Abstract
This Introduction examines the role that feminism has played in the recovery and evaluation of women’s philosophical writings. First, O’Neill addresses the question of whether it is possible to trace conceptions of feminism before the twentieth or nineteenth century. O’Neill offers no analysis of ‘feminism,’ but instead, argues that certain components of feminism that may be traced back to Christine de Pizan. O’Neill then argues that how we understand the role of women in our histories depends on the methodology one uses in doing feminist history of philosophy. She concludes that “pure” history of philosophy allows for the reconstruction of womens’ role in philosophical endeavors in terms of the motives, presuppositions, and argumentational strategies and standards of the past era without the distorting influence of contemporary conceptions of what counts as “philosophy” or what counts as “feminist.” Finally, the issue of the historian of philosophy’s great debt to feminism is acknowledged. It is through feminism that we come to realize that women philosophers’ erasure from history is due to religious, economic, political, and social forces, which reinforce tradition, custom, and “common sense,” in creating structural barriers to women being able to take their place in the histories of philosophy.
Only by the thrashing of history could truth be separated from prejudice. (Leland Thielemann, “The Thousand Lights and Intertextual Rhapsody: Diderot or Mme Dupin,” Romantic Review 74, 3 (1983): 316–29)
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Notes
- 1.
Claire Goldberg Moses, “Debating the Present, Writing the Past: Feminism in French History and Historiography,” Radical History Review 52 (1992): 79–94, fn. 5., cites the following as examples of these earlier historians: Jean Rabaut, Histoire des féminismes français (Paris, Stock, 1978); Celestin Bougle, “Le Féminisme saint-simonien,” La Revue de Paris 25 (15 September 1918): 37l–99, and Chez les prophètes socialistes: le féminisme saint-simonienne (Paris: Alcan 1918); Léon Abensour, Le fémininisme sous la règne de Louis-Phillipe et en 1848 (Paris: Plon-Nourrit, 1913); and Charles Turgeon, Le Féminisme français (Paris: Librairie de la Societe de Recueil Generale des Lois et des Arrets, 1902).
- 2.
See Claire G. Moses, “What’s in a Name”? Feminism in Global Perspective,” Keynote Address, Australian and International Feminism Conference, 2004. Karen Offen argues that the terms ‘féminisme’ and ‘féministe’ did not enter “public discourse before the end of the nineteenth century”; see her “On the French Origin of the Words Feminism and Feminist,” Feminist Issues 8, 2 (Fall 1988): 45–51. In Offen’s European Feminisms, 1700–1950: A Political History (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000), she claims that “no traces of the word [féminisme] have yet been identified prior to the 1870s”; by 1894–95 the term had “crossed the Channel to Great Britain”; and by the late 1890s ‘feminism’ entered discourse in the United States, though it was “not commonly used in the United States much before 1910” (p. 19). However, the OED identifies a usage of ‘feminist’ dating back to 1852, where the meaning is “of, relating to, or advocating the rights and equality of women.” In Debow’s Review 13, 3, article V: 267–291, we find a review of Elizabeth Oakes Smith’s Woman and Her Needs (New York: Fowler and Wells, 1851). This book is a compilation of a series of articles that Smith published in the New York Tribune in 1850–51. The reviewer, Louisa S. McCord, publishing under the initials L.S.M., states: “[O]ur attention has happened to fall upon Mrs. E. O. Smith, who is, we are informed, among the most moderate of the feminist reformers!” Smith was a women’s rights activist, who attended the first National Women’s Rights Convention in 1850; in 1879, she lectured on “Biology and Woman’s Rights” at the eleventh Woman’s Suffrage Convention, in Washington D.C.
- 3.
Nancy Cott, “What’s in a Name? The Limits of ‘Social Feminism:’ or, Expanding the Vocabulary of Women’s History,” The Journal of American History 76,3 (Dec., 1989): 809–29:
The very point of historians’[sic] using the word feminism or feminist should be to distinguish among women’s choices in reform. For no era is the need to make such distinctions more pressing than for the early twentieth century, when the word feminism first came into use. The mainly young and educated women who seized the word felt that they were a new generation venturing beyond the goals and outlooks of predecessors; they differentiated themselves from earlier participants in the “woman movement” or the “cause of woman.” They regarded their constellation of demands for female individuality, political participation, economic independence, and sexual freedom as a new challenge to the social order. For that era, when women’s political practices and interest groups were taking on modern form, it is especially necessary to disaggregate what was considered feminist and thus named for the first time. The concept of social feminism does exactly the opposite—it blots out the rise of feminism as a discrete, self-named movement in the 1910s. (p. 821)
- 4.
Karen Offen states: “The earliest origins of the French word féminisme and its derivatives are still obscure,” in “On the French Origin of the Words Feminism and Feminist,” p. 45. See also her European Feminisms, 1700–1950, p. 19.
