Lost voices: on counteracting exclusion of women from histories of contemporary philosophy

While women philosophers are beginning to be rediscovered in the Early Modern period, they are conspicuously missing from later nineteenth and early to mid-twentieth century histories of philosophy.¹ This is especially the case for those who would now be considered to have been working in the analytic tradition, women who had a huge geographical and linguistic range. Some respected histories of analytic philosophy mention no women at all (e.g. Coffa, The Semantic Tradition). Many assume that no women were involved in contemporary philosophy until the late 1940s or early 1950s, and discuss only a single female theoretical philosopher, such as Elizabeth Anscombe or Ruth Barcan Marcus, spending only a small part of a single page on her work (e.g. Soames, The Analytic Tradition, 1 page out of 657; Glock, What is Analytic Philosophy?, 1 page out of 292). Why, then, do so few philosophers read Ruth Barcan Marcus? Why do they read Martha Kneale only in the context of her joint book with her husband (Kneale and Kneale, Development of Logic), and know Alice Ambrose and Margaret Macdonald only for their editorial work on Wittgenstein’s writings (Ambrose, Wittgenstein’s Lectures)? Why have most of us never even heard the names of the other women featured in this Special Issue, Christine Ladd-Franklin, Olga Plümacher, Dorothy Wrinch, or Ayda Ignez Arruda? Unlike the female philosophers from earlier periods in the history of philosophy, these women’s careers did not take place outside the public sphere. Nor are they neglected because their works are difficult to come by. Between the 1880s and 1940s, women published in Mind, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, the Journal of Symbolic Logic, and the Journal of Philosophy as well as writing widely distributed books. The first wave of the feminist movement had ensured some progress for female students and academics. With the advent of women’s colleges from the mid-to-late nineteenth century, women had access to the same philosophical education as their male colleagues (although, as Ladd-Franklin found, they were not always awarded the same degrees for their efforts). They were able to hold job titles like Lecturer in Logic or Professor of Philosophy, albeit often at relatively poor and under-resourced women’s colleges. Their absence from the canon of nineteenth- and twentieth-century analytic philosophy is, rather, because of a combination of sexist obstacles these women faced and narrative bias in our standard historiography. In some cases, it is also because of a language barrier. Late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century philosophy was more linguistically diverse than analytic philosophy presently is, with important works appearing in, for example, German, French, Polish, and Portuguese. Unlike male philosophers’ key contributions, women’s works in those languages frequently remain untranslated (see Janssen-Lauret, “Women in Logical Empiricism”). This issue includes papers on one German-speaking and one Portuguese-speaking philosopher, Olga Plümacher and Ayda Ignez Arruda.

1. Great minds and male-only genealogical mythology

Histories of contemporary philosophy are still being written to exclude women, if inadvertently. Part of the reason for this is that historians pay attention to the philosophers that have received the most attention in the past. Perhaps unsurprisingly, these philosophers are overwhelmingly male. Male academics in the past often displayed highly explicit sexist biases against female intellectuals in these early days of women’s education when, for a woman, the act of publishing academic works or holding an academic post was a strong feminist statement in itself. Men’s dismissive attitudes were sometimes strongly worded, but often ill-supported and sometimes contradictory. For example, Victoria Welby, in her book What Is Meaning? set out a pioneering programme in the philosophy of language, considering language as a collection of context-sensitive, socially produced behaviours in light of the new evolutionary biology and the emerging science of psychology. C.S. Peirce wrote a review, in which he called her book one of “two really important works on logic” (the other was Russell’s Principles), as well as, on the very same page, “feminine” and “painfully weak”, exhorting “the male reader” to skip several chapters (Peirce, Review, 143). Constance Jones proposed a version of the sense-reference distinction in 1890 (Jones, Elements). Like Frege, she was dissatisfied with the third of the traditional covering laws of Aristotelian logic, the law of identity, expressed as ‘A is A’, because most statements which feature in syllogisms or everyday reasoning are either informative identities, like ‘courage is valour’ (Jones, Elements, 54) not of the form ‘A is A’, or subject-predicate statements which do not express an identity. Jones proposed that the general form of the proposition was not ‘A is A’, but ‘S copula P’ (Jones, Elements, 54). On her view, as she explained in a later paper, “any Subject of Predication is an identity of denotation in diversity of intension” (Jones, “A New Law,” 169); in more familiar terms, a true subject-predicate statement presents an identical referent as falling under different intensions or senses (Janssen-Lauret, “Grandmothers of Analytic Philosophy”). Although Frege, with his mathematical logic, made certain advances, the denotation-intension model which Jones (who was denied a thorough mathematical education as a girl) puts forward strikingly prefigures his ‘Über Sinn und Bedeutung’. But Russell, though aware of her work, refused to give her credit (Waithe and Cicero, “E.E.C. Jones”) and used outright sexist terms to dismiss her as “motherly, prissy, and utterly stupid” (Russell, The Collected Papers, 470). Subsequent historians have often taken their cues from Russell and ignored Jones. On the rare occasions when twenty-first-century historians do discuss Jones, they often foreground these sexist remarks of Russell’s, presenting them either without commentary (Senechal, I Died for Beauty, 51) or describing them neutrally as “misgivings” of Russell’s (Ostertag, “Emily Elizabeth Constance Jones”), rather than correctly describing them as sexist (Janssen-Lauret, “Grandmothers of Analytic Philosophy”). Russell in particular, someone who liked to frame history in his favour, is given a great deal of power to proclaim what is of importance, which means that those he opposed or disapproved of, for philosophical or other reasons, can be marginalized in the history of analytic philosophy due to this influence.² By listening only to those who were ‘in charge’ of that narrative at the time, like Russell, past sexism is reinforced in the present. One might look at this process as a sort of feedback loop of exclusion. Those who received the most attention when they wrote are now considered to be the most important philosophers and their opinions of their contemporaries are credited. Those dismissed by them at the time often continue to be ignored.

