"I do not wish them to have power over men; but over themselves." – Mary Wollstonecraft, *A Vindication of the Rights of Woman* (1792)
FIELD NOTES – Dr. Eleanor Hartley LOCATION: The Salon of Reason, Quarter of Reason SUBJECT: The Disputations and their rule In 1405 Lady Reason came to Christine carrying a mirror. Whoever looks into it, Christine wrote, sees herself as she truly is. The mirror hangs above the central fireplace of the Salon now, round and convex and very old, and the Cité has drawn one rule from it, on which its whole public life depends. An argument that cannot be answered does not count. The rule sounds like logic and works like manners. In the Disputations, which are held in the Hall of Declarations and rehearsed here, any resident may propose a declaration – that the Gate shall accept a new kind of stone, that the Studio shall be regulated, that a quarter shall be rebuilt. The declaration stands only when every argument against it has been answered. Not refuted: answered. An objection may survive, so long as the declaration has met it face to face. What is forbidden is the unanswered sneer, the r...
From the lore of Cité des Dames.