- 5.
Nancy Cott, “What’s In a Name,” p. 826.
- 6.
Nancy Cott, “What’s In a Name,” p. 821.
- 7.
See Karen Offen, “Defining Feminism: A Comparative Historical Approach,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 14, 1 (Autumn, 1988): 119–157, pp. 130–31, especially the bibliographical information in footnotes 24–28.
- 8.
Ian Maclean, Woman Triumphant: Feminism in French Literature, 1610–1652 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1977), p. viii; Karen Offen, “Defining Feminism,” p. 130.
- 9.
Claire Goldberg Moses, The Evolution of Feminist Thought in France, 1829–1889 (Ph.D. diss., George Washington University, 1978) p. 7; cited in Moses, “Debating the Present, Writing the Past,” p. 85.
- 10.
Claire Goldberg Moses, French Feminism in the nineteenth Century (Albany: SUNY University Press, 1984), pp. 7–8.
- 11.
Karen Offen, European Feminisms, 1700–1950, p. 34.
- 12.
Karen Offen, European Feminisms, 1700–1950, p. 31.
- 13.
Perspectives on Feminist Political Thought in European History: From the Middle Ages to the Present, ed. Tjitske Akkerman and Siep Stuurman (London/New York: Routledge, 1998) p. 2.
- 14.
Perspectives on Feminist Political Thought in European History, ed. Tjitske Akkerman and Siep Stuurman, pp. 9–10.
- 15.
Perspectives on Feminist Political Thought in European History, ed. Tjitske Akkerman and Siep Stuurman, pp. 3–4.
- 16.
Sarah Gwyneth Ross, The Birth of Feminism: Woman as Intellect in Renaissance Italy and England (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2009), p. 132.
- 17.
Carol Pal, Republic of Women: Rethinking the Republic of Letters in the Seventeenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 2012).
- 18.
With respect to the historiography of ancient philosophy, see Michael Frede, “The History of Philosophy as a Discipline,” Journal of Philosophy 85, 11 (November, 1988): 666–72 and “Introduction: The Study of Ancient Philosophy” in his Essays in Ancient Philosophy (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), pp. ix-xxvii; Wolfgang-Rainer Mann, “The Origins of the Modern Historiography of Ancient Philosophy,” History and Theory 35, 2 (1996): 165–95. For discussions of the historiography of modern philosophy, or of the full history of philosophy, see Jorge Gracia, Philosophy and Its History (Albany: State University of New York, 1992); Doing Philosophy Historically, ed. Peter H. Hare (Buffalo: Prometheus Books, 1988); Philosophy, Its History and Historiography, ed. A. J. Holland (Dordrecht: Reidel, 1985); Paul O. Kristeller, “Philosophy and Its Historiography,” Journal of Philosophy 82 (1985): 618–25; Maurice Mandelbaum, “On the Historiography of Philosophy,” Philosophy Research Archives 2 (1976): 708–44, and his “The History of Philosophy: Some Methodological Issues,” Journal of Philosophy 74 (1977): 561–72; Gregorio Piaia, “Brucker versus Rorty? On the “Models” of the Historiography of Philosophy, British Journal for the History of Philosophy 9 (2001): 69–81; Richard Popkin, “Philosophy and the History of Philosophy,” Journal of Philosophy 82 (1985): 625–32; Philosophy and Its Past, ed. Jonathan Rée, Michael Ayers and Adam Westoby (Hassocks: Harvester Press, 1978); Richard Rorty, “The Historiography of Philosophy: Four Genres,” in Philosophy in History, ed. Richard Rory, J.B. Schneewind, and Quentin Skinner (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), pp. 49–75; Analytical Philosophy and the History of Philosophy, ed. Tom Sorrell and G.A.J. Rogers (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2005); Richard Watson, “A Short Discourse on Method in the History of Philosophy,” Southwestern Journal of Philosophy 11(1980): 7–24; John Yolton, “Some Remarks on the Historiography of Philosophy,” Journal of the History of Philosophy 23 (1985): 571–8, and “Is There a History of Philosophy: Some Difficulties and Suggestions,” Synthese 67 (1986): 3–21. For further bibliographical material on the historiography of philosophy, see Gracia’s Philosophy and Its History, as well as: James Collins, Interpreting Modern Philosophy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972); Craig Walton, “Bibliography of the Historiography and Philosophy of the History of Philosophy,” International Studies in Philosophy 19 (1977): 135–66; and the work that has most greatly influenced my discussion here, Gary Hatfield, “The History of Philosophy as Philosophy,” in Analytical Philosophy and the History of Philosophy, ed. Sorrell and Rogers, pp. 83–128.
- 19.
