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“Catherine Villanueva Gardner’s work provides a careful analysis of feminist philosophers in the utilitarian tradition. Fresh readings of old canonical favorites—Bentham and Mill—are complemented by the resurrection of long-forgotten philosophers—Anna Doyle Wheeler, Frances Wright, and Catharine Beecher. The book is more than an erudite expansion of the canon providing a gender-sensitive analysis of writings by marginalized women authors. It maps a central criterion for developing a properly feminist history of philosophy : namely, empowerment. Just how does a particular author and set of texts actually free women to participate more broadly in society?” —Reverend John J. Conley, Loyola University “Empowerment and Interconnectivity is an important, finely reasoned, politely radical book that will be widely discussed. It makes a persuasive case that histories of philosophy need to be reconceived to ‘fit’ feminist philosophy rather than the other way around. Centering on methodological analyses, the book both honors and revitalizes a philosophical heritage of justice-seeking feminists no longer marginalized, even erased, from ‘patrimonial’ histories.” —Elizabeth K. Minnich, founding member of the Society for the Study of Women Philosophers “Empowerment and Interconnectivity is a wonderful exemplar of how to identify and interpret feminist theorizing in the history of philosophy. Using the empowerment of women as her interpretive lens, Gardner spells out the limitations of traditional approaches, crafts incisive analyses of often overlooked nineteenthcentury feminist philosophers such as Catharine Beecher and Frances Wright, and demonstrates how to read a range of genres—including domestic advice manuals—for their philosophical significance. Writing with clarity and grace, Gardner gives us a thoughtful, imaginative guide for doing feminist philosophy reflectively and responsibly.” —Marilyn Fischer, University of Dayton “In addition to its theoretical proposals, Empowerment and Interconnectivity makes a valuable contribution to our understanding of several nineteenth-century feminist philosophers, bringing some of them to our attention as philosophers for the first time.” —Charlotte Witt, University of New Hampshire Feminist history of philosophy has focused primarily on canon revision, canon critique, and the recovery of neglected or forgotten women philosophers. There is little doubt that, according to these parameters, it has been a successful enterprise. However, the methodology of feminist history of philosophy remains underexplored, and it would seem timely to ask meta-questions about how the history of philosophy is to be done and whether there is, or needs to be, a specifically feminist approach. In Empowerment and Interconnectivity, Catherine Villanueva Gardner examines the philosophy of three neglected women philosophers , all of them British or American utilitarian philosophers of one stripe or another: Catharine Beecher, Frances Wright, and Anna Doyle Wheeler. Gardner’s focus is less on accounting for the neglect or disappearance of these women philosophers and more on those methodological (or epistemological) questions we need to ask in order to recover their philosophy and categorize it as feminist. Catherine Villanueva Gardner is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Massachusetts– Dartmouth. Cover illustration: Luis Villanueva, Fire 13, 1993. Ink and watercolor on paper. Used by permission. The Pennsylvania State University Press University Park, Pennsylvania www.psupress.org ...

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