Women in philosophy

Representation and working climate

Allegations of sexual harassment

• "Sexual advances, requests for sexual favors, or sexually directed remarks constitute sexual harassment when submission to such conduct is made a condition of academic or employment decisions, or when such conduct persists despite its rejection."
• "Sexual harassment is a serious violation of professional ethics, and should be regarded and treated as such by members of the profession. Sexual harassment is a form of prohibited discrimination when an institution or individual employee is aware of a sexually hostile environment and condones, tolerates or allows that environment to exist. Colleges and universities should supply clear, fair institutional procedures under which charges of sexual harassment on campus can be brought, assessed, and acted on."
• "Complaints of sexual harassment at APA-sponsored activities should be brought to the chair of the committee for the defense of professional rights of philosophers or, if they arise in the context of placement activities, to the APA ombudsperson. Complaints of sexual harassment by or against APA staff members should be brought to the chair of the board."

  Black women

Asian women

Reports from the US

Organizations and campaigns

Minorities and Philosophy

APA committee on the status of women in philosophy

• Differential treatment: male and female university students may be treated differently in the classroom.
• Vicious circle: female students do not feel inclined to study philosophy because of a lack of contact with female philosophy professors.
• Misleading statistics: university administrators focus on gender representation in the humanities overall, which obscures the disparity in philosophy.

  Society for Women in Philosophy

• 2016: Maria Lugones
• 2014: Peggy DesAutels
• 2013: Alison Wylie
• 2012: Diana Tietjens Meyers
• 2011: Jennifer Saul
• 2010: Sally Haslanger
• 2009: Lorraine Code
• 2008: Nancy Tuana
• 2007: Joan Callahan
• 2006: Ruth Millikan
• 2005: Linda Martín Alcoff
• 2004: Susan Sherwin
• 2003: Eva Feder Kittay
• 2002: Sara Ruddick
• 2001: Amelie Rorty

  Gendered conference campaign

History

Ancient philosophy

• Theano of Croton
• Aristoclea of Delphi
• Sosipatra of Ephesus
• Nicarete of Megara
• Catherine of Alexandria
• Ptolemais of Cyrene
• Aesara of Lucania
• Diotima of Mantinea
• Ban Zhao
• Xie Daoyun
• Gargi Vachaknavi

  Medieval philosophy

• Aedesia of Alexandria
• Catherine of Siena
• Tullia d'Aragona
• Moderata Fonte, critic of religion, feminist

  Modern philosophy

17th century

• Marie de Gournay was a critic of religion, proto-feminist, translator and novelist who insisted that women should be educated.
• Anna Maria van Schurman was a multilinguist known for her defense of female education.
• Elisabeth of Bohemia influenced many key figures and philosophers, most notably René Descartes, who she corresponded with. She questioned Descartes' idea of dualism, or the mind being separate from the body, and his theories regarding communication between the mind and body.
• Margaret Cavendish was a philosopher and writer who addressed gender, power, manners, scientific methods, and philosophy.
• Anne Conway was an English philosopher whose work, in the tradition of the Cambridge Platonists, was an influence on Leibniz. Conway's thought is original as it is rationalist philosophy, with hallmarks of gynocentric concerns and patterns, and in that sense it was unique among seventeenth-century systems.
• Damaris Cudworth Masham was an English philosopher, proto-feminist, and advocate for women's education.
• Mary Astell was an English feminist writer and rhetorician known for advocacy of equal educational opportunities for women, which earned her the title of "first English feminist." Her most well known books outline her plan to establish a new type of educational institution for women.

