As new histories of early analytic philosophy and its pre-history begin to appear, there is a striking absence of female names. For example, the important 2008 book What is Analytic Philosophy by Hans-Johann Glock does not discuss any female philosophers. The extensive bibliography contains only one work by a female philosopher of the early analytic period, a short paper by Susan Stebbing. In 1933, Stebbing became the first female Professor of Philosophy in the United Kingdom; she wrote numerous important articles and nine books. Stebbing was also instrumental in introducing ideas from the Continent, particularly logical positivism, to UK philosophers. Her centrality to the philosophy of this period is not conveyed in Glock’s book, which reinforces her relative obscurity; many students of analytic philosophy have never heard of her or read her writing. The habit of ignoring female philosophers has become so entrenched that even the secondary literature is marked by their absence. Other than Stebbing, there are only two women in Glock’s bibliography: Julia Annas and Jennifer Hornsby. Both were students of well-known male philosophers, working with G.E.L. Owen and Bernard Williams, respectively; even in the mid to late 20th century, it was hard to make it in academic philosophy without a male advocate. Two recent books reveal the important philosophical work of a quartet of women in the last century: Philippa Foot, Elizabeth Anscombe, Mary Midgley, and Iris Murdoch. It is likely that you will have heard of at least some of these women. But their contributions to philosophy have until very recently hardly been noted in books on the history of the subject. Midgley is more often seen as a popular philosopher, Murdoch as novelist, and Anscombe as a Catholic thinker. Perhaps the most well-known as an academic philosopher, Foot lacked the confidence of her male peers. ‘I’m not clever at all. I’m a dreadfully slow thinker’ she once said.
Despite being unjustly and sometimes purposefully ignored or considered non-philosophical, women have made very significant contributions to analytic philosophy throughout the 20th century. For example, Constance Jones wrote about the sense-reference distinction before Frege, and Martha Kneale wrote about the history of logic. There have been many philosophers over the ages who did not receive as much scholarly attention as others, and this is perhaps often due to the quality of their work. But the fact that there are only one or two women included in the canonical history of twentieth century philosophy—sometimes Stebbing, sometimes Ruth Barcan Marcus, sometimes Simone de Beauvoir—does not mean that there were no other women whose philosophical ideas were valuable. The purging of women from our histories smacks of outright sexism in historiography, with a smattering of tokenism.
In the pre-history of analytic philosophy we find Sophie Bryant (1850-1922). Widowed at barely 20, she began teaching mathematics and German at the first ever UK secondary school for girls, North London Collegiate. Teaching at and running this school would remain a mainstay of her long career and a platform for many other projects. These included a B.Sc. and subsequent D.Sc. from University College London. “Her work for the DSc,” writes one of her students, “was in philosophy only” (18). As another student put it, “philosophy was so much a part of herself, of the very texture of her mind, and of the way she saw the world and life, that it is impossible to treat it as merely a part” (21). A career as an academic philosopher was not open to Bryant, but she published numerous papers in Mind and Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Bryant was resolutely anti-reductionist, claiming that psychology is not a question of mere conditioning; instead, she argues that individuals are agents in their own self development, a prominent theme in her first book. Today, she is sometimes known as mathematician or psychologist but almost never as a philosopher. The University of London website refers to her as an “educationalist and suffragist.”
As a suffragist and advocate of tough intellectual education for girls, Byrant must have felt it necessary to try to appease the sexists of her time. Friends and colleagues marked her unthreatening demeanour, her “attractive personality,” and the “charm and vivacity of her conversation” (38). She was said to have had “a dignity and reserve…[which] seemed to belong to her widowed state” (13). One acquaintance notes that “all her work [was] charged not with intellectual display, but with homely and womanly sincerity” (44). While displaying the necessary virtues of the Victorian widow stereotype in her personal life, Bryant hoped to subsume female virtue under a more general description of rational moral ends in her work. But the reaction of male philosophers sometimes obscured this. For example, in his review of her book Professor James Sully ends with the following remark:
Some, in fact, may think she is at her best, not when discoursing on the abstractions of logic and ethics, but when she is presenting with admirable lucidity and scientific insight some new observation on human and especially childish ways, evidently plucked from the field of personal experience (108).
Bryant’s absence in our histories of philosophy is the result of multiple factors but includes blatant neglect. Although for a very short time her work was solicited by the men in charge of academic journals, engagement with and citation of her work took a sharp decline soon after. After all, she was merely a widowed teacher of female children.
