Women in Philosophy: Who Cares About Women in the History of Philosophy?

by Sarah Tyson

The place of women in the history of philosophy tends to be most interesting to people who already have an interest in feminist philosophy.  This is not universally the case.  Mary Warnock, for instance, edited a book, Women Philosophers, in which she argues that feminist philosophy isn’t really philosophy.  Warnock’s book seems to be for those who want to be reassured that a few women can be sprinkled into the history of philosophy without anything having to change.  But one might also, despite Warnock’s framing, think it strange that such a volume were necessary.  If women could be included without much fuss, and these women should have been, then why weren’t they?  Whence the need for a book about women philosophers?  Not surprisingly, for the most part, the gateway drug to engagement with historical women thinkers is some sort of dalliance with feminism. In other words, historical women are mostly interesting to people who already find the relationship between women and a lot of things strange.

This correlation is important but also problematic.  After all, feminism poses the threat of destabilizing the academic discipline of philosophy—someone advocating feminism might raise “issues” that have to be “addressed.”  Historical women, on the other hand, do not usually come across as threatening.  They seem sort of grandmotherly or statuary—if they appear at all.  Their histories might include shocking biographical details, but these have a tendency to seem quaint to modern readers in a way that feminism does not.  To be clear, historical women should be seen as threatening, because to be remembered at all, they must have stepped way out of line. But to have to point this out constitutes part of the problem.  It indicates that there’s already another narrative taking up most of the air waves.  For women in the history of philosophy this narrative is roughly: there weren’t any—or at least not any that were really doing philosophy.

Many women throughout history have asked some tough questions about the everyday business of their lives—and occasionally got arrested for it, or killed.  And it seems that questioning the ordinary (not to mention being arrested or killed for it) is one important thing shared by feminism and philosophy.  According to this reading, philosophy and feminism ought to be good friends, and philosophers would, of course, have feminist impulses given their desire to question.  But this desire to question is also shaped by social and cultural forces that likely truck in sexist impulses.  For this reason, professional philosophers don’t necessarily have any commitment to or even grudging respect for feminist methods, practices, and questions.  So long as it’s just feminists, and not philosophers more generally, who care about these women and their moxie, the discipline of philosophy will remain unreconstructed and the worse for it.

My point is not that women have contributed to every philosophical question we grapple with today (although I would contend they have) or made intellectual interventions worth our time and attention (again, I would bet on it).  Rather, my point is that a presumption thrives within philosophy that there were not (and are not) women whose contributions need to be considered, and when feminists insist otherwise, the response, if not hostile, is often an embarrassed politeness.  Embarrassed politeness is an extremely effective defense.  The embarrassment arises from a sense that a mistake has been made and the politeness from a desire to survive the moment with dignity until one can guffaw later, preferably with friends. This logic goes so deep that for a lot of folks, the matter is settled not just without a review of the evidence, but also with a sense of certainty that there is no evidence to review.

I wish this were all hyperbole.

So long as the vast majority of people who are recognized as philosophers think that historical women thinkers can be “dealt with” by feminists, we won’t know where we’ve come from as a discipline or what might be possible.  Disregarding women is one of the most reflexive, everyday things a person can do.  That disregard wasn’t born overnight and its practices have been refined for generations.  Without understanding the history of that disregard and how it operates, we risk, almost to a certainty, being swept along with it.  We might be disgruntled or sorry or well-meaning or politely embarrassed about the whole thing, but we’ll also be complicit.

Philosophy as a discipline has all sorts of (non-philosophical) tricks for policing its borders.  Philosophy as a practice offers us tools, methods, approaches, and, when we’re lucky, an attitude of iconoclasm that are really good for challenging everyday assumptions, practices, feelings, and judgments.  Through philosophy, we can discover that the very category of “women” is, itself, a production partly (although by no means fully) of misogyny.  Can we still use the category?  Sure.  Ought we have long conversations about it?  Yes, which is exactly what feminists have been doing.  Should we be forever suspicious of it?  I’m leaning towards probably, although “forever” is admittedly a long time.  Can the category of women be deployed in ways that make the everyday seem strange? There’s a whole archive of trans* (usually feminist) scholarship that does just this, so don’t take my word for it.

The point in thinking about the intersection of feminism and philosophy is not only to do justice to historical women who have been excluded from our consideration.  Rather the point is to gain traction on our own time.  How have women been absented?  Why?  What have the effects of this missing history been?  And what about the unrecoverable history—the women whose thoughts cannot be found, no matter how hard we scour all the archives we can think to look for?  To avoid merely seeking vindication for what we already know (and thereby offering justification for what already is and the silences by which it has been built), we need methods to unsettle our disciplined expectations.  Such powerful methods have been developed within feminist philosophy.

My book brings methods for thinking about women’s exclusion developed by Genevieve Lloyd, Luce Irigaray, and Michèle Le Doeuff into conversation with the work already done to reclaim historical women for the discipline of philosophy. I argue that women cannot be effectively reclaimed so long as norms and practices that made their exclusion possible persist.  So, reclamation must be a process of transforming philosophy.  That is, to engage with historical women as philosophers, we will need to change the practices and norms by which we identify what work is worthy of philosophical attention, why, and for what ends.  I found the most radical and productive method in Le Doeuff’s approach, especially because, unlike many theorists of women’s exclusion (including Lloyd and Irigaray), she often turns to historical women thinkers to open up new ways of thinking about contemporary problems.  She does so by considering what life now might be like had historical women’s interventions gained traction in their own time.  What might our present lives be like if women’s ideas had not been systematically absented?

All of this leads me to consider two texts, which to many folks trained in philosophy, but not feminism, will look far afield: The Declaration of Sentiments and Sojourner Truth’s speech in Akron, Ohio, in 1851.  The first is the inaugural text of the women’s rights movement in the US, while the second is a heavily mythologized speech by an itinerant preacher who stole herself from slavery.  Truth’s vision of the women’s movement challenges not just the women’s rights advocates in her own time, but also to much contemporary feminism.  That is, the vision of The Declaration meets an even more radical vision in Truth’s response.  When Truth said, “I am a woman’s rights,” she handed us a puzzling relationship between subject and predicate that still deserves our attention.  She asked us to consider the nature of rights that could be inhabited by a former slave who could not read and who was guided by an inner voice that she understood to be divine. While The Declaration drafted in Seneca Falls, New York, proposed ways to address many of the limits to women’s freedom, it did not offer a critique of the category of “women.” Without such a critique, they risked reinforcing prevailing norms of race, class, and property (at least).  Truth upheaved that category with her intervention.  Such an upheaval cannot be sprinkled into history without anything changing.

It’s not that I mind having the most productive and exciting conversations about this work with people who take feminism seriously—that’s been one of the greatest gifts of my work, actually.  It’s just that even after all this time studying women’s exclusion from philosophy, it is still so strange to me that those are not conversations I can have with the vast majority of professional philosophers.

Thank you to Geoffrey Adelsberg, Andrew Dilts, Amy Hoffman, Gillian Silverman, Carl Tyson, and Toni Tyson for comments on an earlier draft of this blog.

Sarah Tyson is Associate Professor of Philosophy and affiliated faculty of Women and Gender Studies at the University of Colorado Denver. She is the author of Where Are the Women? Why Expanding the Archive Makes Philosophy Better(Columbia University Press, 2018) and co-host of the podcast New Books in Philosophy.