Recovering Early Modern Women Writers

Abstract

Feminist work in the history of philosophy has been going on for several decades. Some scholars have focused on the ways philosophical concepts are themselves gendered. Others have recovered women writers who were well known in their own time but forgotten in ours, while still others have firmly placed into a philosophical context the works of women writers long celebrated within other disciplines in the humanities. The recovery of women writers has challenged the myth that there are no women in the history of philosophy, but it has not eradicated it. What, we may ask, is impeding our progress? This paper argues that so often we treat early modern women philosophers’ texts in ways that are different from, or inconsistent with, the explicit commitments of the analytic tradition, and in so doing, we may be triggering our audiences to reject these women as philosophers, and their texts as philosophical. Moreover, this is the case despite our intention to achieve precisely the opposite effect.

Why Research and Teach Early Modern Women Philosophers?

“…Jessica Gordon‐Roth and Nancy Kendrick (2019) argue that when we treat women's work differently from men's work, we risk having them seen as not being philosophers. They note that this is a problem particularly in the analytic tradition that includes a commitment to a strict separation of author and argument.…”

“…Indeed, canonical men's contributions are typically divorced from their personal context. Introducing women's work with personal details or incorporating them into an analysis of their texts may lead audiences to “think that what these women express in their texts is not philosophical ” (Gordon‐Roth and Kendrick 2019, 276). Further, by continually repeating their personal details in research articles, Gordon‐Roth and Kendrick observe that this suggests to the reader that there is no work being done on these figures and that it is not the audience's responsibility to be aware of them (277).…”