This feedback loop is evident in all the papers in this Special Issue. Olga Plümacher (1839–95) was not much discussed in the written work of other thinkers, although Nietzsche had heavily annotated copies of her books (further elucidated by Christopher Janaway’s paper in this issue). Christine Ladd-Franklin’s (1847–1930) work was undermined and ignored in her lifetime and she has not been properly acknowledged for her part in the pragmatist tradition (as explained by Kenneth Boyd in this issue). Dorothy Wrinch’s (1894–1976) viable solution to Wittgenstein’s nonsense challenge to Russell’s multiple relata theory is never cited in that extensive debate, as it did not receive much attention at the time, or only as a possible clue to Russell’s own thoughts on the matter (which Giulia Felappi gives an account of in her paper in this issue). Margaret MacDonald’s (1903–1956) extensive philosophical publications in leading journals in the 1930s and 1940s were largely ignored, except for the occasional incorrect assimilation to a male philosopher, such as Moore. MacDonald, Alice Ambrose (1906–2001) and Martha Kneale (1909–2001) were all invited symposiasts who found their positions ignored, misunderstood or ridiculed, which has led to a lack of engagement with their ideas now.³ Barcan Marcus’ papers were consistently ignored in favour of the work of Kripke which ending up distorting her original position (as described in the paper by Janssen-Lauret, in this issue). A person’s role in the work of the time is often quickly forgotten and left out of emerging histories, as in the case of Arruda (see paper by Gisele Dalva Secco and Miguel Alvares Lisboa in this issue).

While histories of contemporary philosophy tend to emphasize the philosophical significance of past positions in order to justifiably include them in that history, there is a problem with the shift in what counts as philosophically important.⁴ Given this, philosophers advocate a charitable approach: the so-called ‘principle of charity’ dictates that we must assume past philosophers have good reasons to hold to their positions.⁵ Such a principle is, however, differentially applied; because women philosophers were so heavily criticized, ridiculed and dismissed in their own lifetimes, particularly by male philosophers now deemed important to the perceived foundations of our discipline, there is a tendency to continue such treatment of women philosophers of this period. While the big male players were allowed to challenge and criticize their contemporaries, women who wrote critically are more likely to be marginalized in this history than taken seriously. There is also a tendency to try to find philosophical reasons rather than sexist ones for the ridicule and dismissal of female philosophers by their male contemporaries.⁶ When history writes out dissenting voices and different positions within a certain field, many already marginalized philosophers get completely obscured. Some of the women discussed in this Issue cannot be slotted easily into a history that did not include their ideas in the first place.⁷ Plümacher’s philosophical views are part of a less well-known moment of critique of Schopenhauer, different from her contemporary von Hartmann. Ladd-Franklin is part of the less integrated pragmatist strand of early analytic thought; and although she was influenced by Peirce, her views offer an alternative to his. Wrinch’s position was unique at the time, but is assumed to have been Russell’s, although he never published or publicly proclaimed anything like these ideas. MacDonald’s interactions with other philosophers, including Ryle, and her views on meta-philosophy, show a unique position, not reducible to any others, which challenges the usual dichotomies of this history. While influenced by Wittgenstein, is it is wrong to see her as a mere cipher for his ideas; many of her own developments were published well before his Philosophical Investigations. This is also true of Alice Ambrose, who developed ideas in the philosophy of language and meta-philosophy that are almost never discussed as part of the history of this period, despite their merits. When there is an interest in her work, it is often labelled as merely that of ‘the Wittgensteinian’ or assimilated to the views of Morris Lazerowitz, her husband, and thus her own input is grossly obscured. Kneale was one of the brightest students of her generation but her early work does not fit neatly into the categories we are used to, seeking a better understanding of the metaphysics of time from an analytic perspective. While Barcan Marcus’ quantified modal logic is known, the ground-breaking aspects of this work are often overlooked in order to focus on more familiar names. This is also the case with Arruda; while the history of paraconsistent logic and Latin American philosophy has been brought into focus in recent years, Arruda’s role in this has not been acknowledged.

