Discovering the Women at the Heart of Philosophy

This article is the first in a series on women who have been erased from the history of philosophy. The series is titled “Discovering the Women at the Heart of Philosophy.”

St. Catherine of Alexandria by Bernardino Luini

Academic philosophy, especially in the west, has long had a reputation as the near-exclusive domain of white men. These days, however, there is growing interest in philosophy by historical women and in philosophical traditions from other parts of the world. The rediscovery of neglected texts from outside the mainstream has made it increasingly clear that women have always done philosophy, even where this work has been obstructed, lost, forgotten, misattributed, unacknowledged, or plagiarized. Now, academic studies and popular op-eds alike are calling for philosophy to recognize that a narrow focus on only some kinds of thinkers at the exclusion of others forecloses possibilities for thinking and seeking out truths, rather than pursuing them.

The area in which I work—late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century German philosophy—has seemed particularly bleak for women doing philosophy. Only a few years ago, it was still common to hear people say that “there were no women philosophers writing in German at that time.” Since this is considered a golden age for western philosophy—the era of Kant, Hegel, and Schopenhauer, and later Marx and Nietzsche—the apparent absence of women’s philosophical thought from this period contributes to a general sense that women have not been involved in important philosophical developments, at least not until recently. The only historical women philosophers one was likely to study as an undergraduate philosophy major were active in the twentieth century, with Hannah Arendt (b. 1906), Simone de Beauvoir (b. 1908), and Philippa Foot (b. 1920) among the earliest.

However, historians of philosophy have shown that the idea that philosophy was exclusively practiced by men developed in nineteenth-century Europe. Until the end of the eighteenth century, the philosophical contributions of women were often acknowledged, and the list of women recorded as philosophers runs into the hundreds. It was only near the end of the eighteenth century that women began to be excised from our philosophical memory.

Hedwig Conrad-Martius

The challenge to the narrative of an all-male history of philosophy began in earnest in the 1980s and first made serious inroads in the early modern period. Attention to the work of Émilie du Châtelet, Margaret Cavendish, Elisabeth of Bohemia, Mary Astell, Anne Conway, and Catharine Macaulay, among many others, has demonstrated the originality of these women’s ideas as well as their influence on better-known philosophers. Progress has also been made in recovering and studying the work of feminist or proto-feminist women philosophers across Europe and the Americas from the early modern period through the nineteenth century and into the early twentieth century. We are also becoming more aware of the originality and influence of Marxist thinkers and orators such as Clara Zetkin and Rosa Luxemburg, and of the crucial role of women such as Edith Stein, Gerda Walther, and Hedwig Conrad-Martius in the development of early phenomenology.

Despite this progress, there is still relatively little scholarship on philosophy by German-speaking women around the time of Kant or Hegel. As we look beyond standard accounts of the history of ideas, we find that this is due to gaps in the secondary literature and a lack of acknowledgement of women’s ideas by their contemporaries, rather than to a lack of primary philosophical sources by women at the time. Even at what seems to be a nadir for women in philosophy, we are not short of philosophical writing by women. Women wrote and published books, essays and pamphlets, as well as works of literature, poetry, dramas, letters, and diaries, dealing with a variety of philosophical questions. In this, they did not differ from their male contemporaries. Male philosophers, too, wrote novels, dialogues, letters, and plays that are still studied for their philosophical value. Women’s thought on metaphysics, social arrangements, politics, ethics, aesthetics, and many other topics is there, waiting to be read, interpreted, and placed in dialogue with work by philosophers who are already familiar to us.

Although they wrote outside the philosophical mainstream and often in non-academic genres, women in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries considered the same philosophical questions as their male contemporaries. They often brought a different perspective to bear on these issues, either because of their social position as women or simply as unique individuals whose views have not been given the same attention as their more prominent male peers. For example, Dorothea Veit-Schlegel (1764–1839) critiqued Early German Romantic accounts of how identity is constructed in her novel Florentin, highlighting differences entailed by the social context for men and women.

