It started with curiosity, maybe even guilt. Like I was catching up on something I should’ve known.
I walked into my history of philosophy lecture assuming it would be a familiar parade of names. The usual subjects. The Western tradition’s lineup we’re all quietly trained to accept before we even open the textbook.
But on the first day, my professor said something that caught me off guard. Not dramatically, not with fanfare, just casually, like it was the most natural thing in the world: this course would have more women philosophers than men, not as an exception, but because historical reality supports it more than people think. He talked about how these thinkers corresponded with each other, challenged each other, shaped the same debates, and how the erasure wasn’t in the ideas but in how the ideas were later curated.
I think what we call “the history of philosophy” is, in practice, a history shaped by gatekeeping. Women didn’t fail to show up; they were systematically ignored or treated as footnotes to those who borrowed their ideas. They wrote about domestic life as political, emotion as epistemic, and embodiment as central to reason. Those topics are often dismissed as too “everyday” by traditions obsessed with abstraction. But these weren’t detours from philosophy. They were looking at the full scope of human experience.
Reading women thinkers feels like stepping into a room you lived next to for years without realizing there was a door. Wollstonecraft reframes virtue as something corrupted by social expectations. Beauvoir exposes freedom not as a metaphysical concept but as a lived negotiation with constraints. María Lugones makes you rethink what it means to inhabit multiple selves at once. I’d argue they don’t simply “add” to philosophy; they destabilize it to make you reconsider the foundations. And that is the mark of a really interesting philosopher.
And the more I read, the more I noticed patterns. Post-COVID, many of us became more attuned to the invisible labour that props up academic life. Care work, emotional work, and the management of schedules and households rarely show up in canonical texts. Women philosophers wrote about these themes long before the world cared to listen. They treated dependence, vulnerability, and relationality not as flaws in rational agents but as central features of human life. In a moment when everyone is exhausted and trying to rebuild, their work feels less like historical recovery and more like necessary guidance.
What surprised me most was how studying these thinkers changed how I read everyone else. Locke looks different when you know Astell was critiquing his ideas in real time. Dualism shifts when you center Elizabeth of Bohemia instead of treating her as Descartes’ footnote. Ethics takes on new dimensions when you place care theory alongside Kantian universality. These philosophers don’t decorate the tradition. They rearrange the furniture until the whole room makes more sense.
What I came to understand is that studying women in philosophy forces a confrontation with the discipline’s assumptions. Philosophy prides itself on tracing arguments with precision, but the historical record it depends on is not neutral. When entire bodies of thought are excluded, the result is not only an incomplete canon, it’s a distorted method. The boundaries of “proper” philosophical inquiry were drawn around the concerns of a narrow demographic, and those boundaries were later presented as universal. Women philosophers expose this for what it is. A selective guide is treated as a timeless standard.
If philosophy is committed to examining the conditions of human existence, then excluding the insights of those who lived under the most restrictive conditions undermines that mission at its core. Women philosophers often write with an acute awareness of power. Their work makes it harder to retreat into comfortable abstractions, because it insists that arguments always arise from social realities. Questions about autonomy, responsibility, and political legitimacy become more demanding when they account for the asymmetries that structure actual lives.
Philosophy didn’t grow from lone minds brooding in candlelit rooms. It spread through correspondence. Women philosophers make this impossible to ignore because their networks were often the only spaces where real thinking could survive. Oftentimes, it was neither expected nor considered proper for them to pursue higher education, yet they refused to accept those limits. Their work shows that being pushed to the margins does not make a thinker less significant, and history should not treat them as though it did.
Looking back, that feeling of guilt makes sense. I thought I was catching up on something I had missed, when in reality the thing I had “missed” was intentionally removed from view. The course didn’t offer a new angle. It showed what philosophy looks like when the room is fully lit.
Studying women philosophers isn’t an act of charity or representation. It’s a requirement for anyone who wants to understand how ideas actually develop and how they shape the world we live in. Their work complicates, expands, and strengthens the questions philosophy cares about. It pushes the field toward honesty. If philosophy is supposed to be a search for truth, then the truth demands we study everyone who contributed to it, not only those the canon found convenient.