An example of undeserved neglect in the United States is Grace De Laguna, who published extensively on topics at the forefront of research in philosophy in the first part of the 20th century. Her 1927 book Speech: Its Function and Development argues that speech is not a form of bodily activity and rejects a narrow view of meaning as the expression of ideas and thoughts: “to assume that this is its original and fundamental function is hopelessly to intellectualize it, and to divorce it … from the essential business of living and thinking” (10). De Laguna was part of a group of female pioneers, earning a BA and PhD from Cornell. Women faced enormous challenges when attempting academic careers, including lack of financial support, difficulty publishing, family responsibilities, and the sheer effort it took to persist in male-dominated fields. Most academic women in the early 20th century were ghettoized into women-only institutions. De Laguna ended up at Bryn Mawr, where, like many women, she did not have much choice about moving anywhere else.
De Laguna became a somewhat isolated figure, reflected by the lack of contemporary engagement with her work. There was some initial interest in her paper “Dualism in Animal Psychology” (1918), along with “The Empirical Correlation of Mental and Bodily Phenomena” (1917), which was included in a symposium on “Mechanism versus Vitalism” at the American Philosophical Association. Her striking view that the central nervous system “is not primarily a physiological organ” and that “its primary function is to adjust behavior to environment” is notable, but would not be discussed directly in philosophical or sociolinguistic circles until the 1980s. As a woman, De Laguna was less read than her male peers, taken less seriously, and seldom referred to by other philosophers. Her early papers are cited by almost no one. While her Speech book has a healthy 602 citations on Google scholar, most of these relate to child psychology and none are philosophically oriented. This is a common phenomenon for female philosophers in the past – when the importance of their ideas cannot be denied, their status as philosophers is denied instead. We need to restate, over and over again, that certain female thinkers were philosophers; denying them this status has no basis in fact.
Familiar histories of 20th century analytic philosophy center on exclusively male figures. This narrative makes it seem like female philosophers played no significant role in the modern development of analytic philosophy. This is in part due to laziness in citation; when considering an argument or concept, philosophers often reach for the person they think most representative. Given the exclusion of women, they usually think of a man. A case in point: thick concepts, or the idea that some words are both descriptive and evaluative, are almost always attributed to Bernard Williams. But they were in the air in Oxford in the 1940s as a collective response to Ayer’s emotivism. A lively discussion of this topic occurred in Oxford sometime in the late 1940s involving Midgley, Murdoch, and Anscombe. As Midgley tells it in her autobiography The Owl of Minerva, “we were discussing the meaning of rudeness. I think this topic must have come up out of background discussions that Philippa Foot finally expressed in her splendid article called ‘Moral Arguments’ (which appeared in Mind, Vol. 67, 1958), where she used the example of ‘rudeness’ to show that a word’s descriptive and evaluative meanings are not separate and independent” (115). It takes women writing about women to bring women to light in this history. Mary Midgley reminds us of what her female friend thought, while everyone else has forgotten who actually discussed and innovated these ideas. It then gets forgotten again in sources like the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, which allows the only precursors to be two men: Gilbert Ryle and Clifford Geertz.
I have seen this pattern again and again. Another example: women were at the forefront of the studies that Wittgenstein initiated. Margaret Masterman, Margaret MacDonald, and Alice Ambrose wrote and published lecture notes at a time when Wittgenstein was publishing nothing himself. It was Alice Ambrose, an American postgraduate student in Cambridge, who distributed the Blue and Brown Books and Elizabeth Anscombe who edited and translated the Philosophical Investigations. In the 1940s Margaret MacDonald, an impoverished orphan who studied as a mature student at Birkbeck College while working full time, wrote early papers on the sort of philosophy of language Wittgenstein would come to be known for. But books about Wittgenstein’s philosophy and his influence often exclude mention of any of these women. For example, the 2010 edited volume Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations: A Critical Guide mentions not a single woman thinker and cites only three women in its entirety: Cora Diamond, Marie McGinn, and Alice Crary. Not a single author in the volume is female. The more solidly the map of this history gets repeated, the more entrenched it becomes. Female figures—who had limited access to academic spaces in the first place—cannot find any way in.