  18th century

• Catharine Trotter Cockburn published her first major philosophical work, A Defence of Mr. Lock's An Essay Concerning Human Understanding in 1702, at the age of 23. Much of the scholarly interest in her writing centres on gender studies.
• Émilie du Châtelet was a French mathematician, physicist, and author during the Age of Enlightenment. She translated and commented on Isaac Newton's work Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica. She criticized John Locke’s philosophy and emphasizes the necessity of the verification of knowledge through experience. She also theorized about free will and on the way to do metaphysics.
• Laura Bassi was an Italian philosopher and physicist who was the first woman in the world to earn a university chair in a scientific field of studies. She received a doctoral degree from the University of Bologna in May 1732, the third academic qualification ever bestowed on a woman by a university, and the first woman to earn a professorship in physics at a university in Europe. She was the first woman to be offered an official teaching position at a university in Europe.
• Catharine Macaulay was an English historian and writer. She attacked Edmund Burke's Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontents, calling it "a poison...". In her 1790 Letters on Education, she argued along the lines that Mary Wollstonecraft would do in 1792, that the apparent weakness of women was due to their mis-education.
• Olympe de Gouges was a French playwright and political activist whose feminist and abolitionist writings reached a large audience. She was an early feminist who demanded that French women be given the same rights as French men. In her Declaration of the Rights of Woman and the Female Citizen, she challenged the practice of male authority and the notion of male–female inequality.
• Judith Sargent Murray was an early American advocate for women's rights, an essayist, playwright, poet, and letter writer. She was one of the first American proponents of the idea of the equality of the sexes—that women, like men, had the capability of intellectual accomplishment and should be able to achieve economic independence. Among many other influential pieces, her landmark essay "On the Equality of the Sexes" paved the way for new thoughts and ideas proposed by other feminist writers of the century. The essay predated Mary Wollstonecraft's A Vindication of the Rights of Woman which was published in 1792.
• Mary Wollstonecraft was an English writer, philosopher, and advocate of women's rights. She is regarded as one of the founding feminist philosophers. In A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, her most famous and influential work, she argues that women are not naturally inferior to men, but appear to be only because they lack education. She suggests that both men and women should be treated as rational beings and imagines a social order founded on reason.

  19th century

• Harriet Martineau was an English social theorist and political writer, often cited as the first female sociologist. She wrote books and essays from a sociological, holistic, religious, domestic, and feminine perspective. In Society in America, she criticised the state of women's education, stating that the "intellect of women is confined by an unjustifiable restriction" of access to education; she urged women to become well-educated and free.
• Harriet Taylor Mill was a philosopher and women's rights advocate. In John Stuart Mill's autobiography, he claimed she was the joint author of most of the books and articles published under his name. He stated that "when two persons have their thoughts and speculations completely in common it is of little consequence, in respect of the question of originality, which of them holds the pen." Together, they wrote "Early Essays on Marriage and Divorce", published in 1832. The debate about the nature and extent of her collaboration is ongoing.
• Sarah Margaret Fuller was an American journalist, critic, philosopher and women's rights advocate. Her book Woman in the Nineteenth Century is considered the first major feminist work in the United States. She was an advocate of women's rights and, in particular, women's education and the right to employment. Many other advocates for women's rights and feminism, including Susan B. Anthony, cite Fuller as a source of inspiration.
• Antoinette Brown Blackwell was the first woman to be ordained as a mainstream Protestant minister in the United States. She was a well-versed public speaker on controversial issues such as abolition of slavery and she sought to expand women's rights. In 1873 Blackwell founded the Association for the Advancement of Women.
• Victoria, Lady Welby was a self-educated English philosopher of language. She was published articles in the leading English language academic journals of the day, Mind and The Monist. She published her first philosophical book, What Is Meaning? Studies in the Development of Significance in 1903, following it with Significs and Language: The Articulate Form of Our Expressive and Interpretive Resources in 1911. Welby's concern with the problem of meaning included the everyday use of language, and she coined the word significs for her approach. Welby's theories on signification anticipated contemporary semantics, semiotics, and semiology.
• Bertha von Suttner was a Czech-Austrian pacifist and novelist. In 1905 she was the first woman to be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. Suttner's pacifism was influenced by the writings of Immanuel Kant, Henry Thomas Buckle, Herbert Spencer, Charles Darwin and Leo Tolstoy.
• Helene von Druskowitz was an Austrian philosopher, writer and music critic. She was the second woman to obtain a Doctorate in Philosophy, which she obtained in Zürich. She usually published under a male alias because of the predominant sexism of the era.
• Charlotte Perkins Gilman was an American feminist, sociologist, novelist, writer and social reformer. Her short story "The Yellow Wallpaper" became a bestseller. The story is about a woman who suffers from mental illness after three months of being closeted in a room by her husband. She argued that the domestic environment oppressed women through the patriarchal beliefs upheld by society. Gilman argued that women's contributions to civilization, throughout history, have been halted because of an androcentric culture. She argued that women were the underdeveloped half of humanity. She believed economic independence would bring freedom and equality for women.

