path. A girl called Olivia. If you know her at all, it is most likely from Gone With the Wind, or perhaps The Adventures of Robin Hood. But can you tell your daughter the story of how she brought the inhuman practices of the movie Studio System to its knees? Do you know that she left her career at its height, two Oscars in, to move to France and be a mother to her children?

A story like that is powerful. That story tells our daughters and nieces and goddaughters that we too were capable, perhaps what we have given up to put them first. That kind of story tells them the worth of a woman.

In the 14th century, a literate woman named Christine de Pizan sat amidst her books, beset by a persistent idea:

Given that I could scarcely find a moral work by any author which didn’t devote some chapter or paragraph to attacking the female sex, I had to accept their unfavorable opinion of women since it was unlikely that so many learned men, who seemed to be endowed with such intelligence and insight into all things could possibly have lied…I came to the conclusion that God had surely created a vile thing when he created woman.

The Book of the City of Ladies, Christine de Pizan

But in the midst of her despair, when she rails at God for giving her “a female form,” she is visited by three virtues: Reason, Rectitude, and Justice. They come to help her get rid of “those misconceptions which have clouded your mind and made you reject what you know and believe in fact to be the truth.” To purify her mind and strengthen her heart, they instruct her to build a “City of Ladies” where she will protect the stories of women of great worth.

From what will this strong fortress, intended to protect the souls of women and their stories of strength and virtue, be built? The stories of the wise and wily, the ancient and contemporary women “worthy of praise”. The city is built of her words, keeping their memory alive and accurate. So Christine takes up the “trowel of her pen” and writes to remember how to love The Woman.

Artists like de Pizan and Gerwig are both trying to remind us that the strength of women will lie in our ability to tell each other true tales about ourselves. To tell them bravely and beautifully. To build a city of strength around the feminine personhood which the haters and manipulators can’t touch.

So my spunky niece and I sit close to each other and settle into our City of Ladies. Diana Prince, driven by her compassion for suffering children, shoves off her furs and steps into the land where no man dares tread. It’s a story that makes us feel strong. A story that prepares us to be strong when we lose people we love. A story that shows how much is at stake every morning before we walk outside our doors and make a choice to do what is wrong or right.

I want more stories like that.