15th century CE

The 15th century CE serves as a historical point of contrast in Simone de Beauvoir’s analysis: arguments about women’s character and education entered public writing, but the literary dispute did not transform women’s assigned social role. The period also reveals the material institutions behind that role, from segregated prostitution to the limited openings for women to speak and learn.

Public Disputes and Women’s Education

In the 15th century CE, a dispute over marriage, clerical life, and women’s supposed faults unfolded in poems and polemics. The author of The Fifteen Joys of Marriage described husbands’ misfortunes, while Eustache Deschamps wrote at length on the same theme. These works belonged to a wider quarrel that reflected society’s assumptions rather than challenging its structure.

Christine de Pizan made a notable intervention by taking up her pen in defense of women. She criticized clerical writers and argued that girls should be admitted to schools and taught the sciences as boys were. Her claim was that women could understand the arts and sciences just as fully if given the customary education. The dispute thus opened a space for a woman’s voice, but its central demand for education did not amount to a broader demand for a different social role.

The controversy remained, in de Beauvoir’s account, largely a masculine debate about marriage and celibacy. Gerson, chancellor of the University of Paris, supported Christine, and wrote in French so that his argument could reach a wider public; Martin Le Franc joined the literary field with The Ladies’ Chaperon. Yet satire, courtly praise of femininity, and defenses of women left the actual distribution of social power intact. The quarrel registered prevailing attitudes more than it altered them.

Urban Regulation of Prostitution

A travel account from the late 15th century describes a municipal institution in Valencia that placed prostitution within a bounded, supervised district. The establishment was surrounded by walls and had a single entrance. Its streets held small houses, taverns, and cabarets; nearly three hundred women lived there, and a set price was specified for their services. At the gate, an appointed man handled the money and warned visitors that the porter would not be responsible if it was stolen overnight.

The arrangement combined commercial activity with confinement and public oversight. The women’s houses were described as clean and furnished with good linens, and at night lamps made them visible from their doorways. Two doctors, paid by the town, visited weekly to check for illness. If an epidemic struck, the authorities were required to support the women at municipal expense and could send foreign visitors away. This organized district contrasts with the severe restrictions imposed on prostitutes elsewhere: in many French towns they were confined to designated streets or areas outside the walls, made to wear identifying signs, and denied ordinary recourse to courts and police.

Historical Significance

The period’s two examples illuminate different parts of the same argument. Christine de Pizan’s educational appeal marks a rare effort to contest women’s exclusion from intellectual life, while Valencia’s district shows how women’s lives could be administered through civic rules that contained and classified them. Neither example, as presented here, signals a general transformation in women’s standing.

De Beauvoir uses such episodes to resist treating women’s condition as an eternal essence or as a simple march of progress. A literary controversy can make gender hierarchy discussable without changing it; a regulated institution can provide services while preserving women’s marginal and controlled status. The 15th century CE is therefore significant less as a turning point than as evidence of the distance between arguments about women and the conditions under which they lived.