  Early 20th century

• Mary Whiton Calkins was an American philosopher and psychologist. She was also the first woman to become president of the American Psychological Association and the American Philosophical Association. Calkins studied psychology under William James and studied at Harvard University, which allowed her to attend courses but refused to register her as a student, because she was a woman. She published her doctoral dissertation in 1896, and Harvard's Department of Philosophy and Psychology recommended that she be granted her PhD, but Harvard's President and board refused, as she was a woman. The President believed women should not study with men. James was astonished at the university's decision, as he described her performance as "the most brilliant examination for the Ph.D. that we have had at Harvard." She published four books and over one hundred papers in her career in psychology and philosophy. She was also an avid supporter of women's rights and an advocate of women's right to vote.
• Emma Goldman was an anarchist known for her political activism, writing and speeches. She played a pivotal role in the development of anarchist political philosophy in the first half of the 20th century. She was viewed as a free-thinking "rebel woman" by admirers, and denounced by critics as an advocate of violent revolution. Her writing and lectures spanned a wide variety of issues, including atheism, freedom of speech, militarism, capitalism, marriage, free love, and homosexuality. Although she distanced herself from first-wave feminism and its efforts toward women's suffrage, she developed ways of incorporating gender politics into anarchism.
• Rosa Luxemburg was a Marxist theorist, philosopher, economist and revolutionary socialist of Polish-Jewish descent. While Luxemburg defended Marx's materialism dialectics and his conception of history, she called for spontaneous grass roots-based class struggle.

  Contemporary philosophy

• Ayn Rand developed a philosophical system she named Objectivism, which affirms objective reality and advocates holding reason as absolute. In ethics, Rand championed rational egoism and individualism. In politics, she advocated for individual rights and capitalism. In esthetics, she upheld romanticism. Rand regards Aristotle as her sole major philosophical influence.
• Susanne Langer was an American philosopher of mind and of art, who was influenced by Ernst Cassirer and Alfred North Whitehead. She was one of the first women to achieve an academic career in philosophy and the first woman to be popularly and professionally recognized as an American philosopher. Langer is best known for her 1942 book entitled Philosophy in a New Key. It argued that there is a basic and pervasive human need to symbolize, to invent meanings, and to invest meanings in one's world.

