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Antifeminist Tradition

Entertainment / Literature / Antifeminist Tradition: While some women writers like Christine de Pisan and Margery Kempe advocated that women should have stronger positions in the medieval church or medieval society more generally, many other writers (mostly but not exclusively male) called for the female gender to remain in inferior or subservient positions. Other monastic writers would go so far as to declare all women evil temptresses and seductresses, inherently corrupt, conniving, incompetent, and weak-willed. Modern critics call these writers and their works the 'anti-feminist tradition.' The term primarily applies to patristic writers like Saint Jerome, Saint Augustine, and Saint Paul, but it more loosely applies to Juvenal, Theophrastus, Abelard, John of Salisbury, Walter Map, Hugh of Folietto, Peter of Blois, and Andreas Fieschi. In Chaucer's 'The Wife of Bath's Tale,' the Wife recounts how her fifth husband would read from a book of 'Wykked Wyves'--apparently a collection of works in the anti-feminist tradition. Aemilia Lanyer confronts and rebuts this anti-feminist tradition in her Renaissance work, Salve Deus, Rex Judaeorum, and Virginia Woolf touches on it indirectly in her twentieth-century writings like 'A Room of One's Own.'
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