Where are the lady philosophers? You just have to look.

Recently, I read Nigel Warburton’s A Little History of Philosophy. It’s a pretty fascinating read with a lot of the main ideas in philosophical history broken down into easily digestible pieces. Warburton’s task wasn’t an easy one. It’s a pretty big job to take all of the history of philosophical thought and drill it down into brief, clear ideas.

I just had one problem with it… there were like four chicks in the book. Simone de Beauvoir, Hannah Arendt, Philippa Foot and Judith Jarvis Thomson. de Beauvior shares a chapter with Sartre and Camus, while Foot and Thomson share a chapter with each other. This in a book with forty chapters about fifty-two philosophers.

That was a bit disheartening.

The thing is, there were definitely female philosophers operating at the same time as the men covered in the book. I wondered if maybe the problem was that they weren’t covering as important topics as the dudes.

But then I started reading Women in Philosophy: What Needs to Change? by Katrina Hutchison and Fiona Jenkins. Turns out, there’s a lot of research that suggests a mixture of implicit bias and stereotype threat has kept women’s voices quieter in the discipline.

In essence, when dudes make the curriculum and decide what readings to assign to new students, they create a cycle of identifying the ‘important’ voices and ideas in philosophy. Like every other university discipline, there’s a history of sexism in philosophy. Women weren’t considered clever enough to study philosophy in Socrates’ time (though kudos to Epicurus for letting them into his garden, even if it did give him a reputation), and the universities were boys clubs until about a century ago. When they started letting women into the philosophy discipline, the male voice was deeply entrenched in the culture.

And why should they look for others or update their reference lists when they’ve already got a good thing? Why read about Arete of Cyrene when you already know Epicurus so well? When you already have a curriculum and class outlines on Pythagorus, why would you read about his teacher, Themistoclea?

But there ARE lady philosophers throughout history. It is super easy to find them, too! Bringing them into the conversation would be easy for the motivated lecturer. The Australasian Association of Philosophy thinks so, too, which is why they developed a list of women’s works by area.

I’ve gone ahead and made a brief list as well. The below is a result of a cursory search of the internet to find women who practiced philosophy at the same time periods that Warburton identified as crucial to the development of philosophical thought. It’s by no means intensive – I’m sure there are plenty of gaps and names that I’ve neglected. But this was the best I could do on a Sunday morning between grading assignments!

Check it out! Women abound in the history of philosophy!