Christine de Pizan & Sanchi Honnamma

Christine de Pizan (1364-1430) was the first French female writer who earned her living by her pen. The earlier writers like Hildegard of Bingen were nuns who had no need to earn their living. Deeply pained by the misogyny of her times, she wrote "The Book of the City of Ladies" where she refuted the allegations of the misogynists point by point & listed the woman achievers both past & present.

Sanchi Honnamma, who lived in a King's court in the seventeenth century in Karnataka, was one of the first poetesses in Kannada, the earlier one like Akka Mahadevi in twelfth century being basically a renunciate like Hildegard above. Honnamma was also hurt by the misogynists of her time & composed a famous poem which roughly translates as below:

"Was it not a woman who bore you?

Was it not a woman who brought you up?

Then why do you denigrate women

You blind men?"

It has to be noted that Christine, "far from inciting her contemporaries to resist the limitations placed on them by society, recommends traditional virtues to them: tolerance & humility to wives, modesty & obedience to virgins, & courage & dignity to widows." (Rosalind Brown Grant).

Similarly in "Hadibadeya Dharma", Honnamma preaches exactly the same virtues as mentioned above by Christine. So both Christine & Honnamma can be viewed as spiritual sisters seperated by space & time.