Addressing a black hole in history: where are the women philosophers?

In the words of Friedrich Nietzche, aphorisms and quips concerning women:

Ah, women. They make the highs higher and the lows more frequent.

A woman may very well form a friendship with a man, but for this to endure, it must be assisted by a little physical antipathy.

In the last analysis, even the best man is evil: in the last analysis, even the best woman is bad.

If you go to see the woman, don't forget the whip.

In the words of Arthur Schopenhauer, from his essay "On Women":

One needs only to see the way she is built to realize that woman is not intended for great mental or for great physical labor. She expiates the guilt of life not through activity but through suffering, through the pains of childbirth, caring for the child and subjection to the man, to whom she should be a patient and cheering companion... Women are suited to being the nurses and teachers of our earliest childhood precisely because they themselves are childish, silly and short-sighted, in a word big children, their whole lives long: a kind of intermediate stage between the child and the man, who is the actual human being, ‘man.’ One has only to watch a girl playing with a child, dancing and singing with it the whole day, and then ask oneself what, with the best will in the world, a man could do in her place.

G.W.F. Hegel on women from The Philosophy of Right:

Women can, of course, be educated, but their minds are not adapted to the higher sciences, philosophy, or certain of the arts. Women may have happy inspirations, taste, elegance, but they have not the ideal. The difference between man and woman is the same as between animal and plant. The animal corresponds more closely to the character of the man, the plant to that of the woman. In woman there is a more peaceful unfolding of nature, a process, whose principle is the less clearly determined unity of feeling. If woman were to control the government, the state would be in danger, for they do not act according to the dictates of universality, but are in influenced by accidental inclinations and opinions. The education of woman goes on one only knows how, in the atmosphere of picture thinking, as it were, more through life than through the acquisition of knowledge. Man attains his position only through stress of thought and much specialized effort.

Now, let us add to the above that Immanuel Kant believed a woman is complicit in her own rape; Hobbes barely touched upon the status of women in his Leviathan although he seemed to suggest that in the state of nature mothers have dominion over families, but with the establishment of the commonwealth, which in consequence of its being founded by men, places women under the dominion of men; and Aristotle believed a woman is "an inferior being" and that the courage of a man lies in commanding and woman in obeying. When one reviews the history of Western philosophy one quickly sees that all the great names and contributors are men and, interestingly, their disparaging views on women is rooted in Judeo-Christian values or in the cultures of societies that are generally patriarchal.

Of course, one could also argue that many of these lionized philosophical figureheads just couldn't get laid and their bitterness reflected over onto their writings. Such was the case of Nietszche and Lou Andrea Salomé, a writer and intellectual in her own right, who refused to marry him and thwarted his advances. Schopenhauer also appears to have had "mommy issues" and spent most of his adult life alone with the exception of refusing marriage at 19 and having been rejected by another woman he pursued at age 43. Kant, for whatever reason, never married. Certainly, we can't discount that many a male philosophers' experience of women may well have been bitter.

But where are women in the great discourses of philosophy? They certainly existed but they are only footnotes in history. One of the reasons for this may have been the widespread denial of literacy and education to women historically. Only with literacy and education did women become interested in joining men in philosophizing and engaging in political debate and moral arguments. Albeit, over time they were often overshadowed by men who wrote the history and created a narrative devoid of women in intellectual discourse.

15th-century writer Christine De Pizan, one of those rare exceptions to the rule, wrote a staunch defense against contemporary theories of female inferiority with her publication of The Book of City Ladies in 1405. Francois Poullain de la Barre, a 17th century French writer, rejected the notion that women's intellects were inferior to that of men and championed the existence of an equality of reason in both men and women. Juana Inez de la Cruz, a Mexican nun and contemporary of de la Barre, also challenged the right of a woman to pursue education, albeit, she was later silenced.

Among writers and thinkers of centuries past were often the financially independent courtesans and salon hostesses in France. Ninon de Lenclos, a 17th-century epicurean and a writer, defended the possibility of living a good life sans religion, a scandalous proposition in her day. She also wrote prolifically concerning the relations between men and women and nobility sent their sons to her for advice on courtship. Madame de Staël, an 18th century salon hostess, also published her own opinions on political transformations of her age and involved herself in revolutionary activities during Napoleon's reign.

Women's later involvement in philosophical treatises and arguments concerned overturning notions of their own inferiority as well as existing assumptions on the value of their political existence. These writers included Mary Wollstonecraft, considered by many the first modern feminist; and with the suffragist movement Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Soujourner Truth, Harriet Taylor Mill, and Susan B. Anthony; then among the existentialists Simone de Beauvoir, and among political theorists, Hanah Arendt. With education and political participation women have become members of philosophical and political discourses in academia, albeit, feminism stands out as the thread that takes into account both philosophy and politics.

It will be interesting to see, in the future, women rise in prominence as philosophers, theorists, and scientists that their names should become as cliche as Nietszche, Schopenhauer, and Hegel. A pity that male philosophers in the past, despite all their brilliance, lacked the foresight to understand the causes and consequences of a woman's condition in their time or, perhaps, pity the bitterness these men probably never had the love of a woman or love for a woman.