HOW TO THINK LIKE A WOMAN

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.