Female superiority
Belief that women are superior to men
The belief in female superiority, that women are superior to men, was present in Renaissance literature and the early modern period. It was also a part of second-wave feminist arguments.
History
Early modern period
The belief that women are superior goes back to protofeminism. In 1600, during the renaissance, the dialogue Il merito delle donne, translated to The Worth of Women: Wherein is Clearly Revealed Their Nobility and Their Superiority to Men by Moderata Fonte was published. It has been described as "witty" and "ambitious".
Other notable examples include The Nobility and Excellence of Women and the Defects and Vices of Men by Lucrezia Marinella in 1601 and In Praise of Illustrious Learned Women, both Ancient and Modern by Marguerite Buffet in 1668. The argument for women being superior was widespread in Europe during the seventeenth century. These types of claims started through the notion that both men and women had rational souls, an idea which was uncontroversial at the time and was developed through a treatise by Cornelius Agrippa known as Declamation on the Nobility and Preeminence of the Female Sex in 1528. In the sixteenth century, pro-woman writers argued that the souls were equal and followed up with an argument that women are superior. The following century, some who argued women are superior did not believe that the sexes are equal.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Female superiority” as belief that women are superior to men. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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The subject matters to the general reference register because the source frames it as belief that women are superior to men. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.
Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 28, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q137794571. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1600, 1601, 1668 and 1528.
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This entry incorporates text from “Female superiority” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.