Interpretations of past philosophical texts, using a non-historical methodology, for the main purpose of furthering contemporary philosophical discussions range from unhelpful “historical mythologies” (such as Gilbert Ryle’s reconstruction of Descartes’ “ghost in the machine”) to philosophically stimulating texts such as Jerrold Katz’s Cogitations: A Study of the Cogito in Relation to the Philosophy of Logic and Language and a Study of Them in Relation to the Cogito (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986). Texts, such as Katz’s, often spawn replies by genuine historians of philosophy, which are equally philosophically stimulating, but which also get us closer to understanding the views of the past historical figures. See, for example, Gareth Matthews’ reply to Katz in the former’s “Descartes’s Cogito and Katz’s Cogitations,” Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 68 (1987): 197–204.
- 20.
Arguably Bernard Williams’ Descartes and the Project of Pure Enquiry (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1978) and Jonathan Bennett’s Learning From Six Philosophers: Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, Locke, Berkeley, Hume, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2001)—especially vol. 2—utilize a historically contextualized philosophical methodology with the main goal of using past philosophy to help solve current philosophical problems.
- 21.
Gary Hatfield,“The History of Philosophy as Philosophy,” p. 94, fn. 20, quoting Robert C. Sleigh, Jr., Leibniz and Arnauld: A Commentary on Their Correspondence (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990).
- 22.
A good example of this genre is the series, Oxford Philosophical Concepts, which is under the general editorship of Christia Mercer. The series consists of individual volumes dedicated to tracing the historical trajectory and change over time of a central philosophical concept.
- 23.
Charlotte Witt, “Feminist History of Philosophy,” in Feminist Reflection on the History of Philosophy, ed. Lilli Alanen and Charlotte Witt (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2004), pp. 1–2.
- 24.
The following texts provide feminist critiques of canonical male philosophers’ assumptions and arguments about women, as well as critiques of the gendering of key philosophical concepts, images and metaphors: but many of these texts also include other genres of feminist history of philosophy: Genevieve Lloyd, The Man of Reason: Male and Female in Western Philosophy (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984); Susan Bordo, The Flight to Objectivity: Essays on Cartesianism and Culture (Albany: SUNY Press, 1987); Michèle Le Doeuff, The Philosophical Imaginary, tr. C. Gordon (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1989); Nancy Tuana, Woman and the History of Philosophy (New York: Paragon Press, 1992), Elizabeth V. Spelman, Inessential Woman: Problems of Exclusion in Feminist Thought (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1988; Vigdis Songe Møeller, Philosophy Without Women: the Birth of Sexism in Western Thought (London: Continuum, 1999; Penelope Deutscher, Yielding Gender: Feminism, Deconstruction and the History of Philosophy (London/New York: Routledge, 1997); Robin May Schott, Cognition and Eros: A Critique of the Kantian Paradigm (Boston: Beacon Press, 1983); Engendering Origins: Critical Feminist Readings in Plato and Aristotle, ed. Bat-Ami Bar On (Albany: SUNY Press, 1994) and Modern Engenderings: Critical Feminist Readings in Modern Western Philosophy, ed. Bat-Ami Bar On (Albany: SUNY Press, 1994).
- 25.
Critical treatments of canonical male ethical philosophy include: Nel Noddings, Caring: A Feminine Approach to Ethics and Moral Education (Berkeley/Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1984); Virginia Held, “Feminist Transformations of Moral Theory,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 50, 3–4 supplement (Fall 1990): 321–44 and her “Feminist Reconceptualizations of Ethics,” in Philosophy in a Feminist Voice: Critiques and Reconstructions (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998), pp. 92–115. Such treatments of canonical male philosophy of science include: Evelyn Fox Keller, Reflections on Gender and Science (New Haven/London: Yale University Press, 1985); and Londa Schiebinger, The Mind Has No Sex? Women in the Origins of Modern Science (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1989). With respect to aesthetics, see: Aesthetics in Feminist Perspective, ed. Hilde Hein and Carolyn Korsmeyer (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1993) and Carolyn Korsmeyer, “Gendered Concepts and Hume’s Theory of Taste,” in Feminism and Tradition in Aesthetics, ed. Peggy Zeglin Brand and Carolyn Korsmeyer (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1995). For philosophy of religion, see: Rosemarie Radford Reuther, Sexism and God-Talk (Boston: Beacon Press, 1983); Mary Daly, Beyond God the Father (Boston: Beacon Press, 1973); and Nancy Frankenberry, “Philosophy of Religion in Different Voices,” in Philosophy in a Feminist Voice, ed. Kourany. And with respect to social and political philosophy, see: Susan Moller Okin, Women in Western Political Thought (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979); The Sexism of Social and Political Theory: Women and Reproduction from Plato to Nietzsche, ed. Lorraine Clarke and Lynda Lange ((Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1979); Women in Western Political Philosophy: Kant to Nietzsche, ed. Ellen Kennedy and Susan Mendus (NY: St Martin Press, 1987); and Carole Pateman, The Sexual Contract (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988).
