Feminist History of Philosophy: The Recovery and Evaluation of Women's Philosophical Thought ed. by Eileen O'Neill and Marcy Lascano (review)

This book, a collection of articles on women's contributions to the history of philosophy, can accurately be described as long-awaited. Originally conceived in, I gather, roughly its present form in 2006, it is now finally in 2019 reaching the light of day. Although unavoidable delays are always a pity, in this case the result is certainly worth the wait, and the significantly high quality of the volume has not been undercut by its belated appearance. In 2006, the editors secured contributions from most of the leading contributors to the field of women in the history of philosophy, and since twelve years is not all that long a time, they remain leading contributors. Anyone interested in teaching, writing about, or merely familiarizing themselves further with this area will find this collection invaluable.

Unfortunately, I do not have space to discuss each article in any detail, or indeed, at all. The interested reader will find pieces on most of the women whose names have recently become familiar to scholars, as for example, Christia Mercer's on Conway, Karen Detfefsen's on du Châtelet, Tad Schmatz's on Princess Elisabeth, Karen Vintges's on Beauvoir, Hilda Smith's on Astell, Sarah Hutton's on Cavendish and Macaulay, and Eileen Botting's on Wollstonecraft. There are also articles on women who deserve to be better known, as Martha Bolton's on Mary Shepherd, Eric Schliesser's on Sophie de Grouchy, Marguerite Deslauriers's on Marie de Gournay, and Jacqueline Broad's on Damaris Masham. Also included are pieces on some quite unknown philosophers, as Lisa Shapiro's on Marie Thiroux Arconville, and pieces on some who might deserve more attention from philosophers, as Laura Benitez's on Sor Juana, Karen Green's on Christine de Pizan, and perhaps most surprisingly, Moira Gatens's on George Eliot. All the authors of these chapters have absorbed, and indeed are proponents of an important lesson now grasped by most historians of philosophy, that it is no longer necessary to apologize for expanding the reach of history of philosophers beyond a handful of the canonical. Each author, without apology, takes the texts discussed seriously, and provides helpful exposition, locating and evaluating key questions and important arguments.

Each author might be said as well to have absorbed a second lesson: that historical figures need to be located within their own historical content and not anachronistically judged against our own. I found especially interesting the way in which several authors made use of contextual comparisons to bring out what is novel in the women they were discussing. Detlefsen, for example, showed in a comparison between du Châtelet and Descartes on the notion of hypotheses, that despite wide areas of overlap, there were nevertheless differences that reflected into their metaphysics. Deslauriers, situating Gournay against earlier discussions on the equality of the sexes, draws out significant novelty, and suggests her thinking might be located in a surprising place: Aristotle. And Broad, placing Masham's work in the context of tolerationist literature, finds ways in which Masham too can be found to be upholding a tolerationist ideal, but with consequences for women's education. Broad makes extensive use of Masham's correspondence and, to my mind, provides further evidence that Masham deserves a modern edition of her work.

There is one way I might mention in which this collection shows its age. Although the title provides no temporal parameters, almost all the pieces concern early modern figures. Eileen O'Neill, in her introductory chapter, accounts for this, speculating that the institutionalization of philosophy in universities "led to women's virtual exclusion from philosophy" (19). I am sure no one would be happier than O'Neill to learn, from recent work on women's contributions to early analytic philosophy, that there were many women in universities in this period, like Grace De Laguna, Mary Whitons Calkins...