APA Editor Heidi Schmidt interviewed Melissa M. Shew and Kimberly K. Garchar about their new book Philosophy for Girls: An Invitation to the Life of Thought recently published by Oxford University Press.
Melissa M. Shew is a Visiting Professor at Marquette University, where she also works as a Senior Faculty Fellow in the Center for Teaching and Learning. In addition to teaching at the university level for fifteen years, she also taught for five years at an all-girls high school.
Kimberly K. Garchar is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Kent State University and an associated faculty member at Northeast Ohio Medical University. Dr. Garchar specializes in American pragmatism, ethics, and clinical ethics, particularly in the areas of death and dying. She has focused on issues of gender and gender equity throughout her career.
Thanks so much for taking the time to talk with us about this new book. Tell me a little about what the work is about and what you saw when you thought about putting it together.
This book invites and encourages girls and young women to think philosophically. It is a snapshot of philosophy expressed through a range of essays written by academic women philosophers for their younger counterparts. The essays in the volume welcome this audience to reflect, inquire, and analyze in philosophical ways. This book is for “thinkerly” girls who have begun to ask philosophical questions and provides ways both in content and form for exploring those questions under the guidance and expertise of professional women philosophers.
The goal of the book is to equip young women with a sound introduction to philosophical thinking in a way that explicitly includes and speaks to them and their lives in the book’s examples, anecdotes, scholarship, and overall layout. This book is, in short, the kind of book that women in philosophy wish existed when they (we) were younger. It is a book written in clear, vibrant, and engaging voices about a variety of philosophical topics and questions for intellectually curious young women, and any other persons wanting to dive into philosophy.
What called to you to write this particular book? What did you see that needed to be in the published world, and what were your goals?
In light of the widespread exclusion of women and women’s philosophical work from standard introductory textbooks, academic philosophy, the history of philosophy, and general philosophy books, this collected volume of essays by women philosophers aims to help correct this gender disparity by evidencing that women are indeed outstanding philosophers and that young women have a great capacity for philosophical thinking. Further, we insist that girls have a right to intellectual conversations from which they have largely been excluded. This book will empower girls in their “capacities as knowers” (Fricker 2007) and will benefit not only the girls individually but also the field of philosophy and the life of thought as a whole.
Thus, the book has both epistemic and ethical goals: We want girls to embrace their existence as thinking agents and make the world better in the process. In order to achieve these goals, the collection offers chapters by diverse academic women in philosophy and offers girls opportunities to pursue their own questions and assess their own lives through these chapters. For instance, chapters on autonomy by Serene Khader, credibility by Monica C. Poole, and the recognition of multiple ways of being in the world by Shanti Chu address questions often posed by young people.
These questions are both perennial and especially timely now, when young women, those who identify as gender-fluid or gender-nonbinary, and many others are still marginalized and discredited in terms of their intellectual capabilities and the value of their ideas. The chapters in our book provide a strong footing for people looking for a philosophical anchor that helps moor readers in the discipline while allowing for their own courageous exploration in it.
We hope to achieve four distinct but related goals as readers enter into and explore the examined life:
Goal #1: To empower girls and young women as learners and knowers by encouraging them to assess, challenge, question, and affirm their experiences and ideas through the expertise and tools provided by women in academic philosophy.
Goal #2: To provide an introductory philosophy text comprising chapters written by women philosophers to be used at both the secondary and post-secondary level in classrooms, philosophy clubs, discussion sections, and other related educational outlets.
Goal #3: To help close the gender gap in professional philosophy by providing a book to recommend to and use with interested students, thereby encouraging young women to participate in philosophy classes and programs.
Goal #4: To broaden the audience for philosophical reading by addressing the lives and ideas of girls in stimulating and vivid, yet accessible, prose.
How is your work relevant to the contemporary world?
While women are more represented in terms of numbers in different professions and in the workplace, studies show that women’s ideas aren’t valued equally to men’s ideas even with more proportionate representation of them/us in different fields. This book explicitly aims to empower young women intellectually, helping them see the ways that their voices about timely and timeless intellectual ideas matter both in our time now regarding a host of issues but also in terms of the future of Philosophy as a discipline.
