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Feminisms

Women Philosophers

Therese Dykeman on a case for a Sherlock Holmes and Dorothy Sayers.

American women philosophers supposedly did not exist until the mid twentieth century. Of course, that wasn’t true, for it is no more possible for a mind conducive to philosophic thought to cease being so, than for a season to arrive out of order. But for a philosophic mind to be trained, that is another matter. With higher education denied to them, training was hard won for women in America, as Judith Sargent Murray pointed out in the eighteenth century.

A native of Gloucester, Massachusetts, not far from Boston, Judith wrote to her brother, Governor of the Mississippi Territory, that she lamented all her life the fact that he was allowed to attend Harvard University while she, simply because she was of the female sex, was not.

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