An account of the lives and works of influential 17th and 18th century feminist philosophers Mary Wollstonecraft and her predecessors who have been written out of history, and a searing look at the author's experience of patriarchy and sexism in academia.
Invigorating ... Ms. Penaluna tacks between rage and humor, biography and theory. Her writing is sharp and rousing. Her message is consoling and motivating. If this is what it means to think like a woman, sign me up.
Penaluna sometimes seems to agree that there is no such thing as the female mind. She chafes at the suggestion that women are intrinsically caring and rejects the idea that they are naturally ill-suited to rational pursuits. It is suspicious, then, that the main point of connection among the four thinkers she has chosen to write about, or at least the one that she stresses, is simply that each is female ... Of course, How to Think Like a Woman is more than a resuscitation of early modern philosophers who have been unjustly excised from the canon because of their sex ... The weakest sections of the book follow Penaluna’s rocky path through graduate school at an unnamed institution ... If the personal reflections in How to Think Like a Woman are often mushy and maudlin, its portrait of philosophy’s misogyny is more firmly wrought ... These women have strikingly similar stories, but what, if anything, unites their thought? We learn a great deal about the oppression they faced, which was of course considerable, and very little about the content of their philosophies. What Penaluna does have to say about their actual commitments is often shallow and cursory ... In general, How to Think Like a Woman contains a lot of agonizing about philosophy but little philosophy itself ... Reduc[es] four rich philosophers to mere avatars of their demographic ... Not as a woman, but as a person, I think this is not how to think.
Penaluna...writes ambivalently of navigating male-dominated philosophy departments, where she wondered if her negative experiences were the result of sexism or her own inadequacy ... Penaluna zeroes in on four women who deserve more recognition ... Though Penaluna engages rigorously with her subjects’ work, she tends to focus more on biography than textual analysis. But, refreshingly, she doesn’t cast these four women as flat feminist heroes ... By giving us their names, she not only counteracts their omission from the canon, but fashions the beginnings of a new one entirely.
