Politics, Gender, and Genre: The Political Thought of Christine de Pizan. (book reviews)

Each of these works contributes, in distinctive and related ways, to the project of discerning and constructing lineages of modem feminism. Although the term feminism did not appear until 1892, its relatively recent linguistic coinage does not automatically disqualify this project as an anachronistic effort to read feminist desires, sensibilities, motifs, and strategies into premodern eras. Such a project, however, is simultaneously facilitated and hampered by two interrelated problems, the first of which is astutely described by Christine Faure:

Suppose you want to come to grips ...