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IX Introduction

who make their living through sex, is linked to a move that Franco makes much morę emphatically earlier in the poem: she turns her defense of her-self against Maffio into a defense of all women. At first, she criticizes Maf-fio for his lack of chivalry in a way that appears to concede a great deal to conventional ideas about women s naturę and social role: because they are weak and timid, they deserve mens protection, not their abuse (10-16). But she revises her apparent acceptance of women as the weaker sex as the poem goes on. The man s attack has foreed her to toughen up, to become as capable of battle as he is. Although Franco first presents this capacity for transformation as hers alone—Maffio’s attack has spurred her to train her-self—she moves from this individual claim to a feminist focus on women as a group. She takes her personal experience as proof that women in generał “are no less agile than men” (36) in warfare—and, as the rest of the poem shows, in verbal combat.

She expands her argument for women s equality to men by insisting that training, not innate essence, determines women s abilities. As Lucrezia Marinella would do in her La nobiltd e leccellenza delle donnę, citing a 1581 poem by Moderata Fonte, Franco imagines a situation in which women enjoy the same opportunities as men and therefore demonstrate the same physical and mental strength (“hands and feet and hearts like yours,” 66).²² She rejects gender fixity morę radically by pointing out that masculinity itself is not a unified given. Men vary in physical strength; fur-ther, their diversity proves that there is no necessary connection between body types and mental qualities: "some men who are delicate are also strong, / and some, though coarse and rough, are cowards” (68-69). She also suggests that it is ideology that prevents women from discovering their capabilities. If they were not kept ignorant of their potential, they would re-veal it in triumphant encounters with men (70-72).

Franco concludes her defense of women with a neat combination of the two roles she has claimed as Maffio s challenger: poetic yirtuosa and member of the female sex. She declares herself the champion of women: she is the first to write against Maffio, their common enemy, but she intends that others will follow in her footsteps: “Among so many women, I will be the first to act, / setting an example for all of them to follow” (74-75). Franco s verve and eloquence in this capitolo would indeed reappear in the

22. In Ld nobilta e leccellenza delle donnę (Vcnice: Giovanni Battista Ciotti, 1600; 2d ed., 1601), Lucrezia Marinella raises training above fixed gender capacity as follows: “Let them train a boy and a girl of the same age, both well born and with good minds, in lcttcrs and in arms;... they would see in how short a timc the girl would be morę expertly accomplished than the boy” (33). She cites in support a passage from Moderata Fonte s 1581 epic, llFloridoro: “If when a daugh-ter is born to a father, / 1 le set her to the same work as his son, / In solcmn or gay tasks, she’d hołd her own, / Ncither less than her brother nor unequal to him, / Whether he placed her in ficrccly armed squadrons / Or assigned her to learn any liberał art” (11, canto 4).