The old philosophical claim that men are capable of pondering the infinite while women give sense to the finite can be read in many ways. For example, since men cannot produce babies, they console themselves with Zeno’s paradoxes. But such ideas have led to the common notion that history, at least up to the twentieth century, has brought us great female poets and writers, and women in various branches of science, but no women philosophers or mathematicians.
Such biases fostered the long-held view that women had no gift for painting, except for the likes of Rosalba Carriera or Artemisia Gentileschi. Since painting originally meant frescoing churches, it is natural that climbing on scaffolding wearing a skirt was not considered respectable, nor was it a woman’s job to run a workshop with thirty apprentices, but as soon as painting could be done on easels, women painters began to appear. It’s rather like saying the Jews were great at many arts except for painting, until Chagall. It’s fair to say that Jewish culture was primarily auditory rather than visual, and that divinity was not to be represented through images, but there’s a visual content of undoubted interest in many Jewish manuscripts. Yet during the centuries when figurative art was in the hands of the Catholic Church, it was unlikely that a Jew would be encouraged to paint Madonnas and crucifixions—it’s rather like being surprised that no Jew had ever become pope.
The chronicles of Bologna University mention women professors like Bettisia Gozzadini and Novella d’Andrea, who were so beautiful that they had to give their lectures behind a veil so as not to distract the students, but they didn’t teach philosophy. In the textbooks on philosophy we don’t come across women who teach dialectics or theology. Eloise, Abelard’s brilliant and unhappy student, had to make do with becoming an abbess.
But the position of abbess is not to be underrated, and a woman philosopher of our own time, Maria Teresa Fumagalli, has written extensively about them. An abbess was a spiritual, administrative, and political authority and carried out important intellectual functions in medieval society. A good textbook on philosophy must include among the leading figures of the history of thought such great mystics as Catherine of Siena, not to mention Hildegard of Bingen, who, in terms of metaphysical visions and perspectives on infinity, give us plenty to chew over to this day.
The argument that mysticism isn’t philosophy doesn’t hold. After all, histories of philosophy reserve space for great mystics like Henry Suso, Johannes Tauler, and Meister Eckhart. And to suggest that much of female mysticism placed more emphasis on the body than on abstract ideas would be like saying that someone like Maurice Merleau-Ponty should disappear from philosophy textbooks.
For some time, the chosen heroine of some feminists has been Hypatia, who taught Platonic philosophy and early mathematics in fifth-century Alexandria. Hypatia became a symbol, but unfortunately all that remains of her is the legend, since her works were lost, and so was she, literally hacked to pieces by a frenzied mob of Christians at the instigation, according to some historians, of Cyril of Alexandria, who was later canonized, though not on this account. But was Hypatia the only one?
A small book has recently been published in France called Histoire des femmes philosophes. Anyone curious about its author, Gilles Ménage, will discover that he lived in the seventeenth century, was Latin tutor to Madame de Sévigné and Madame de Lafayette, and that his book had been published in 1690 under the title Historia mulierum philosopharum. Hypatia was not alone: Ménage’s book, though devoted chiefly to the classical period, presents a series of fascinating figures, including Diotima the Socratic, Arete of Cyrene, Nicarete of Megara, Hipparchia the Cynic, Theodora the Peripatetic (in the philosophical sense of the word), Leontia the Epicurean, and Themistoclea the Pythagorean. Leafing through ancient texts and works by the fathers of the Church, Ménage found sixty-five references to women philosophers, though he interpreted the concept of philosophy fairly widely. Given that in Greek society the woman was kept at home, that male philosophers preferred to entertain themselves with young boys rather than girls, and that a woman had to become a courtesan if she wanted to enjoy public celebrity, we can see to what lengths these women thinkers had to go to make a name for themselves. Aspasia, on the other hand, is still remembered as a courtesan, but a high-class one; what is forgotten is that she was skilled in rhetoric and philosophy, and that, according to Plutarch, Socrates followed her with interest.
I checked at least three modern philosophy encyclopedias and, apart from Hypatia, found no trace of these names. It’s not that women philosophers didn’t exist. The fact is that male philosophers have chosen to ignore them, after first borrowing their ideas.
2003