The Book of the City of Ladies dismantles the misogynistic status-quo of the time, which equated of femininity with vice, sin and temptation, instead arguing that positive qualities like wisdom, strength, and constancy are universal human virtues, not exclusively male. In many places, her text goes further to suggest that women may be more virtuous than men, and that misogyny is expressive of male failings, not female ones.  

A key method for Christine is her treatment of the biblical Genesis story, in which Eve is traditionally blamed for “the Fall,” when mankind’s disobedience caused them to be expelled by God from the Garden of Eden. By the medieval period, this scripture was used to hold women in general responsible for the evils of the world, casting them as naturally sinful and a source of temptation for men. In a culture where scripture was accepted as literally true, it is impossible for Christine to analyze the Genesis itself as an example of misogyny, as she does with other texts. Instead, she relies on the established Augustinian concept of “felix culpa,” the paradoxical idea that the Fall was necessary to enable the birth of Christ, through which the virtue of the Virgin Mary more than eradicates the sin of Eve. Christine uses this theological precedent to establish her consistent argument that men have focused on Eve as the archetypal women in order to vilify them as a sex. For instance, when Rectitude acknowledges that some women are “unreasonable” and she would be a “liar” to say otherwise, but that these women are in a “minority,” the book supports the key argument that most women are naturally good, unlike male scholarship suggests. When the city is ultimately crowned by the Virgin Mary, the “Queen of Heaven” (201), this argument reaches its resolution. 

The text’s repeated focus on stories of chastity and sexual violence is also used to frame women as inherently good. Although Christine’s arguments uphold strict moral norms of the middle ages, which placed high value on female virginity, abstinence, and faithfulness within marriage, her treatment consistently places the burden of sexual “sinfulness” on men, not women. By considering that women’s chastity and virginity is “defiled” by men through sex, especially though sexual violence, Christine implies that women are inherently pure and men are a corrupting force. This reverses the prevailing approach at the time that women were a source of sin, especially for male sexual temptation. Similarly, Christine points out that men break God’s many of commandments by committing “terrible violent deeds” (34), apparently as an expression of their more aggressive natures, whereas, she argues, women who break the commandments “are going against their own nature” (34). This acts as a thesis statement for the theme that women are naturally virtuous rather than a force for evil in the world.