Some day, people will say I didn't write my own books.

I've been digging into the x-chromosome side of the history of philosophy lately. As soon as my manuscript on Mary Wollstonecraft (without zombies) was off to the publishers, I started reading Christine de Pizan. Then I had a bright idea and went further back. I knew that Abelard was studied in courses on Medieval philosophy. What about Heloise, his correspondent? And then I went a bit further down.  Plato had female students - did any of them, or any other women in the ancient world, write anything philosophical?

I'd like to say I hit gold - but it would be slightly off the mark. There just aren't many writings by women philosophers before Christine de Pizan. And not many afterwards either until the seventeenth century, when every princess worth her salt started taking on Descartes, and a few English eccentrics wrote metaphysical treatises of their own. Then, gradually, there's an increase in the female branch of the family, and now we make up nearly 20% of the profession! Hurrah! In another three or four centuries, we might actually reach equal proportions. Never lose hope.

I've ranted before about why there aren't that many women philosophers, listing several reasons, none of them have to do with women not being good enough. But I think I may have come across yet another reason.

Reading up on the Abelard and Heloise literature, I found very little analysis of what Heloise had to say. Instead, authors questioned whether she'd written the letters herself. Was the whole correspondence a forgery from the author of Le Roman de la Rose? Or did Abelard himself concoct them as a publicity stunt? Some more generous commentators suggest that maybe Abelard discussed with Heloise what her fake responses might be before he wrote them. The thought that Heloise was a highly educated woman, who taught Greek, Latin and Hebrew to the nuns in the convent she ran, did not dampen the of those wanting to write her out of philosophical history.  Of course no one suggests that it's because she's a woman. No. It just so happens that the best use of some scholars' time is in coming up with arguments why Heloise couldn't have written these letters. It also turns out that these arguments don't hold much water - as a more careful scholar, John Marenbon, convincingly argues.

When I eventually located a text attributed to an Ancient Greek woman philosopher, I had the same experience. I quickly found myriads of poorly constructed arguments why she could not have written her own piece of philosophy. Granted, the writer bore the name of Plato's mum. Given there are no records of her being a philosopher, it stretches the imagination a bit far to think she was a well-known author. It doesn't stretch it as far to think she would have written a short text though, so I'm not sure it's worth getting one's knickers in a twist. But the texts themselves are discounted as forgeries by men writing some four centuries later. Again, the arguments are shoddy. And no one seems to even entertain the possibility that the forger, or pseudonymous writer, could have been a woman. I call it bad faith. I call it bad scholarship. I call it bad philosophy.

Telling 'Im indoors about all this at lunchtime, we pondered why and when this taking over of women's philosophical productions stopped. After all, he said, nobody is claiming that Wollstonecraft's or Simone de Beauvoir's books were written by men. I said that maybe that was because they were both active, public figures, who discussed their works with other writers, so that there could be no doubt about authorship. He replied that maybe these memories were still too fresh in our minds, but that a few centuries from now, people would again start questioning whether these works had not in fact been written by Godwin or Sartre.

Which brings me to the title of this post. How long till fragments of my books turn up in some archive and someone, bent on identifying obscure philosophers from the past decides that I couldn't have written them and attributes them to a male contemporary of mine? I suppose I won't be worrying about the royalties, then.

Frankenchicken

I've been reading a fantastic book by Rebecca Skloot called The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks. It tells the history of the artificial growth of cancerous human cells for the purposes of research, of the dying woman the cells were harvested from, without her knowledge or consent and of her family who found out about the existence of the cells years later and never saw any of the money made from the growing business of selling HeLa cells, as they are still called. Henrietta Lacks died of cervical cancer in 1951, at the age of thirty-one. At that time segregation was still lawful and she ha been treated in the 'colored' section of the Johns Hopkins hospital in Baltimore. She came from a small tobacco growing town and had five children, the youngest  still only a baby.

