How to Think Like a Woman (eBook)

Author’s Note

The seed for this book was planted when I was thirty-one years old and newly divorced. I had just resigned from a full-time job with benefits as a professor of philosophy and moved out of my home near the Upper Iowa River. I’d invested over a decade in a life of the mind only to trade it all in for a small, cockroach-ridden apartment in New York City and an adjunct teaching job with no security and a ninety-minute commute. All the same, I knew if I didn’t make the move, I’d break.

Once, being an academic philosopher had held the promise of making me into the person I always imagined I’d become—someone authentic, driven by her own compass. It would, I believed, fulfill my childhood dream of jumping headfirst into a life devoted to questioning—a life that would lead me to places of exceptional intellectual endeavor and beauty. It promised a career that would give me independence.

The truth is, philosophy is a hard place to make a career, but it’s especially hard for a woman. The odds are against her from the start. It is a subject dominated by white men, many of whom aren’t much concerned about the field’s long history of oppression and how that oppression is still alive today, pulsing through texts, customs, habits of thinking, and behavior. The result is a climate that is unfriendly, sometimes even hostile, to women.

Philosophy has been and is still very much a field where you’re rewarded for thinking in a way that ignores or is detrimental to women.1 Where raw intellectual talent is heralded as necessary for success, this regularly works against women, who are viewed in the very texts being studied to have less raw talent than men. One study revealed that fields of research that highly prized “natural brilliance” also had low numbers of women PhDs.2 Of all the subject areas scrutinized, including STEM, philosophy valued raw intelligence the most of all.3 There are also studies showing that when teachers don’t expect much from certain students, those students adopt a similar self-perception.4 I believe this is a problem in philosophy, where greatness is rarely, if ever, expected of women. Rather than taking responsibility for the hostile climate, some men in the field simply doubt women’s intellects.

These men see women primarily as a sex rather than as individuals. These men also see women’s underrepresentation in philosophy as a result of choices women have made to study other things in an otherwise fair world rather than as evidence of women making decisions in a world that is in many ways limited to them or working against them. But most of all, they don’t acknowledge that their skepticism of woman’s intellectual capacity—expressed casually and with an objective air—impacts the self-perception and lives of actual women.

The word “philosophy” is from the ancient Greek and means “the love of wisdom,” a pursuit, in theory, available to any curious, determined human being. Ideally, philosophy reflects human thought at its greatest magnitude and embodies a culture’s quest for truth and self-knowledge. It matters that this endeavor has fallen short not only of truth but also of justice on several counts, including the treatment and understanding of women. Philosophers have been some of the most consistent and fruitful contributors to theories of women’s inferiority, treating topics traditionally studied by women, such as parenting, caregiving, and other aspects of domestic life, with little interest, while the white male point of view is dramatized in countless thought experiments.

Of course, not all philosophy is like this. Feminist philosophy, critical race theory, and Queer theory all challenge the dominance of this view. In my experience, the problem is that these schools of thought are neither mainstream nor regularly taught in introductory courses; if they are on offer at all, it is typically as elective courses. In college philosophy departments, the mark of a “serious” philosopher is whether he knows his epistemology, metaphysics, and ethics—not, for example, his feminist philosophy, which is still largely dismissed as a political rather than a philosophical endeavor. Yet any person who knows their Nietzsche or has carefully studied the history of philosophy recognizes the hubris behind the assumption that some areas of philosophy—including the most abstract—are necessarily free of bias.

In this light, perhaps it’s no surprise that some women report feeling uncomfortable speaking up in philosophy classes. Perhaps it’s also not surprising that there are fewer women in senior positions in philosophy than in any other field in the humanities and in many of the sciences as well.5 And in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, an important touchstone for scholars and students, women make up only 10 percent of the most cited philosophers,6 and all in all, women make up only 13 percent of authors in top philosophy journals.7

The plight of women in philosophy is part of a much larger story of the suppression of individuals who are not white, male, heterosexual, cis, and able-bodied. For instance, works by Black, Indigenous, and other People of Color (BIPOC) make up only 3 percent of articles published in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, and from 2003 to 2021, Black academics contributed only 0.32 percent of all papers published in the top fifteen philosophy journals.8 These numbers are appallingly even lower than the already tiny fraction of ethnic minorities with PhDs in philosophy.9 Some scholars pin the lack of diversity on boundary policing—the act of dismissing work as unphilosophical that takes into account feminist, Queer, disabled, Black, and other marginalized perspectives.10 The philosopher Shelley Tremain says gatekeepers in the field “diminish the importance of philosophy of disability, disqualifying it from the realm of what counts as philosophy.”11 Gayle Salamon, a Queer theorist in the English department at Princeton University, says she left philosophy after growing tired of the constant need to counter the belief that “the philosophy that I do is not quite philosophy.”12 I suspect a major reason there aren’t many women and minorities in philosophy is because the double standard of justification is simply too exhausting. On top of teaching, researching, and fulfilling departmental duties, these individuals are under constant pressure to prove that they belong there in the first place.

These issues of inclusion and fairness were not at the top of my mind when I began studying philosophy. But my perspective started to shift when I accidentally came across the work of a woman philosopher from over three hundred years ago. I realized I didn’t know of any women philosophers who had lived prior to the twentieth century. I also realized, abashedly, that I didn’t know anything about the women philosophers of the twentieth century except their names. No one in my department studied or taught them; we didn’t even have a course on feminist philosophy. I had internalized the misogynist notion that because none of them were being taught, none of them were worth looking into.

I was wrong. Over the next few years, I read about the lives and work of four brilliant and inspiring female philosophers: Mary Astell, Damaris Masham, Mary Wollstonecraft, and Catharine Cockburn. I discovered that in a time when women were forbidden to study at universities and male philosophers wrote extensively about the intellectual shortcomings of the female mind, these women pushed back. They highlighted the double standards of philosophers who promoted Enlightenment ideals of freedom and equality but did not extend those ideals to women. In reading about their works and lives, I started to reconnect to something deep inside myself. Astell, Masham, Wollstonecraft, and Cockburn were heroic voices from across time cutting through my frustration.

This book tells the story of how I lost myself in philosophy and then, through my discovery of these early feminist philosophers, found a path back to myself. Despite the centuries that separated us, we were united by our love of philosophy and our sorrow and anger. What does a woman do when she’s told that she doesn’t belong or that she’s not as smart as a man because of her sex? Some let it roll off their backs, knowing their worth regardless of what they’re told. I admire these women, but I’m not like them. I can’t maintain that level of equanimity. I struggle, I doubt, but above all, I need answers—or at least attempts to explain what is happening to me and why. In this, I feel a kinship with these four philosophers.

Though not all of them devoted their entire careers to defending women, each was highly attuned to how patriarchy oppressed women and how philosophy could be used to counteract women’s marginalization and suppression. Their legacy helped carve out an alternative vision for women’s lives, in which they were no longer men’s inferiors or dependents but their equals, capable of intellectual greatness and of making significant contributions to society. Nevertheless, you won’t find them in textbooks or introductory courses on the history of philosophy. Most of us have forgotten them.

Before I begin my story, I should say that I decided not to name the institutions or faculties where I studied or taught, and I used pseudonyms for the people I personally interacted with. I am not interested in identifying any school or person...