• DOI:10.1086/491677
• Corpus ID: 143102585

Feminist Interpretations of the Philosophical Canon

@article{Witt2006FeministIO,
  title={Feminist Interpretations of the Philosophical Canon},
  author={Charlotte Witt},
  journal={Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society},
  year={2006},
  volume={31},
  pages={537 - 552}
}

• C. Witt
• Published 1 January 2006
• Philosophy
• Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society

A s graduate students in philosophy in the late 1970s, we learned that almost every philosopher who had ever lived was male, and what little we learned about what these male philosophers thought about women was negative and degrading. To be perfectly honest, I can recall studying exactly one female philosopher (G. E. M. Anscombe), and I can remember only one class discussion of G. W. F. Hegel’s views on women. I recall annoyance at my professor’s gleeful description of Hegel’s assessment of women and the secondary (yet necessary) theoretical role women play in his political thought, but we all shared the assumption that whatever Hegel thought about women just wasn’t all that important. For the most part what we learned about women in the history of philosophy was nothing. For the past six months I have had on my bookshelf twenty-four vol-