A medieval philosopher goes on a slut walk

If you're at all like me, you'll be irritated to hell by the nasty little comments people have been making about the slut walks. So let's get a few things straight.

Women, on the whole, do not dress up in short dresses because they want strangers to pay them for sex.

Those who do, actually want to enter into some sort of contract with their potential customers, that is, they must agree to serve them and settle on a price for their service. They are not free for all.

No woman, sex worker or otherwise, wants to be raped. This means, amongst other things, that choice of clothing never indicates the desire to be sexually assaulted, by strangers or otherwise. And that still obtains even with very short skirts and very low cut tops.

To think otherwise is utterly unreasonable. Men who work in construction often go topless, sometime showing off the proverbial builder's crack. Do we think that they are thereby inviting somebody bigger and stronger than them to take them by force, maybe with the use of the instruments of their trade? No. No one, to my knowledge, has even so much as suggested it. They undress because they're too hot, and because they can.

So granted, women don't always wear skimpy clothes because of the weather. But they do wear them because of fashion. And fashion, whatever one says, is important. A teenage girls who has nothing to do with it will find it harder to make friends - not to find a boyfriend, mind you: teenage boys don't care so much about fashion - they'll find it hard to fit in. Of course that can be character building. But let's face it, we're not all cut out for isolation, and it's actually not bad for us to learn how to fit in with a community of peers.

And then there's work. Who - outside of academia - is going to give a job to a 'frumpy' looking woman? Some jobs actually require you to dress nicely, that is, to wear skirts, and heels. Maybe not short skirts, but once we become used to a certain dress style, we're going to work with it as we can. I think it's outrageous that employers should demand that women dress in a 'feminine' manner, and that the fashion industry should so relentlessly target young women. But they do. So let's not pretend that we, women come up with the idea of wearing skirts all by ourselves.

And we shouldn't get raped for it. Or be blamed when we are.

I was mulling over all this, when I came across very similar arguments in a book I am reading for next semester's teaching. It's by a medieval French philosopher, Christine de Pizan:

I am troubled and grieved when men argue that many women want to be raped and that it does not bother them at all to be raped by men even when they verbally protest. It would be hard to believe that such villainy is actually pleasant for them. (The Book of the City of Ladies II.44)

She goes on to discuss a whole bunch of famous women, from Lucretia onwards, who clearly didn't like being raped.  Then she asks whether women who like to look nice, who are coquettish are doing it to seduce. Nonsense, she says. It's perfectly natural, for men and women, to enjoy pretty things and looking good. It's done, unless one is actually required to dress a certain way, first and foremost for one's enjoyment.

No one should judge someone else's conscience from dress (II.62).

I like to think that if she could time travel, Christine would have put her ink and parchment down, last Saturday, and flown to London to join in the slut walk there. And with her medieval dresses, she would have fitted right in with the colourful and sometimes outlandish outfits that women wore on the march.

(Not)* On Ada Lovelace's day: Emilie du Chatelet

"Judge me for my own merits, or lack of them, but do not look upon me as a mere appendage to this great general or that great scholar, this star that shines at the court of France or that famed author. I am in my own right a whole person, responsible to myself alone for all that I am, all that I say, all that I do. it may be that there are metaphysicians and philosophers whose learning is greater than mine, although I have not met them. Yet, they are but frail humans, too, and have their faults; so, when I add the sum total of my graces, I confess I am inferior to no one."

      Mme du Châtelet to Frederick the Great of Prussia.


Behind every great man, they used to say, stands a great woman.
Well, some still say it. So for every great woman standing behind a great man, I say:
Take a large stick, and hit the good man over the head with it. Then stand in the light you were hidden from. Enjoy.

All this is especially true of the wives, sisters, mistresses of the men of the Enlightenment period. Mme du Chatelet is an excellent example of a woman who could have used a large stick.

International Women's Day - Judge a book by its cover.