• Hannah Arendt was a German-born American assimilated Jewish political theorist. Though often described as a philosopher, she rejected that label on the grounds that philosophy is concerned with "man in the singular" and instead described herself as a political theorist because her work centers on the fact that "men, not Man, live on the earth and inhabit the world." Her works deal with the nature of power, and the subjects of politics, direct democracy, authority, and totalitarianism. The Hannah Arendt Prize is named in her honor.
• Simone de Beauvoir was a French writer, intellectual, existentialist philosopher, political activist, feminist and social theorist. Though she did not consider herself a philosopher, she had a significant influence on both feminist existentialism and feminist theory. De Beauvoir wrote novels, essays, biographies, autobiography and monographs on philosophy, politics and social issues. She is known for her 1949 treatise The Second Sex, a detailed analysis of women's oppression and a foundational tract of contemporary feminism.
• Elizabeth Anscombe, usually cited as G. E. M. Anscombe, was a British analytic philosopher. Anscombe's 1958 article "Modern Moral Philosophy" introduced the term "consequentialism" into the language of analytic philosophy, and had a seminal influence on contemporary virtue ethics. Her monograph Intention is generally recognised as her greatest and most influential work, and the continuing philosophical interest in the concepts of intention, action and practical reasoning can be said to have taken its main impetus from this work. Mary Warnock described her in 2006 as "the undoubted giant among women philosophers" while John Haldane said she "certainly has a good claim to be the greatest woman philosopher of whom we know".
• Mary Midgley was an English moral philosopher. A senior lecturer in philosophy at Newcastle University, she is known for her work on science, ethics and animal rights. Midgley strongly opposes reductionism and scientism, and any attempts to make science a substitute for the humanities—a role for which it is, she argues, wholly inadequate. She has written extensively about what philosophers can learn from nature, particularly from animals. The Guardian has described her as a fiercely combative philosopher and the UK's "foremost scourge of 'scientific pretension.'"
• Mary Warnock was a British philosopher of morality, education and mind, and writer on existentialism. From 1984 to 1991, she was Mistress of Girton College, Cambridge. Warnock studied at Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford, and was made an Honorary Fellow in 1984. She delivered the Gifford Lectures, entitled "Imagination and Understanding," at the University of Glasgow in 1992. She has written extensively on ethics, existentialism and philosophy of mind.
• Philippa Foot was a British philosopher, most notable for her works in ethics. She was one of the founders of contemporary virtue ethics, inspired by the ethics of Aristotle. Her later career marked a significant change in view from her work in the 1950s and '60s, and may be seen as an attempt to modernize Aristotelian ethical theory, to show that it is adaptable to a contemporary world view, and thus, that it could compete with such popular theories as modern deontological and utilitarian ethics. Some of her work was crucial in the re-emergence of normative ethics within analytic philosophy, especially her critique of consequentialism and of non-cognitivism. A familiar example is the continuing discussion of an example of hers referred to as the trolley problem. Foot's approach was influenced by the later work of Wittgenstein, although she rarely dealt explicitly with materials treated by him.
• Patricia Churchland is a Canadian-American philosopher noted for her contributions to neurophilosophy and the philosophy of mind. She is UC President's professor of philosophy emerita at the University of California, San Diego, where she has taught since 1984. Educated at the University of British Columbia, the University of Pittsburgh, and the University of Oxford, she taught philosophy at the University of Manitoba from 1969 to 1984.
• Susan Haack is distinguished professor in the humanities, professor of philosophy, and professor of law at the University of Miami. She earned her PhD at Cambridge University. She has written on logic, the philosophy of language, epistemology, and metaphysics. Her pragmatism follows that of Charles Sanders Peirce. Haack's major contribution to philosophy is her epistemological theory called foundherentism, which is her attempt to avoid the logical problems of both pure foundationalism and pure coherentism. Haack has been a fierce critic of Richard Rorty. She is critical of the view that there is a specifically female perspective on logic and scientific truth and is critical of feminist epistemology. She holds that many feminist critiques of science and philosophy are overly concerned with 'political correctness'.

• Alice Ambrose
• Simone Weil
• Raya Dunayevskaya
• Jeanne Hersch
• Iris Murdoch
• Ruth Barcan Marcus
• Mary Hesse
• Judith Jarvis Thomson
• Cora Diamond
• Marilyn Frye
• Julia Kristeva
• Genevieve Lloyd
• Onora O'Neill
• Nancy Fraser
• Martha Nussbaum
• Barbara Cassin
• Rebecca Goldstein
• Christine Korsgaard
• Linda Martín Alcoff
• Judith Butler
• Ruth Hagengruber
• Nancy Bauer
• Tamar Gendler
• Alice Crary
• Rahel Jaeggi