Karoline von Günderrode, c. 1800

Karoline von Günderrode (1780–1806) was influenced by the Early German Romantics and Schelling but rejected a dualistic metaphysics with its gendered implications. At the same time, Günderrode developed unique models of personal identity and friendship, as well as a panpsychist account of existence that allowed for a continued, altered form of consciousness after death. Günderrode’s friend Bettine Brentano-von Arnim (1785–1859) published an edited account of their correspondence, in which she wrote against what she saw as the over-intellectualized philosophical tradition of Kant and Schelling and in favor of a philosophy that prioritized nature and the body: “My coat swung on and out of the window, and all clutter left behind me, that’s my way of thinking,” she writes, adding: “To be sure, in the end I’d know nothing, which I gladly admit, but I would be aware.”

Women often made unacknowledged contributions to the development of ideas by well-known male philosophers. Caroline Schlegel-Schelling’s work on both August Schlegel’s and Schelling’s publications is a good example of this pattern, as is much of Dorothea Veit-Schlegel’s work for August’s brother Friedrich. Meanwhile, the largely unknown Maria von Herbert’s correspondence with Kant challenged Kantian ethics on several points, including what Herbert saw as its failure to address despair and the apparent dependence of moral value on the existence of competing inclinations adequately. This correspondence generated some of the text for Kant’s “Doctrine of Virtue” in the Metaphysics of Morals.

Rahel Levin Varnhagen by William Hensel

Other women from this period were lauded for their intellects or celebrated for their literary achievements without this leading to study of their philosophical ideas. Rahel Varnhagen (1771–1833) was described by a contemporary as having the “spirit of a philosopher” and as understanding the “deepest obscurities of nature.” Her extensive correspondence presents a sustained reflection on the dynamics of language and thought and addresses a vast number of topics, including identity, friendship, marriage, and sociability. However, there is little analysis of her philosophy. Instead, discussion has centered on her salons, her biography, her conversion to Christianity, and her struggles with her Jewish identity.

Similarly, Therese Huber-Forster (1764-1829) has enjoyed a longstanding place in German literary history on the basis of her novels, short stories and travel writing, but her essays and thousands of letters have received little attention from philosophers. The latter include not only personal news, but also arguments on politics, history, gender relations, marriage and pedagogy. Other women of the era, including Susanne von Bandemer, Benedikte Naubert, Philippine Engelhard, Amalia Holst, Henriette Herz, Meta Forkel-Liebeskind, Lucie Domeier (aka Esther Gad), Sophie Mereau, Caroline de la Motte Fouqué, Karoline von Woltmann, and Helmina von Chézy, have long been recognized as novelists, poets, translators or playwrights, or as key members of the intellectual social scene at the time, while their philosophical contributions have received little or no attention.

We are only at the beginning of the work of reconstructing the philosophical thought of these and many other historical women writers. Already it is clear that we have been missing a great deal—and have not been aware of what we are missing. In addition to the fact that women’s names often go unmentioned in historiographies of philosophy, it is often difficult to see the philosophical merit of a text in the absence of pre-existing analysis of at least some aspects of the work—and very difficult to teach on such a piece. As Eileen O’Neill writes:

Determining the philosophical value of a text requires that we first understand the context in which a text was written, what its philosophical goals are, what the argumentational strategies are, and so on . . . It typically takes many scholars, working hard for some time, before we can properly interpret, and thus be in a position to evaluate the philosophical significance of a text.

Fortunately, many scholars are currently working on uncovering the fascinating arguments and perspectives of these forgotten thinkers. In subsequent installments, I’ll talk more about the philosophical work of Günderrode, Brentano-von Arnim, Veit-Schlegel, and other neglected historical women writing in the German tradition, as well as the ongoing efforts to recover their thought.

Anna Ezekiel is a feminist historian of philosophy and translator working on post-Kantian German thought. Her translations of Karoline von Günderrode’s work are available as Poetic Fragments (SUNY Press, 2016) and Philosophical Fragments (OUP, forthcoming); she has also translated the writings of eight historical women philosophers for the forthcoming OUP volume Women Philosophers of the Long Nineteenth Century: The German Tradition, edited by Kirsten Gjesdal and Dalia Nassar.

Emilie du Châtelet, Anne Conway, and Mary Wollstonecraft via Wikimedia Commons/Getty