This post is in honour of International Women's Day: a global day celebrating the economic, political and social achievements of women past, present and future, every year on 8 March, since 1911.



As part of my job, I occasionally review books. This is good, because I get free books, a publication of sorts to my name, and I get to find out what some of the other people in my field are thinking.

The latest one is a book by Robert Kane called Ethics and the Quest for Wisdom. Cool title, I thought, when the editor first contacted me about doing the review. A quick look at Amazon told me that the book seeks to revive certain ancient ethical beliefs and apply them to contemporary problems in social and political philosophy. Nice, I though. My kind of thing.

Then, a few weeks later, I received the book. Here it is:

Men, men, and more men. Fat men, skinny men, old men, young men, bearded men, bold men, men. Is this what the quest for wisdom looks like, I asked myself? If so, I might as well give up. Now.

Let them bleed

I've been following the anti-abortion debates in the United States with a growing sense of horror - which is why I was grateful for some light relief from The Feminist Philosophers' blog with their cartoon: The Mombies!!!
But what are these people thinking? Do they really think it's ok to sacrifice a mother's life in order not to kill a fetus, even though the fetus will probably die if the mother dies before the fetus is big enough to survive?

Salad Bar Philosophy, anyone?

I was listening to woman's hour again today. It was a program I'd meant to catch on the day it came out but didn't in fact listen to for a while because my computer got virused (and all...) So I listened to the podcast here. The reason I was so keen on listening to it was that they'd announced it on twitter as being about women in philosophy. As in academic women philosophers. In actual universities, teaching in actual jobs. Why there are so few of us.

So the women interviewed were saying, surprise surprise, that it's all down to cultural stereotype. Women aren't supposed to be good at abstract reasoning, and cold stuff like logic and maths. Which is sort of what Rousseau said. And Aristotle, those pillars of the sexist bastards community.

Where have all the women gone?

In my head, the great writers are women. Sure, there's Balzac. But is he really as good as Jane Austen? Don't think so. And there's Victor Hugo - eminent - but he can't touch either Charlotte or Emily. What's a better read? Dickens or Mrs Gaskell? What's a better social commentary: his Hard Times or her North and South? I know which one I'd vote for. And Sartre's novels are nothing to Beauvoir's, certainly. And contemporary fiction - well, that's mostly women, isn't it!

Still, this all seems to be in my head only, because Universities world wide are having fights about whether or not to revise their mostly male syllabi.

Now in my branch of writing, philosophy, there's even more of a gender gap. One that's not quite ready to close yet, as men are still hogging the front line in the syllabi and the university jobs.

Blame it on the Bloggin'

For this week's Writers' Workshop over at Mama Kat's , I chose the prompt "Why do you blog?"

Now, that's an interesting question, and so many people have asked me why I blogged that I feel this is the right opportunity to answer properly.

Each time I was asked that question, I always felt the need to justify myself, as if I were doing something bad or illegal. People would tilt their heads a little, looking a little concerned. For the most part, I think they dont really know what it's for. But, what is the point, they ask me.

In France, we teach philosophy in High School. Certainly not as thoroughly as we do in University, but we do read Plato and a few of his buddies. I remember my first philosophy class. I was 16 (going on 17... Sorry, BIG fan of The Sound of Music) and very excited. Sandrine had left for England a few years before that to go study philosophy and I was finally going to know what it was all about - I'm pretty sure she must have explained, but then again, I was 11 years old when she left, I'm not sure I was listening or understanding.

Our teacher was great. He was extremely smart, and like all other philosophy teachers, he taught in High schools but also in Uni, at a very high level. He used to tell us he was here to try and teach us how to think for ourselves. To exit the cave, he said.

We all sat in the classroom, I was late so I could only find a seat in the first row. I never left it after that. I liked him a lot. He thought differently from other teachers, you see. He wanted us to think, for real, and he seemed to believe we were all capable of it.

