Top 10 books by neglected female thinkers | Philosophy books

As a graduate student in philosophy years ago, I had a life-changing insight: there were women philosophers. Lots of them. So many in fact that it was laughably tragic how easy it had been for me to study the history of philosophy completely oblivious to their existence.

I also discovered, unsurprisingly, that like their male counterparts, female philosophers were interested in all sorts of topics and represented a rich variety of intellectual sensibilities and temperaments. But I was drawn especially to the messier types. Those who didn’t respect the distinction between the abstract and the everyday, and whose experience of being a woman in the world bled into her work – in some cases just a little and in others consuming her entire opus.

Most of the great male philosophers ignored the subject of women or denigrated it, but for some female philosophers, it was carefully, luxuriously considered. It was a prize, an urgent mystery, and few of them agreed on what it was to be a woman or what sort of life she should lead. And I liked that very much.

I write about some of these women in my new book, focusing on four British early Enlightenment thinkers, and the ways that their irreverence leads to canon-shattering ideas. Here are some such books by women, some of them long overlooked, but all deserving to be better known.


1. This Sex Which Is Not One by Luce Irigaray
This is the only book by a living philosopher on my list, but I admire how French philosopher Irigaray aims at nothing less than to punch through the western canon and create an entirely new discourse for women. She’s captivated by the paradox of how language can free women from sexist discourse, if the entire discourse is sexist. She has some good advice. When you describe sexism in the texts of men, mimic the harmful content of their words – but do so unfaithfully. I have had endless fun with this.

2. Whether a Christian Woman Should Be Educated by Anna Maria van Schurman
Schurman, a 17th-century Dutch polymath, was allowed to take courses at Utrecht University as long as she sat behind a curtain. Most universities didn’t admit women, believing their place was in the home. Here Schurman argues otherwise, appealing to God and reason. But my favourite justification is on the basis of pleasure: “Whatever fills the human mind with exceptional and honest delight is fitting for a Christian woman.”

3. Essays and Speeches by Maria W Stewart
A serious omission in my education was the tradition of Black female intellectuals leading up to the US civil war. Take Stewart, for example, whose words crackle with brilliance: “How long shall the fair daughters of Africa be compelled to bury their minds and talents beneath a load of iron pots and kettles?” She inspired a generation of Black women including Sojourner Truth and Anna Julia-Cooper to defend the rights of Black women in the fight for emancipation – especially when white women’s rights activists ignored them.

4. Femininity and Domination by Sandra Lee Bartky
I’ve always bristled at the idea that women are naturally inferior to men, and I’ve found something therapeutic about books, like this one, that explain women’s subjection in terms of conditioning. Bartky writes how shame operates on women, encouraging them to take up less space than men, to hang back, be quiet, and participate less. This 1990 book improves on Michel Foucault’s philosophy, which describes social practices that limit freedom, except for those that specifically inhibit women.

5. Extant Writings of Im Yunjidang
Many of Confucius’s male followers argued that women were men’s moral and intellectual inferiors. Yunjidang didn’t agree. She was a 17th-century Korean widow who helped her husband’s family by day and analysed Confucian texts by night. Her studies persuaded her that women were as capable of sagacity as men. She composed poems, discourses, and biographies of women, and in one exposition wrote: “Though I am a woman, still, the nature I originally received contained no distinction between male and female.”

6. Reflections Upon Marriage by Mary Astell
Is it a surprise that Astell, a British philosopher who relished her single life, equated marriage to pig farming? In this 1700 book, she calls out the hypocrisy of the male political philosophers of her age, such as John Locke, who defended natural rights and equality but gave husbands ultimate authority over wives because they’re “the abler and the stronger”. Astell’s reply: “If all Men are born free, how is it that all women are born slaves?”

7. Love’s Work by Gillian Rose
Sometimes philosophy can be frustratingly dull. But in this 1995 memoir, Rose demonstrates how it can be so much more than “cleverness, a game” of the academy. In the wake of a terminal cancer diagnosis, she mercilessly examines her own suffering, while working out what is love, what is philosophy, and what is a life lived well. She reconsiders some of her earlier commitments to feminism and its ability to speak to her in this profound existential moment, and whether you’re persuaded by her or not, it’s a powerful, beautiful read.

8. Maria: Or, The Wrongs of Woman Illustrated by Mary Wollstonecraft
In this novel, Maria is on a journey to cultivate her mind, but the men in her life remain unsympathetic: her husband ultimately locks her up in an institution. What irony then when Wollstonecraft shared a draft of her novel with a couple of men who failed to see the point. In The Wrongs of Woman, Wollstonecraft uses fiction to expound on the ideas in her more familiar 1792 discourse A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, while providing an important critique of Rousseau, who brushed aside women’s intellectual autonomy in his philosophical novels and treatises.

9. Declaration of the Rights of Woman and of the Female Citizen by Olympe de Gouges
Gouges, like most women of her time, never learned to hold a quill. Yet with the help of a secretary, she composed a novel, plays, and political works, and demanded the rights of women and the emancipation of slaves. Her 1791 Declaration, published a year before Wollstonecraft’s landmark treatise on women’s rights, was a significant corrective to the 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen that justified the French Revolution but ignored the condition of women.

10. The Mirror of Simple Souls by Marguerite Porete
This early 14th-century book is an instance of a strange, intellectual flourishing that happened among the Beguines, a community of women in northern Europe in the Middle Ages. They didn’t marry, educated one another, and lived self-sufficiently. Some of them also intellectualised their relationship to God, among them Porete, arguing they had no need for male church clerics because they could meld with God’s essence directly, virtually becoming God themselves.

