Joan of Arc – feminist icon?

Christine de Pizan was a remarkable woman. Despite the odds stacked against her by her gender, this daughter of a Venetian physician at the French royal court became one of the most distinguished writers of the later middle ages. In 1418, after a long career during which she had defended the cause of women against literary misogyny in a scholarly debate known as the querelle des femmes, she retreated into religious seclusion, horrified by the civil war and English invasion that, between them, were tearing her beloved France apart. But in the summer of 1429, by then in her 60s, she emerged one last time from a decade of literary silence to celebrate in effervescent verse the achievements of a yet more extraordinary woman: Joan of Arc.

That February, a peasant girl from a village named Domrémy had arrived at the court of the Dauphin Charles, leader of the Armagnac French, the anti-English faction in France's brutal civil war. The girl was bizarrely dressed – in men's clothes, with her hair cut short – and she brought a startling message: she was sent by God to drive the English out of France. Her utter conviction – and the desperate straits in which the Armagnacs found themselves – persuaded the Dauphin's theological advisers that she should be put to the test, and, in May, dressed in shining armour, she led his troops to astonishing victory at the besieged town of Orléans.

For Christine, a staunch partisan of the Armagnacs, the sun had come out after years of darkness. This was heaven's doing, she declared – a vindication of the Dauphin's God-given right to the French throne. And not only that: "Oh! What honour for the female sex!" No one, she wrote, could doubt God's regard for womankind, now that he had chosen as an instrument of his will a simple young girl and given her "a heart greater than any man's".

This "protofeminist" writer had made of Joan a protofeminist icon, comparing her to the biblical heroines Esther, Judith and Deborah, through whom, she said, God had delivered his people from oppression. As the years passed, Joan was figured, too, as an Amazon – one of the virginal warriors of Greek mythology – or as a personification of heroic Virtue: chastity, justice and fortitude in one ideal exemplar.

But it wasn't until the development of feminism proper that Joan of Arc became a properly feminist icon. For the suffragettes, she was – literally – a poster girl. She wore suffragette colours and brandished a banner of the Women's Social and Political Union on a poster promoting the Suffragette newspaper, and, in 1909, and again in 1911, members of the WSPU marched through London with an armour-clad "Joan" riding at their head. (In 1911, as if to emphasise her mythical status, her white charger was led by a fellow protester dressed as Robin Hood.)

Behind the iconic dazzle, however, there is incongruity in the idea that a medieval visionary who fought for the God-given rights of her king should become, half a millennium later, an inspiration to campaigners for women's right to vote in democratic elections. It isn't the only incongruity in Joan of Arc's afterlife; instead, it's a symptom of her endlessly protean capacity to be all things to all people. She is a Catholic saint who was condemned as a heretic by the Catholic church; a hero to republicans and monarchists, Vichy and the Resistance, the right and the left. (And, indeed, by 2014 a conservative Catholic newspaper in the US would run an article under the headline "Joan of Arc: Scourge of Modern Feminists".)

Somehow, the unique has become the universal – and that's partly because the real Joan is such a complex and elusive figure. Unlike De Pizan, Joan didn't see her mission as a demonstration of God's approval of womankind. Her messages from heaven could not have been more individual and particular: she, and only she, could save France from the English and lead the rightful king to his coronation. We know her as Joan of Arc, but that was a name she never used: she called herself "Jeanne la Pucelle", "Joan the Maid". The word meant an unmarried girl, older than a child and not yet a woman; but, just as there were virgins and the Virgin, so it seemed that, for Joan, there were maids and the Maid – the daughter of God, "Fille Dé", as she said her voices called her.

Her virginity played a crucial part in staking her claim to divinely inspired authority. She was examined by her own side, twice, and by her enemies when she was captured, to check the physical embodiment of the spiritual purity she claimed. Yet she defied the Old Testament prescription that a woman in men's clothing was "an abomination unto the Lord". And she did so not to hide herself from danger by passing as a man, as several female saints had done, but openly, so that she, a young woman, could lead an army of men.

Her enemies knew what that made her: she was, they said, the "whore of the Armagnacs". Even once that slur had been disproved, they denounced her insistence on wearing men's clothes as a crime against nature, God and the authority of the church. Nor did the armour of her virginity unsex Joan for her supporters, or make her body any less an object of fascination. Two of her military companions caught glimpses of her beautiful breasts and her bare legs while they were on campaign, they later declared, but felt no carnal impulses whatsoever in the presence of one so holy. It was left to a female witness to suggest they might be protesting too much; men around Joan had lusted after her, she remembered, but never dared say so.

Contemporary responses to Joan's femaleness were therefore complex and profoundly conflicted – as were Joan's responses to the females around her. She would beat camp followers with the flat of her sword and angrily drive them away, witnesses said, unless soldiers came forward to marry them. And she went to great lengths to discredit another woman, Catherine de la Rochelle, who came forward claiming to bring messages from heaven. Joan sat up all night waiting to witness Catherine's "visions", only to declare them foolish nonsense – as, of course, her own voices had already told her. Catherine, Joan said, should go back to her housework.

The real Joan of Arc is an uncomfortable fit as an icon of female solidarity or democratic rights. She achieved what should have been impossible for someone of her gender and class in 15th-century France. But for Joan's contemporaries, both her friends and her enemies, her achievement proved not that barriers of sex and class were wrong, but that her inspiration came from beyond this world, whether from heaven or from hell. And perhaps, amid the crises of the early 21st century, that medieval response resonates even more strongly than the suffragette Joan of 100 years ago: her remarkable life as a story of uncompromising faith, its extraordinary power in war and the bloody violence it can bring.