How to Think Like a Woman

November 21, 2022
Journalist Penaluna spotlights in her incisive debut four women thinkers who pushed back against misogyny in Western philosophy. Penaluna writes of how she wanted to become a philosophy professor, but during graduate school she became discouraged by her studies of male philosophers who largely viewed women as “submissive” and “weak.” A footnote in an obscure paper led her to 17th-century English philosopher Damaris Cudworth Masham, and this discovery in turn spurred Penaluna to find other women philosophers of the era, Mary Astell, Catharine Cockburn, and Mary Wollstonecraft among them. Astell taught Penaluna to be aware of her own prejudices as a privileged white woman; Cockburn demonstrated that she could pursue her own intellectual passions while being a mother; and after reading Wollstonecraft, Penaluna felt compelled to “protect her self-worth” and divorced her husband. Penaluna skillfully captures the thinking of these four women in impassioned prose as she challenges sexism in the canon: “Patriarchy makes it hard for a woman to think for herself... and for the most part, philosophy hasn’t done us any favors.” Lucid and frank, this blend of memoir, biography, and criticism makes a solid case for why representation matters.