He waited for us to be quiet, and took a moment to look at us. Then, he asked: "So, what's the use of philosophy?" (in French, "Ca sert à quoi, la philo?). Many students, myself included, tried to say something smart. And then, he said: there's no use. "Ca ne sert à rien".

Blogging has no use, either. It serves no purpose. But it did bring us sisters closer, it's fun, and when I write, I think by myself. It's good enough for me.

Oh, one last thing. If you liked this post, would you mind terribly clicking on the RSS feed, here, or the Google connect buttons (top left), or by email at the bottom of this page? And if you didn't like it, you might still want to look around. There's three of us, you know, so you're (almost) bound to find something you like. And then, if you've still got time, you could share this post or stumble it, or both and get in touch with your local tv station to sing our praises. We'll love you forever.

The Passions of the Soul

This is Sister 3's entry for the Gallery / Writing Workshop mash-up.
The theme is 'Emotions'.


Renee Descartes defined the six primitive passions as love, hatred, joy, desire wonder and sadness. Any other emotion, he said, is a combination of those six, of varying intensity. Although Descartes did not think emotions should be eradicated, he believed, like the Stoics, that emotions could be mistaken, just like perceptions, and if they were they ought to be cured.

So when the Princess of Bohemia, his philosophical correspondent on the topic of mind and body for over six years, contracted a low fever, Descartes blamed it on depression and recommended she read the Stoic Seneca, all the while reflecting on how much stronger the mind is than the body.
Surprisingly, it didn't go down all that well.

Here are Sister 3's interpretations of Descartes' Passions:

A Vindication of the Rights of Zombies

Another guest post from the lovely Mary Wollstonecraft.

It has long been my impression that our world is riddled with inequalities both in nature and in our treatment of each other. What has never been till now quite clear to me is how little those we treat as inferiors owe their inferiority to nature and not prejudice. In some cases at least it is obvious that it is our societies' treatment of them that has rendered them inferior. (I think that French manners, in particular, are much to blame for this.) Such is the case, I am now convinced, with zombies. Is a zombie by its nature a brain chomping, limb dropping fool, or has it been forced to become so by the prejudices of our society?

Mary Wollstonecraft: The Musical

Mary Wollstonecraft: the Musical.

I have this idea. I want to do a musical. It will tell the life of 18th century feminist philosopher Mary Wollstonecraft. The set scenes will be from her childhood, protecting her mum from her drunk dad, being all lonely and thinking nobody loves her, wanting books. I hear some high pitched singing of a very melancholy song. Short. Then from her early adulthood, as a governess, a school teacher. A couple of songs: hectoring, enthusiastic, multi-tasking. Then work : a sung summary of the Vindication of the Rights of Woman would work well there, I think. It would start with a dialogue between her and Rousseau, with a puppy eyes beginning and Rousseau being cast out in the end, then Wollstonecraft pitched against a chorus led by Burke, and a grand finish with Wollstonecraft and chorus of women singing a song of hope for the future.
There'll be love stories, of course: her proposing a ménage à trois to her colleague Fuselli, and then the fickle American in Paris. And travelling: scenes from Portugal, Paris in the Revolution (with heads falling and all), melancholy journey through Sweden with a baby and a French maid. Next the suicide songs, when her lover leaves her and she fails to take her life twice. The marriage song, with Godwin, and last the death after childbirth song. Long and drawn out, with much blood and a weeping husband. I think that should make for a varied and fun program, don't you ? Who should I send the proposal too?

And I also want to do a cartoon version of Plato's Protagoras.

Over the hills and far away...

In correspondence with a colleague (allright, chatting with a friend on facebook), I found myself having to type the word teletubbies. I think I may have spelt it wrong, possibly with two lls. So my every helpful firefox add-on spell checker offered a few suggestions. The second one was 'intellectuals'. When spelt correctly, firefox still doesn't like it, so it suggests: 'telepathies'.
Now am I missing something here? Is there an important secret message conveyed by the post-apocalyptic brain-damaged tv-encrusted monsters? I never got around to read The Secret (always suspected the secret was how to make lots of money selling a pointless book): did it mention the teletubbies?