- 26.
For examples of feminist reinterpretation and appropriation of the work of canonical male philosophers see: Annette Baier, Postures of the Mind: Essays on Mind and Morals (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985) and her Moral Prejudices: Essays on Ethics (Cambridge: Harvard University Pres, 1995); Lynn Hankinson Nelson, Who Knows: From Quine to a Feminist Empiricism (Philadelphia: Temple Univesity Press, 1994); Charlene Haddock Seigfried, Pragmatism and Feminism (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1996). While the following collections of essays make use of a variety of genres of feminist history of philosophy, they each contain the genre of canon appropriation: Feminism and the History of Philosophy, ed. Genevieve Lloyd (Oxford: Oxford University Pres, 2002); Feminism and Ancient Philosophy, ed. Julie K. Ward (New York/London: Routledge, 1996; Feminist Reflections on the History of Philosophy, ed. Alanen and Witt; and a variety of volumes in the Re-Reading the Canon series, published by The Pennsylvania State University Press, under the general editorship of Nancy Tuana.
- 27.
A History of Women Philosophers, ed. Mary Ellen Waithe, 4 vols. (Dordrecht/Boston/London: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1987–95); Eileen O’Neill, “Disappearing Ink: Early Modern Women Philosophers and Their Fate in History,” in Philosophy in a Feminist Voice: Critiques and Reconstructions, ed. J. Kourany (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998); and Lisa Shapiro, “Some Thoughts on the Place of Women in Early Modern Philosophy,” in Feminist Reflections on the History of Philosophy, ed. Lilli Alanen and Charlotte Witt. See also the following collections of essays: Hypatia’s Daughters: Fifteen Hundred Years of Women Philosophers, ed. Linda Lopez McAlister (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996); Presenting Women Philosophers, ed. Cecile Tougas and Sarah Ebenreck (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 2000); as well as the following selections of primary sources: Women Philosophers of the Early Modern Period, ed. Margaret Atherton (Indianapolis/Cambridge: Hackett Publishing Company, 1994); Women Philosophers, ed. Mary Warnock (London: J.M. Dent and North Clarendo, VT: Charles E. Tuttle, 1996). See also The Neglected Canon: Nine Women Philosophers First to the Twentieth Century, ed. Therese Boos Dykeman (Dordrecht/Boston/London: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1999). Finally, Jacqueline Broad, Women Philosophers of the Seventeenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002) offers an excellent introduction to the philosophy of the women of this period, especially English women; and Jacqueline Broad and Karen Green, A History of Women’s Political Thought in Europe, 1400–1700 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009) provides an outstanding synoptic picture of women’s contributions to political philosophy.
- 28.
Mary Warnock, Women Philosophers, pp. xxx-xxxi.
- 29.
Mary Warnock, Women Philosophers, pp. xxxi-xxxii. See the following examples of histories of the philosophy of gender that chronicle, and some of which critically engage with, past conceptions of “woman’s nature”: Sister Prudence Allen, The Concept of Woman: The Aristotelian Revolution, 750 BC–AD 1250, rev. edn. of 1985 original (Grands Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1997) and her The Concept of Woman: The Early Humanist Reformation, 1250–1500 (Grands Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2002); as well as Nancy Tuana, The Less Noble Sex: Scientific, Religious and Philosophical Conceptions of Woman’s Nature (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993);
- 30.
Hutton, Anne Conway: A Woman Philosopher, 233. Hutton cites Leibniz’s letter in Gerhardt, vol. II, 217.
- 31.
Locke, John. 1976. The Correspondence of John Locke. Edited by E. S. De Beer. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Letter 1375.
- 32.
Cavendish, William, Duke of Newcastle, ed. 1678. A Collection of Letters and Poems Microform/Written by Several Persons of Honour and Learning, upon Divers Important Subjects, to the late Duke and Dutchess of Newcastle. London: Printed by Langly Curtis in Goat Yard on Ludgate Hill, 135–6.
- 33.
For more on the reasons for this, see my article “Disappearing Ink: Early Modern Women Philosophers and Their Fate in History.”
- 34.
Desmond M. Clarke, The Equality of the Sexes: Three Feminist Texts of the Seventeenth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 60–61.
- 35.
Leland Thielemann, “The Thousand Lights and Intertextual Rhapsody: Diderot or Mme Dupin,” Romantic Review 74, 3 (1983): 316–29.
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O’Neill, E. (2019). Introduction. In: O’Neill, E., Lascano, M.P. (eds) Feminist History of Philosophy: The Recovery and Evaluation of Women’s Philosophical Thought. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-18118-5_1
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