Review by Booklist Review
This thought-provoking book unfolds in a double narrative. One is an engaging overview of the personal lives and intellectual pursuits of women philosophers from antiquity through modern day, a considerable achievement given ongoing efforts to erase or omit their names and contributions from the patriarchal canon. A second, equally compelling story line is author Penaluna's memoir. Penaluna first fell in love with philosophy as an undergrad. She married her graduate adviser and settled into a career in academia as a professor. Despite suffering from occasional bouts of self-doubt and impostor syndrome, she believed herself to be happy. Readers will be caught up in her dawning sense of self-realization as she delves further into her research, uncovering the wisdom of past women philosophers and their views on intellectual capability, self-determination, and notions of liberty. Galvanized, Penaluna devised a new life for herself: she left her husband, moved across the country, and found a new career in scientific journalism. Years, a new relationship, and two kids later, Penaluna participated in a literary evening dedicated to muses. This ignited a spark; Penaluna dug out her notebooks and started writing this book. Readers interested in both interior and exterior lives will be very happy that she did.
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
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. (Mar.)
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Review by Library Journal Review
Plunging into the study of philosophy, Penaluna ended up embittered by its implicit rejection of women's intellect. Then she discovered epistemologist Damaris Cudworth Masham; English novelist, dramatist, and philosopher Catharine Cockburn; and philosopher/rhetorician Mary Astell, all of whom she presents with Mary Wollstonecraft as leading 1660s-1770s women philosophers who taught her to love the discipline again.
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Review by Kirkus Book Review
A writer and journalist fuses her memoir with the forgotten writings of four female philosophers to carve an intellectual space that is all her own. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Penaluna, a former editor at Nautilus Magazine and Guernica, discovered the study of philosophy in the university to be stiflingly sexist and systematically silencing. In this debut, she recounts her love for--and eventual separation from--both her academic discipline and her philosopher husband. She shares her narrative alongside accessible biographies and critiques of four "lost feminist philosophers": Mary Astell, Damaris Masham, Mary Wollstonecraft, and Catherine Cockburn. Contextualizing the "woman question," Penaluna punctuates the text with discussions of the male-dominated philosophical canon, women who had relationships with famous philosophers, and the teachings of various women intellectuals. The book is full of interesting tidbits and thought-provoking observations, but some sections are more compelling than others, and a sense of scholarly detachment infiltrates the author's personal account. Still, Penaluna provides an incisive exploration of the forces that exclude women from the pursuit of knowledge and the ways that women sometimes abet their own oppression. Her reflections on academic life--often characterized by loneliness, unease, and self-doubt--emphasize the tensions between the pursuit of objective truth and the indulgence of subjective sensibilities long considered the domain of women. Her work is an astute alternative to both the study of philosophy as currently practiced and its assumed classics, and Penaluna lays the foundation for a new genre--and community--in which women can more easily participate in the life of the mind. Her story of rebuilding and reimagining personally and professionally demonstrates defiant independence from patriarchal prescriptions and their shame and an embrace of feminist anger, ambiguity, and diversity of thought. While the author struggles some to make all components work powerfully, the book is a solid, entertaining, and intellectually stimulating attempt at a new kind of work. An occasionally tepid but ultimately satisfying, redemptive reclamation of the female voice in the study of philosophy. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