Despite being educated and then publishing in the same venues as their male counterparts, female philosophers were and continue to be much less cited and discussed than male philosophers—the discussion, discourse, and processes of philosophy gradually purge their voices. Their published work is fading away because they are not in our courses and nobody reads and tries to understand them. The further away we get, the harder it is to understand these writings; they are not familiar and thus they may seem irrelevant. Libraries purge their shelves of hard copies of old journals and of books long out of print—such as Sophie Bryant’s masterpiece, On Educational Ends (1887), Susan Stebbing’s Introduction to Logic (1930), and Alice Ambrose’s Essays in Analysis (1966)—to make way for new books, some of which are histories of philosophy that leave out any mention of women. The work of female philosophers further disappears as digitized materials emphasise only those whose writings supposedly shaped our discipline. Think of the efforts spent on chronicling everything that Bertrand Russell ever wrote, including all of his letters, or on collecting and cataloguing Wittgenstein’s writing. Meanwhile, Sophie Bryant’s papers languish in boxes in a private day school for the daughters of the wealthy middle class.
There have been many attempts to counteract the masculine whitewashing of early analytic philosophy. For example, two recent special issues of the British Journal for the History of Philosophy focus on women philosophers in the 19th and 20th centuries. Ruth Hagenburg’s work on the history of women philosophers is extraordinary. There are also projects which started with enthusiasm but have become defunct; the Society for the Study of Women Philosophers looks to have been inactive for the last 6 years, and the Women in the History of Analytic Philosophy Network, of which I am a founding member, awaits any substantive activity at all. Reasons for the marginalization of the demarginalizing project are not hard to fathom; it is much easier and more comfortable to continue with the presumption of male genius and innovation, focusing on philosophers that we learned were important in our undergraduate years. The only way to seriously overhaul the white- and male-dominated canon of early analytic philosophy is to integrate women and minorities thoroughly into teaching and research, and into the stories that we tell our students and colleagues about the history of the subject.
Editor’s note: The Women in Philosophy publishes posts on the work of underappreciated historical women philosophers. For another perspective on Grace De Laguna, see this post in our series.
The Women in Philosophy series publishes posts on women in the history of philosophy, posts on issues of concern to women in the field of philosophy, and posts that put philosophy to work to address issues of concern to women in the wider world. If you are interested in writing for the series, please contact the Series Editor Adriel M. Trott or the Associate Editor Alida Liberman.
Thanks for this informative post, which alerted me to a number of authors I didn’t know of! Just a note about the attribution of the notion of thick concepts to Williams. This is particularly obtuse given that Williams himself has an endnote to his discussion in EaTLoP acknowledging lectures as the originators of the idea. Weird that the IEP entry doesn’t mention it. But as the author notes, this is a common mistake and I’ve seen famous philosophers make it.
(The IEP mentions Hare as the originator of the concept. But that’s unlikely given the Hare was Williams’s tutor. Given Williams’s note, Hare must also have gotten it from Murdoch and Foot).
Should read “lectures by Foot and Murdoch as the originators of the idea”
There is discussion in The Women are Up to Something by Benjamin Lipscomb of Hare’s having come up with the idea of thick concepts independently of Murdoch and Foot — but he never published on this and gave up on the idea, so he wouldn’t seem to be a source of the idea.
Wonderful article. I think Ruth Anna Putnam also deserves much more recognition.
Let’s not forget Lady Victoria Welby!
Thank you for this post. It reminded me that I wanted to read “Thinking to Some Purpose” in hard copy; I better grab it while I can.
For the past few years I have been working on bringing out another woman in analytic philosophy out of (relative) obscurity: Janina Hosiasson-Lindenbaum. I see hers as quite a paradoxical case: she is often mentioned in lists of important/accomplished people in her field – and was already mentioned as such in the 1930s! – but that is all. No historians are looking at her work in close detail; we have arrived at one or two sentences about her that are repeated ad nauseam whenever she is mentioned.
And I think a big factor in this is her nationality and the languages she wrote in. Whenever I see talk of forgotten women in philosophy, it is always the English speakers, the French, some Germans and Austrians maybe. The large group of Polish women philosophers before WWII is, again, acknowledged in the footnotes, but not deemed worth reading, interacting with, or putting in course reading; at least not really west of Berlin. I think the only person I know who actually put together a course acknowledging their contribution was Allard Tamminga in Greifswald (technically speaking, not west of Berlin ;)).
I am trying to counteract this purging tendency you write about by preparing an edition of her collected works, translated into English (time will tell if any publishers will be interested in that). I am also working on locating every remaining scrap of paper of her own writing, putting together a mini-archive.