First women of philosophy

November 23, 2018 8:43 AM

Philosophy was once a woman’s world, ranging across Asia, Africa and Latin America. It’s time to reclaim that lost realm
posted by infini (9 comments total)

There are a bunch of women zen practitioners but the one I've seen most in ukiyo-e is Jigoku Dayuu, the hell courtesan who debated with Ikkyu.
posted by sukeban at 9:11 AM on November 23, 2018 [2 favorites]

Enheduanna the first author, a person who questioned much.
posted by Oyéah at 9:15 AM on November 23, 2018 [3 favorites]

In Korea, Im Yunjidang (1721-93) flourished as possibly the first modern female philosopher on the Korean peninsula. She was born in Yangson in the Kyonggi province, close to Seoul, during the enlightened mid-Chosŏn era. Unfortunately her masterpiece Yunjidang Yugo has not yet been translated into English, which is a shame since Sungmoon Kim, professor of political theory at Harvard University, in 2014 proclaimed her to be ‘the counterpart to Mary Wollstonecraft in the Confucian tradition’.

that's it I'm learning Korean

Perhaps [Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz's] most famous work is a letter written as a response to her fellow nun Sor Filotea, who argued that women should not study certain philosophical disciplines and should rather stick to devotional literature alone. At one point Sor Juana rhetorically asks: ‘Senora, what can we women know but kitchen philosophies?’ [...] It would have perhaps amused Sor Juana to learn that Sor Filotea, to whom her response was addressed, turned out to be the pseudonym of a man: the bishop Manuel Fernández de Santa Cruz.

The bishop would have made an exemplary internet-dwelling loser

I haven't had luck finding the FPP where I originally read about it but the sort of information in the thoroughly-cited Wikipedia article “women in Classical Athens” seems relevant here:

In classical Athens, women ideally remained apart from men. This ideology of separation was so strong that a party to a lawsuit (Lysias' Against Simon) could claim that his sister and nieces were ashamed to be in the presence of their male relatives as evidence that they were respectable. Some historians have accepted this ideology as an accurate description of how Athenian women lived their lives; W. B. Tyrrell, for example, said: "The outer door of the house is the boundary for the free women". However, even in antiquity it was recognised that an ideology of separation could not be practiced by many Athenians. In Politics, Aristotle asked: "How is it possible to prevent the wives of the poor from going out of doors?"

The ideal that respectable women should remain out of the public eye was so entrenched in classical Athens that simply naming a citizen woman could be a source of shame. Priestesses were the only group of women to be exempt from this rule. Thucydides wrote in his History of the Peloponnesian War, "Great honour is hers whose reputation among males is least, whether for praise or blame".

[...]

When a woman married, her husband became her new kurios. His authority over his wife extended to the right to select a new husband for his widow in his will.

[...]

Steven Johnstone argues for the manuscript reading of [Demosthenes] 59.67. If he is correct, then women's ability to deal with men while working as market traders without being accused of adultery seems to also have been protected by law.

So yeah. That's the environment in which Classical Greek culture and the Socratic—Platonic—Aristotelian lineage of philosophy developed, the foundation stones of Western civilization.
posted by XMLicious at 11:23 AM on November 23, 2018 [3 favorites]

OTOH, a few schools of philosophy accepted the revolutionary idea that women were smarter than cattle. Most famously but not uniquely, the Pythagoreans (Theano, Myia) and Epicureans (see Themista, Batis or Leontion). Diotima and Aspasia also figure in Plato's dialogues, and Plato's mom Perictione was also known as a thinker.
posted by sukeban at 1:21 PM on November 23, 2018 [2 favorites]

That's why I was so pleased to see the article mentioned Asia, Africa, and Latin America.
posted by infini at 10:37 PM on November 23, 2018 [2 favorites]

infini, I am 100% behind that, it's just that you don't need to make European women philosophers disappear in order to dunk on the dead white men canon.

(The original article centers on philosophers outside the European canon, but there are still African women philosophers inside it: Monica, Hypatia who gets only a namecheck, or the mythical alchemists Mary the Jewess and Cleopatra the Alchemist to begin with)
posted by sukeban at 1:21 AM on November 24, 2018

Excellent article! Thanks for posting, infini.
posted by homunculus at 2:16 PM on November 24, 2018

mexican philosophy lab @ucsd: "...we are compiling the names dates major works of women in mexican philosophy..."
posted by homunculus at 3:30 PM on December 19, 2018

@AbiralCP: "Looking for pieces on non-'Western' philosophy written for a general audience? I've started compiling a public list."
posted by homunculus at 6:27 PM on December 21, 2018 [1 favorite]