As such, the book has multiple audiences of readers. These audiences include students, educators, and otherwise intellectually curious young women; members of philosophy clubs and discussion groups; adults, friends, and classmates who buy this book as a gift for or recommend it to young women; advocacy groups; and people who want a model of clean and vivid academic writing that respects its audience. The book is smart in style and relatable in content and the three primary target audiences are:
- Individual girls: They may buy the book for themselves, have it recommended to them by friends and relatives, or have it suggested to them by educators at the high school or college level. Indeed, we expect that people who support the intellectual development of girls will recommend or gift this book to young women.
- Students in colleges and universities: We expect that this book will gain traction in both single-sex and co-ed university classrooms as a much-needed addition to a male-dominated set of anthologies and textbooks. This book differs from existing volumes of all-women philosophy anthologies because it offers a range of thinking on a variety of philosophical topics, discussions, and questions, and is pitched for a non-expert audience. We believe that this text can be used in any number of philosophy courses due to faculty members’ desires to provide a corrective to typical male-dominated choices for philosophy texts in their classes. Finally, we expect that this book will be used in philosophy clubs, humanities programs, and more, functioning as a practical dialogical tool on university campuses.
- Students in high schools: There are hundreds of all-girls high schools in the U.S., U.K., and beyond that could make use of this book in their humanities classes, philosophy courses, book clubs, philosophy clubs, and in other ways. The book need not be restricted to single-sex schools, of course, but we anticipate that this book will be loved at all-girls schools and coed schools with single-sex classrooms for this volume. Furthermore, we expect progressive educators in all-boys high schools to use this book as a matter of social justice as well as genuine inquiry. We are also well aware of dual and concurrent enrollment courses that are gaining popularity in U.S. high schools. These courses are taught in a high school for college credit when paired with a university. Given the rising number of faculty with PhDs or MAs in Philosophy who are teaching high school, we expect that this book would be a welcome addition to the reading lists in these courses at both the high school and corresponding university affiliate program.
How have readers responded?
Readers have responded with enthusiasm and excitement for the book in its early release. Indeed, it sold out quickly and has been out of stock for some time; we are happy that the book will be back in stock by mid-November. Former and current students, faculty looking to shake up their traditional textbook selections, relatives looking to gift the book for the holidays, and a host of other different kinds of readers have reached out with great enthusiasm. We are grateful for the warm reception it has already received.
Part of our strategy for this book includes highlighting its contributors as well. We are featuring contributors in videos that they’ve created to explain why they were interested in this project, boosting the selfies that they’re sharing on social media, and attempting to spotlight the incredible work of dedicated women in our profession. We expect that these elements will connect with individual readers and with faculty looking to make their courses more personal to students, particularly in a time of widespread remote learning. Since this project is both personal and professional for all involved, we want to make the personal elements pronounced now that the book is out.
We have also done some writing about the book already and will continue to do so, like for the Women in Philosophy blog for the APA in January 2021. For instance, you can see a recent blog post about girls, women, and intellectual empowerment on OUP’s blog,
an excerpt from the book in “Humanities Unveiled” and on the Imperfect Cognitions blog. We are thankful that the book has received loads of early interest, and we look forward to continued conversation about philosophy with our readers and all who care about them.
What advice do you have for others seeking to produce such a work?
We take a special pride in the process of this book, not only its finished product. It started as a single-authored project over a decade ago and transformed a few years ago into a multi-authored volume copiously edited by both of us. We took great pains in our strategic approach to fulfill the initial vision, which we saw as essential in terms of trying to work toward equity and inclusion in our discipline.
To achieve these goals, we not only invited contributions from well-known philosophers but also made an open call for chapter proposals. We took this approach for the sake of justice and to achieve the strongest possible compilation of chapters. We extended invitations to a number of authors who are well established in philosophy but also to reach the many excellent thinkers who are at earlier stages in their careers, or on different careers paths entirely.
