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A review by jdscott50
How to Think Like a Woman: Four Women Philosophers Who Taught Me How to Love the Life of the Mind by Regan Penaluna
informative
inspiring
slow-paced
4.0
When Reno Penaluma is sitting in her graduate philosophy class, her visiting professor speaks openly on how women do not have the mental fortitude for philosophy. Caught in the moment, instead of protesting it, she internalizes the remarks. Searching for a thesis, she finds connections to prominent women philosophers in history.
Damaris Cudworth/Lady Marsham, Mary Astell, Catherine Cockburn, and Mary Wollstonecraft all inspire her to redouble her efforts and help these neglected philosophers find new light. "Why have women been given intelligent souls if they cannot improve them?" (Astell) If men are born fee why are women slaves.
All these women wrote at a time when less than a quarter of women could even write. Yet, their writing would rival Ocke, Hobes, Rousseau, and many who would lay the foundation of modern thought and American Democracy. In their rediscovery, she discovers her own motivation, completes her degree, leaves her husband, and writes this book. A journey of discovery, these inspirational philosophers get a well-deserved review.
Favorite Passages:
This book tells the story of how I lost myself in philosophy and then, through my discovery of these early feminist philosophers, found a path back to myself. Despite the centuries that separated us, we were united by our love of philosophy and our frustration, sorrow, and anger. What does a woman do when she’s told that she doesn’t belong or that she’s not as smart as a man because of her sex? Some let it roll off their backs, knowing their worth regardless of what they’re told. I admire these women, but I’m not like them. I can’t maintain that level of equanimity. I struggle, I doubt, but above all, I need answers—or at least attempts to explain what is happening to me and why. In this, I feel a kinship with these four philosophers.
To help her readers see women anew, she borrowed language from the new science. She wrote that women were unaccustomed to thinking for themselves and were in an important sense indistinguish- able from automatons. They move and speak, but they are mostly following orders from without and have an “unthinking mechani- cal way of living.”55 Here she invoked Descartes’s division of reality into two substances: the mind, which is immaterial and thinking, and matter, which is its opposite—material and unthinking. These substances were governed by different laws, and the motion of mate- rial things was due to physical forces, whereas the activity of mind was rational. For Astell and many other early modern philosophers, reason was essential to freedom. To follow the commands of some- one else was to be not truly free. A person must earn her own path to salvation. But Astell argued that women lived as if they were only matter in motion, as if they were just “Machins” devoid of mind.56
This reminds me of something the philosopher Irigaray once said. She asks what a philosophy of woman’s nature would look like that didn’t derive from the belief that women are inferior and des- tined for motherhood: “But to what reality would woman correspond, independently of her reproductive function?”113 It’s an open ques- tion and one that Astell was also motivated by centuries ago. Astell’s answer was that a woman’s sex should not be her defining feature if she does not want it to be, because humans are foremost rational persons. Even if a woman were to participate in a traditional female role, it should not be because of necessity but rather because she freely chose to do so. A sentiment that—despite her conservatism in other areas—is strikingly modern.
A friend wrote that in Astell’s final moments of life, she asked to have her coffin placed next to her bed and to be alone, contemplating the afterlife.
She saw the minimal investment in her intellect as symptom- atic of a cultural force inhibiting the minds of women. In these early years she didn’t set forth a path to freedom for women. Instead, she absorbed this oppression and then spun it out into a description of the world as suffocating and harmful to women’s intellects; it was a place where women would live and die, vulnerable and without much control over their own thought.
It’s often a tougher path for a woman, because society can be a hostile place for her to cultivate her subjectivity. It was true in the seventeenth century, and it was true for me. Maybe, then, the com- mon experience of being a woman in philosophy is to be effaced: your feelings, your opinions, your presence, your life, your works, your impact are belittled, glanced at, or ignored. The psychological hurdles are one reason why today there are fewer women than men in graduate programs across many disciplines, and even fewer who rise to the top of their class, and why some women seem to come into their own at a slower rate than men. Only years later, when men have outpaced most women in their careers, will women begin to discover how they nearly snuffed themselves out. Just like I was doing. I took Masham’s recommendation to be: Do not retreat. A woman’s path to self-knowledge requires her to risk losing herself to find herself.