One other possibility which has occurred to me recently is that the teletubbies may have existed before the 20th Century. I came across some evidence while conducting research for my next book on Mary Wollstonecraft. In a letter to her friend George (Curious George?) she complains that he has gone 'over the hills and far away'. Clearly a reference to the tubs. Now of course, Wollstonecraft could have time travelled to the late 90s, and obtained the relevant knowledge here. But that is clearly not the case. Had she been here we'd have seen a bit more happening in terms of women's rights.

One thing we can deduce from the presence of the teletubbies in the eighteenth century is that they're not tied to the technology (though of course, they do have to have tellies in their bellies). What I mean is that they're probably not fictional. They might even be aliens. But if they are, they've been visitors on earth for a long time. Who among us can really tell what is on Lala or Dipsy's head? It's a sign of some kind, right? Doesn't it look almost like hieroglyphs? Maybe the ancient Egyptians tried to copy them when they came up with things like the ankh sign. Maybe they too weren't watching carefully.

With evidence of teletubbies culture in the mystical circles of ancient egypt, and amongst philosophers of the enlightenment, one cannot help but wonder. Are the teletubbies an ancient alien sect of intellectual telepaths?

The shame! (of being a French philosopher)

I had a nightmare a few nights ago. I was sitting in an old gym room, crossed legged on a rubber mat. 'Please introduce yourself to the group'. - 'My name is Sandrine' - 'Yes?' - 'I'm a philosopher.' - '?' - 'and I'm French'. - 'Please, relax. We're all friends here'. Then I look around and see everyone around me is wearing a white designer shirt, with the two top buttons undone, they're all Bernard Henry Levy! I break into a sweat as I notice I too am wearing a white shirt. I raise my hand to my head to feel for the trademark hair and as I begin to scream I wake up.


So when did 'French philosopher' become a dirty word? Was it just BHL with his cheap designer look? Or Derrida with the improbably titled books (Nietzsche's Spurs??? Postcards???). Or does it go back even further to when Hobbes and Descartes were bickering about rotten apples?

Back when I was teaching a course on the Rationalist, my head of department got my husband, a Brit, to teach the Empiricists. Now the rationalists weren't all French, by any means. Descartes and Malebranche maybe (hardly anyone teaches Malebranche though) – but Leibniz and Spinoza??? On the other hand, all the empiricists were Brits – English (Hobbes, Locke), Scottish (Hume), Irish (Berkeley). So that gives the snotty islanders a very good reason to pretend that the rationalists were French and to take the hundred years war up the ivory tower.

Then there's the whole analytic continental debate. Analytic philosophers are Brits, and Americans. They're sensible, wear cords, tweed, or jeans. They read serious philosophy of the kind that makes sense and that scientists supposedly wouldn't turn their noses up if they were to read any of it. (right). Continental philosophers are French, Italian, or anyone whose English is accented. They read Kant and Heiddeger, maybe Sartre, mix metaphysics and politics, and don't like being understood, especially by scientists (which of course, gives scientists the perfect reason to love them!) Now the funny thing is, that both kinds of philosophy are really German. And except in their most extreme, ridiculous form, they are perfectly compatible with each other. So it looks like the distinction is just one more way for the English and the French to fart at each other across the channel.

But maybe there is yet a distinct species of the French Philosopher. The French philosopher is always male. He wears designer shirts, he smokes. He fancies himself a bit of a journalist and a babe-magnet. His books are best-sellers. He doesn't even need to be French, but can be, say, Romanian. Also, he doesn't read philosophy, and is easily confused by the distinction between real and fictional writers.

Thankfully, as a woman, I can't be a French Philosopher. Saved by sexism.