This approach worked quite well from our perspective. We aimed for a cross-section in representations of universities, regions, areas of expertise in and approaches to philosophy, and other kinds of diversity within the profession. We wanted to model a living pluralistic approach to the discipline. Indeed, the two of us have shared philosophical questions and topics, though we approach them in different ways, which we see both as necessary and as a strength in philosophy. There is no one right way to be philosophical, so it was important to us to exhibit a diverse representation of the field. We do know, though, that it is just one book and cannot represent all fields, approaches, methods, and so on, but we think it is solid in terms of what it does offer.
We believe the process of editing the book was perhaps more intense than the editing done for some other anthologies, insofar as the editing occurred at many stages through the creation of the volume. We approached the book from a dialogical perspective, meaning that we were in close conversation with many contributors as they wrote and rewrote their chapters. Getting the pitch and tone right for this book was essential, given its broad appeal but sturdy and non-negotiable constraints (e.g., opening with an anecdote, citing mostly women in philosophy, etc.). This was a challenge for us as editors and also for many contributors, but we are proud of both process and result.
This dialogical and collaborative “labor of love,” as many of the contributors have described it, represents our approach to philosophy as a living discipline. We firmly believe that philosophy happens through dialogue with each other, our students, and the profession at large. We think that insofar as it is possible and appropriate, a dialogical approach to scholarship and pedagogy is essential for the future of philosophy.
What else would you like to do with your research, if you could do anything?
We fully expect that this book is a first very important step in our explicit outreach to young women in philosophy. We are quite encouraged that PIKSI (Philosophy in an Inclusive Key Summer Institutes) have really gained traction to help diversify and support Philosophy as a field. Likewise, the PLATO institute supports philosophical inquiry at a K-12 level. We believe philosophy as a discipline having important conversations across (and making important contributions to) social media, in the APA itself as an institution, and beyond. These are all very important initiatives.
We intend to build support for young women’s philosophical thinking both internal to philosophy as a discipline and as a public philosophy project beyond the scope of this book. We are actively exploring venues to build meaningful, creative, and philosophical ways to support women from high school on up, to faculty in the discipline. We envision building a host of pedagogical resources and opportunities for young women to connect and exchange ideas based on topics from the book and their own ideas both virtually and, ideally, in person.
Kimberly K. Garchar
Kimberly K. Garchar is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Kent State University and an associated faculty member at Northeast Ohio Medical University. Dr. Garchar specializes in American pragmatism, ethics, and clinical ethics, particularly in the areas of death and dying. She has focused on issues of gender and gender equity throughout her career.
Melissa M. Shew
Melissa M. Shew is a Visiting Professor at Marquette University, where she also works as a Senior Faculty Fellow in the Center for Teaching and Learning. In addition to teaching at the university level for fifteen years, she also taught for five years at an all-girls high school.
H. L. Schmidt
H. L. Schmidt currently holds the Becker Fellowship. She has worked as an editor or writer at multiple publications, including Qu, City Magazine, and The Verve. Schmidt is SOPHIA’s Chapter Development Officer and is a doctoral student in the University of Kentucky’s Educational Policy Studies and Evaluation Ph.D. program in Philosophical and Cultural Inquiry, where she focuses on how we develop, communicate, and sustain a personal moral code. She founded the Roanoke chapter of SOPHIA, has presented at a number of conferences, including Philosophy of the City’s 2019 Conference where she presented her research on the role of the public library in a just city. She is part of the leadership of the Philosophers for Sustainability group, where she co-leads the Social Media & Outreach team. At the APA Blog, she edits the Research beat, conducts interviews for the Recent Book Spotlight, and oversees the Diversity & Inclusion beat, which features the Women in Philosophy and Black Issues series. She hosted the Civic Connections podcast featuring conversations with local public policy officials about justice and public affairs. She holds a Master’s in the Humanities from Hollins University where she studied ethics and public policy under Lawrence C. Becker and a Masters of Fine Arts degree in Creative Writing from Queens University of Charlotte. Her interests include practical ethics, public policy, existentialism, and utilitarianism. You can follow her on Twitter @theheidifeed.
