A review by emily_m_green
How to Think Like a Woman: Four Women Philosophers Who Taught Me How to Love the Life of the Mind by Regan Penaluna

challenging emotional informative inspiring reflective slow-paced

4.5

Thank you to Grove Atlantic and Goodreads for the review copy of Regan Penaluna’s How to Think Like a Woman. The book is a combination memoir and review of four female philosophers' work and lives. 

Penaluna begins the book describing her early higher education in philosophy and the older boy she met early on. She shares much of the beauty as well as the indignities of studying philosophy. One of the atrocious highlights of her story is a professor who asks his class to debate if women are reasoning creatures. She writes about being an extreme minority in her graduate classes as well as teaching in a philosophy department. She also writes of how her mentors were not so willing to help her break into academia and how she often felt like she was never quite her husband’s equal in her husband’s stature. 

Throughout Penaluna’s book, she also discusses the lives and works of Damaris Cudworth Masham, Mary Astell, Mary Wollstonecraft, and Catherine Cockburn. I found the stories of these philosophers more interesting than the excerpts on philosophy that Penaluna peppers throughout. 

As I read, I found myself waiting for tragedy in each philosopher's life, craving the drama of the intellectual’s life--and the book did not disappoint. 

While it is well-researched and there are excellent notes at the back of the book, it is not too heavy. It still reads as a pleasure read and not one that I felt I needed to reread sentences or paragraphs to untangle the meaning, like some academic writing asks of the reader. It was not a light or thoughtless read, however, and did ask some work of me as a reader to make connections and understand the philosophical bits. 

I thoroughly enjoyed How to Think Like a Woman, in part because there are times when I know I am being belittled for being a woman and gaslit at the same time to believe that the behavior of those around me is normal.

Would I teach this book? Yes, in a college course, I would teach it in full or with excerpts from different parts of the book. Each chapter reads as a complete essay. It is an excellent example of how to blend research and memoir and Penaluna’s writing is thoroughly enjoyable.