Male-Female Relationships: 600 Years of Change

As I began to consider the evolution of male-female relationships over the past decades, I took a brief foray into history and found that active discussion and controversy about male-female interactions and sex roles have been ongoing for at least 600 years. Christine de Pisan initiated an active dialogue on the subject with the publication of The Book of the City of Ladies (1405) at the beginning of the 15th century. It initiated the “querelles des femmes,” a literary debate carried on by women and men of high rank and scholarship. Previously, issues were defined and discussed only by men. De Pisan and the women who followed her drew on classical learning to create a space for a new intellectual position that opposed what seemed to be the overwhelming authority of the learned about women.

In her book she concerned herself with the nature of femininity and gender-related issues. She indicated that gender roles had cultural as well as biological roots and argued against misogynist notions of defectiveness and the societal shaping of women to fit those notions. The fact that her work was largely ignored, except by medieval historians and scholars must be underscored. Feminist historians and scholars have suggested that since most world history has been written by men it is male oriented and tells of men's achievement and influence. Women's history has often been lost, unacknowledged, or attributed to others. Our understanding of women's history is based on fragmentary and incomplete accounts and is biased by values and perspectives that are often more literary than accurate.

The problem of bias has recently been attended to by women scientists who have described it in fields that we usually consider objective and value free (Bleier, 1984; Keller, 1985). The history of women's contributions to medicine, science, and psychology reveals a number of notable women who, like their literary sisters, made