As a graduate student in philosophy years ago, I had a life-changing insight: there were women philosophers. Lots of them. So many in fact that it was laughably tragic how easy it had been for me to study the history of philosophy completely oblivious to their existence.

I also discovered, unsurprisingly, that like their male counterparts, female philosophers were interested in all sorts of topics and represented a rich variety of intellectual sensibilities and temperaments. But I was drawn especially to the messier types. Those who didn’t respect the distinction between the abstract and the everyday, and whose experience of being a woman in the world bled into her work – in some cases just a little and in others consuming her entire opus.

Most of the great male philosophers ignored the subject of women or denigrated it, but for some female philosophers, it was carefully, luxuriously considered. It was a prize, an urgent mystery, and few of them agreed on what it was to be a woman or what sort of life she should lead. And I liked that very much.

I write about some of these women in my new book, focusing on four British early Enlightenment thinkers, and the ways that their irreverence leads to canon-shattering ideas. Here are some such books by women, some of them long overlooked, but all deserving to be better known.


1. This Sex Which Is Not One by Luce Irigaray
This is the only book by a living philosopher on my list, but I admire how French philosopher Irigaray aims at nothing less than to punch through the western canon and create an entirely new discourse for women. She’s captivated by the paradox of how language can free women from sexist discourse, if the entire discourse is sexist. She has some good advice. When you describe sexism in the texts of men, mimic the harmful content of their words – but do so unfaithfully. I have had endless fun with this.

2. Whether a Christian Woman Should Be Educated by Anna Maria van Schurman
Schurman, a 17th-century Dutch polymath, was allowed to take courses at Utrecht University as long as she sat behind a curtain. Most universities didn’t admit women, believing their place was in the home. Here Schurman argues otherwise, appealing to God and reason. But my favourite justification is on the basis of pleasure: “Whatever fills the human mind with exceptional and honest delight is fitting for a Christian woman.”

3. Essays and Speeches by Maria W Stewart
A serious omission in my education was the tradition of Black female intellectuals leading up to the US civil war. Take Stewart, for example, whose words crackle with brilliance: “How long shall the fair daughters of Africa be compelled to bury their minds and talents beneath a load of iron pots and kettles?” She inspired a generation of Black women including Sojourner Truth and Anna Julia-Cooper to defend the rights of Black women in the fight for emancipation – especially when white women’s rights activists ignored them.

4. Femininity and Domination by Sandra Lee Bartky
I’ve always bristled at the idea that women are naturally inferior to men, and I’ve found something therapeutic about books, like this one, that explain women’s subjection in terms of conditioning. Bartky writes how shame operates on women, encouraging them to take up less space than men, to hang back, be quiet, and participate less. This 1990 book improves on Michel Foucault’s philosophy, which describes social practices that limit freedom, except for those that specifically inhibit women.

5. Extant Writings of Im Yunjidang
Many of Confucius’s male followers argued that women were men’s moral and intellectual inferiors. Yunjidang didn’t agree. She was a 17th-century Korean widow who helped her husband’s family by day and analysed Confucian texts by night. Her studies persuaded her that women were as capable of sagacity as men. She composed poems, discourses, and biographies of women, and in one exposition wrote: “Though I am a woman, still, the nature I originally received contained no distinction between male and female.”

6. Reflections Upon Marriage by Mary Astell
Is it a surprise that Astell, a British philosopher who relished her single life, equated marriage to pig farming? In this 1700 book, she calls out the hypocrisy of the male political philosophers of her age, such as John Locke, who defended natural rights and equality but gave husbands ultimate authority over wives because they’re “the abler and the stronger”. Astell’s reply: “If all Men are born free, how is it that all women are born slaves?”

7. Love’s Work by Gillian Rose
Sometimes philosophy can be frustratingly dull. But in this 1995 memoir, Rose demonstrates how it can be so much more than “cleverness, a game” of the academy. In the wake of a terminal cancer diagnosis, she mercilessly examines her own suffering, while working out what is love, what is philosophy, and what is a life lived well. She reconsiders some of her earlier commitments to feminism and its ability to speak to her in this profound existential moment, and whether you’re persuaded by her or not, it’s a powerful, beautiful read.

8. Maria: Or, The Wrongs of Woman Illustrated by Mary Wollstonecraft
In this novel, Maria is on a journey to cultivate her mind, but the men in her life remain unsympathetic: her husband ultimately locks her up in an institution. What irony then when Wollstonecraft shared a draft of her novel with a couple of men who failed to see the point. In The Wrongs of Woman, Wollstonecraft uses fiction to expound on the ideas in her more familiar 1792 discourse A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, while providing an important critique of Rousseau, who brushed aside women’s intellectual autonomy in his philosophical novels and treatises.

9. Declaration of the Rights of Woman and of the Female Citizen by Olympe de Gouges
Gouges, like most women of her time, never learned to hold a quill. Yet with the help of a secretary, she composed a novel, plays, and political works, and demanded the rights of women and the emancipation of slaves. Her 1791 Declaration, published a year before Wollstonecraft’s landmark treatise on women’s rights, was a significant corrective to the 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen that justified the French Revolution but ignored the condition of women.

10. The Mirror of Simple Souls by Marguerite Porete
This early 14th-century book is an instance of a strange, intellectual flourishing that happened among the Beguines, a community of women in northern Europe in the Middle Ages. They didn’t marry, educated one another, and lived self-sufficiently. Some of them also intellectualised their relationship to God, among them Porete, arguing they had no need for male church clerics because they could meld with God’s essence directly, virtually becoming God themselves.