Reviewed by Sara Ebenreck
St. Mary’s College of Maryland

In response to the question, "Why have there been so few women philosophers in the Western tradition?" feminist historian Gerda Lerner points to the way that cultural and institutional factors led women thinkers to express their ideas in forms other than the academic essays favored by male philosophers. We must "recognize the subversive… manner of women’s thought and claim its legitimacy," she asserts (Lerner 2000, 8). Only so will we begin to grasp the wealth present in the intellectual history of women.

Rediscovering Women Philosophers pursues that important mission by exploring the work of five earlier women philosophers for their ethical insight. As she does this, author Catherine Villanueva Gardner reveals how the alternative forms of expression chosen by these women philosophers are themselves of philosophical import. In sequence, she analyzes the letters of Catherine Macaulay, the allegorical Book of the City of Ladies by Christine de Pisan, the often dramatically intense essays of Mary Wollstonecraft, the novels of George Eliot, and the mystical insights of Mechthild of Magdeburg. Piece by piece the historical foundations for much contemporary feminist ethical discussion are laid; feminist ethics, the reader begins to see, has its own fore-mothers.

Can a sequence of letters—usually seen as existing in the sphere of private, not public, writing—contain systematic ethical philosophy? Gardner argues that Macaulay’s letters on education do precisely that. Macaulay begins with the principle that consistency requires "one rule of right for the conduct of all rational beings." Education, our means for understanding ideals of moral excellence, must therefore be as consistently available to women as to men (32-41). Sympathetic feelings that open us to a moral, empathetic response to the needs of others must be fostered; this, in turn, requires social and legal provisions that encourage moral excellence in all humans (41-45). Gardner’s concern here is to lift into view a philosophical perspective on gender equity that is developed in a non-traditional form and has its own unique twists and turns of thought; for example, sympathetic response is not opposed here to rational principle.

With Christine de Pisan’s work, Gardner takes a further step, arguing that the allegorical form of the "city of ladies" is itself a philosophical statement about the capacity of image, rather than linear argument, to present multiple layers of meaning. Christine’s book is a response to misogynist insults about women’s abilities. Chapters in it cite example after example of exemplary virtuous, wise, creative women whose supposed "weaknesses" are turned into strengths. For example, Xanthippe’s show of emotion over Socrates’ forthcoming death is seen as empathetic caring for her husband and children. Although Christine was deeply impressed by Joan of Arc and other women who took on public leadership, she generally argues for complementary rather than equal powers for men and women. Her philosophical position thus lacks appeal for many contemporary feminists. But Gardner focuses on the way that Christine’s creation of an allegorical city provides a symbolic context within which women can learn of the great moral significance of their life-choices. Thus, even while being focused on supporting their husbands, they are freed from the status of being less important actors in the morality play that is human life on earth. Wifely life has its own moral excellence. Analogously, allegory is not simply some inferior form of doing philosophy; it is, rather, a form with its own stature among diverse patterns for expression of truth.

In her analysis of Wollstonecraft’s work, Gardner adroitly puts forward the argument that what is often seen as philosophical ineptness (e.g., Wollstonecraft’s failure to write purely and abstractly rational treatises) is actually a deliberate and philosophically important choice to "smudge the boundaries between poetry and philosophy" (83). This chapter traces in depth Wollstonecraft’s philosophical position that genuine feeling is not opposed to reasoned principle. "False" feelings are the problematic issue; Wollstonecraft’s novel Maria insightfully shows how the moral dilemma of marriage is often that its social requirements lead women to stifle genuine feelings and develop false ones—resulting ultimately in a "false morality" (110). Seen as a whole, Gardner writes, Wollstonecraft’s work raises profound questions about the ability of the "tightly argued" philosophical essay to serve as the best model for presentation of insight from a philosophical investigation.

The chapter on George Eliot first addresses the error of assuming that a philosophically important novel is about a philosophy that would better be expressed in abstract form. Here, Gardner neatly disposes of work that sees Eliot’s novels as expositions of the philosophy of Comte or Spinoza. That accomplished, Gardner proceeds to draw out Eliot’s delineation of the way that self-understanding and sympathetic relationships to others form the basis of moral action. As is Christine de Pisan’s City of Ladies, Eliot’s fiction is seen as work that draws us into practicing that understanding and sympathy. Thus the active reader may develop, through relationship to the fictional work, personal qualities that are not encouraged by the argumentative stance of a more usual philosophical treatise.

The study of Mechthild’s mystical writing gets at a final issue related to the definition of what counts as philosophical work, namely, the autonomy of authorship and the originality and rational coherence of the ideas expressed. From a traditional Western intellectual standpoint, ideas "received" and then expressed lack autonomy and originality; a "wandering" form of expression lacks explicit rational coherence. Here, Gardner mounts a challenge to the concepts of autonomy, originality, and coherence themselves. Knowing may arise out of loving relationship, and the wisdom expressed may be available to more than one person. Coherence may exist precisely in the wandering circularity of expression.

Gardner now takes a final step. She says, "the assumption of the dominant model of moral philosophy—that the notion of morality that it begins with is somehow an ahistorical, universal, neutral ‘given’—is questionable" (173). The focus on abstract principles, argued for by purely rational approaches, itself involves a suspect notion of what morality is. If sympathetic relationship is at the heart of moral life, then autobiographical sketches or prose designed to elicit empathy may more aptly draw a reader into consideration of moral ideas.

The importance of the study of work by earlier women philosophers now becomes obvious. Firstly, it provides a historical foundation for such contemporary feminist developments as "the ethics of care." Further, what is revealed in Gardner’s analysis is the way that women thinkers have for centuries been undercutting the dualistic distinction between reason and feeling, in ways that might illumine contemporary discussion about the relationship between an ethic of justice and an ethic of care. That particular potential is undeveloped in the book itself, however. As the curiously titled "A Few Comments on Content" section of the book’s conclusion indicates, Gardner is most interested here in issues related to the boundaries created within the discipline about what counts as philosophical, and why. If George Eliot and other philosophical novelists are not only exemplifying a philosophy but expressing it in ways that more truly lead us to the complex layers of meaning than would a purely rational analysis, then the nature of philosophy as discipline is open to question. Indeed the boundaries between traditional academic disciplines are revealed to be problematic.

Questioning the value-laden choices at the very basis of what the Western philosophical traditional has generally called "moral philosophy" or "ethical theory" is fine philosophical work, making this book significant for readers who may have otherwise thought of work on non-canonical women thinkers as marginal to their interests. What is needed next is an undergraduate-friendly reader that includes selections (perhaps beginning with the fragments from women Pythagorean philosophers contained in the first volume of Mary Ellen Waithe’s A History of Women Philosophers) with commentary from the long historical trail of women’s ethical poetry and prose (see Waithe 1987, Waithe 1989, Waithe 1991, Waithe 1994). With books such as Gardner’s the map of women’s intellectual history becomes more visible, its importance ever more apparent. This work needs to be integrated at every level of philosophical study.

Works Cited

Lerner, Gerda. 2000. "Why Have There Been So Few Women Philosophers?" In Presenting Women Philosophers, ed. Cecile T. Tougas and Sara Ebenreck. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.

Waithe, Mary Ellen. 1987. A History of Women Philosophers. Volume I. Dordrecht: Kluwer.

______________. 1989. A History of Women Philosophers. Volume II. Dordrecht: Kluwer.

______________. 1991. A History of Women Philosophers. Volume III. Dordrecht: Kluwer.