Damaris Cudworth/Lady Marsham, Mary Astell, Catherine Cockburn, and Mary Wollstonecraft all inspire her to redouble her efforts and help these neglected philosophers find new light. "Why have women been given intelligent souls if they cannot improve them?" (Astell) If men are born fee why are women slaves.
All these women wrote at a time when less than a quarter of women could even write. Yet, their writing would rival Ocke, Hobes, Rousseau, and many who would lay the foundation of modern thought and American Democracy. In their rediscovery, she discovers her own motivation, completes her degree, leaves her husband, and writes this book. A journey of discovery, these inspirational philosophers get a well-deserved review.
Favorite Passages:
This book tells the story of how I lost myself in philosophy and then, through my discovery of these early feminist philosophers, found a path back to myself. Despite the centuries that separated us, we were united by our love of philosophy and our frustration, sorrow, and anger. What does a woman do when she’s told that she doesn’t belong or that she’s not as smart as a man because of her sex? Some let it roll off their backs, knowing their worth regardless of what they’re told. I admire these women, but I’m not like them. I can’t maintain that level of equanimity. I struggle, I doubt, but above all, I need answers—or at least attempts to explain what is happening to me and why. In this, I feel a kinship with these four philosophers.
To help her readers see women anew, she borrowed language from the new science. She wrote that women were unaccustomed to thinking for themselves and were in an important sense indistinguish- able from automatons. They move and speak, but they are mostly following orders from without and have an “unthinking mechani- cal way of living.”55 Here she invoked Descartes’s division of reality into two substances: the mind, which is immaterial and thinking, and matter, which is its opposite—material and unthinking. These substances were governed by different laws, and the motion of mate- rial things was due to physical forces, whereas the activity of mind was rational. For Astell and many other early modern philosophers, reason was essential to freedom. To follow the commands of some- one else was to be not truly free. A person must earn her own path to salvation. But Astell argued that women lived as if they were only matter in motion, as if they were just “Machins” devoid of mind.56
This reminds me of something the philosopher Irigaray once said. She asks what a philosophy of woman’s nature would look like that didn’t derive from the belief that women are inferior and des- tined for motherhood: “But to what reality would woman correspond, independently of her reproductive function?”113 It’s an open ques- tion and one that Astell was also motivated by centuries ago. Astell’s answer was that a woman’s sex should not be her defining feature if she does not want it to be, because humans are foremost rational persons. Even if a woman were to participate in a traditional female role, it should not be because of necessity but rather because she freely chose to do so. A sentiment that—despite her conservatism in other areas—is strikingly modern.
A friend wrote that in Astell’s final moments of life, she asked to have her coffin placed next to her bed and to be alone, contemplating the afterlife.
She saw the minimal investment in her intellect as symptom- atic of a cultural force inhibiting the minds of women. In these early years she didn’t set forth a path to freedom for women. Instead, she absorbed this oppression and then spun it out into a description of the world as suffocating and harmful to women’s intellects; it was a place where women would live and die, vulnerable and without much control over their own thought.
It’s often a tougher path for a woman, because society can be a hostile place for her to cultivate her subjectivity. It was true in the seventeenth century, and it was true for me. Maybe, then, the com- mon experience of being a woman in philosophy is to be effaced: your feelings, your opinions, your presence, your life, your works, your impact are belittled, glanced at, or ignored. The psychological hurdles are one reason why today there are fewer women than men in graduate programs across many disciplines, and even fewer who rise to the top of their class, and why some women seem to come into their own at a slower rate than men. Only years later, when men have outpaced most women in their careers, will women begin to discover how they nearly snuffed themselves out. Just like I was doing. I took Masham’s recommendation to be: Do not retreat. A woman’s path to self-knowledge requires her to risk losing herself to find herself.
Art, philosophy, and literature tell us a different story. That the brief time we are here matters, that it is meaningful and contains beauty. We’ve learned to talk to ourselves in this expansive and dark vacuum to keep ourselves company, so that we can transcend our finite, perplexing condition—if not in fact, then in our imaginations. We’ve learned to free ourselves—if only for the duration of a poem, an equation, a book, a prayer—from our despair.