Being inattentive to the social and institutional factors which lead to the silencing of female voices is a serious error which leads to an emaciated view of the topics under discussion and of the different available perspectives on these voiced by marginalized groups. While it is impossible to undo both the initial tendencies to undermine, ignore and sometimes take ideas from women but without acknowledgement, it is imperative to circumvent further damage by forcefully counteracting any such tendencies in the present day. In common with the rediscovery of early modern women’s philosophical voices, there will necessarily be some initial effort. The style of content of philosophy from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries are now unfamiliar; in order to understand the import of this philosophical work, a certain context is required and an acceptance of the lack of familiarity. Since a majority of the time, male philosophers of this period not only serve as the philosophical canon but are also read by first year undergraduate students to introduce them to ‘philosophy’, the very idea of the discipline becomes thought of as something that only men participated in until relatively recently.⁸ It also makes reading those historical texts by men easier because they are familiar to most people from the beginning of studying philosophy. Even when the writing style or logical content is difficult or almost impossible to make sense of, for example, Russell and Whitehead’s Principia Mathematica, men’s works are shown immense respect despite, or even maybe due to, their impenetrability. Women philosophers of this period, on the other hand, are often dismissed because the style and content of their work is unfamiliar and some are derided for writing in a way that is too technical, for example, Ruth Barcan Marcus (1921–2012) and Ayda Ignez Arruda (1936–1983).⁹

2. Institutional sexism

In addition to the implicit and explicit bias in the attitudes of their contemporaries, and the implicit historiographical bias inherent in the Great Men narrative that has such a hold over twenty-first-century historians of philosophy, women’s works have also been obscured as a result of institutional sexism and social factors. Just as attitudinal bias can be explicitly expressed or remain implicit, we see some highly explicit institutional biases against women, especially towards the earlier end of the period discussed in the papers collected here, and some implicit, subtler ones. The cause of women’s higher education was a controversial one in the nineteenth and early twentieth century. Many universities and colleges refused altogether to admit women as students or hire them as faculty. Christine Ladd-Franklin was only admitted for graduate study to the all-male Johns Hopkins because she applied as ‘C. Ladd’. When the university found out that she was female, it placed limits on what lectures she could attend. She published her PhD work in 1883 (Ladd, “On the Algebra of Logic”) but, because she was a woman, she was not actually awarded her doctorate by the university until 1926 (see paper by Boyd). This state of affairs was relatively slow to change. Ruth Barcan Marcus arrived as a female graduate student at Yale, a previously all-male institution which did not then allow female undergraduates, in the early 1940s. She reports being discouraged from taking up the post of chair of the student philosophy society because of her gender, being banned from undergraduate classrooms even as a TA, and being unwelcome in parts of the library (Barcan Marcus, “A Philosopher’s Calling”, 80–81). Her appointment as head of the philosophy department at the University of Illinois was queried – though fortunately unsuccessfully – on the grounds that there had never been a female head of department at that University (see Janssen-Lauret’s paper in this special issue). Until the mid-twentieth century, many women attended and worked at women’s colleges only. But during this period, especially early on, these single-sex colleges were under-resourced, their accommodation rather Spartan, their staff underpaid and overworked (Jones, As I Remember). In Cambridge, students at women’s colleges, Girton and Newnham, could take the University Tripos (Honours) exams from the 1870s onwards – in 1880, Constance Jones, reading Moral Sciences, was the joint first Girton student to achieve a First-Class mark – but women who passed those exams were nevertheless not permitted to graduate with their degrees until 1948.

Explicit institutional discrimination was also responsible for the scarcity of academic posts open to female applicants. Alice Ambrose, already in possession of a PhD, could only find financial support as a student in Cambridge. Ambrose was, in fact, exceptionally fortunate to secure a Newnham College Studentship in philosophy at all, being the only woman of her generation to do so (see paper by Connell in this issue). Wrinch held a Junior Research Fellowship at Oxford, but in mathematics. Women in academia were often insecurely employed, especially near the beginning of their careers (see the papers by Kremer on MacDonald, by Connell on Ambrose, and by Felappi on Wrinch). Among the posts open to female applicants, some were open only to single women, not married ones (Janssen-Lauret, “Grandmothers of Analytic Philosophy”). Female philosophers fortunate enough to find permanent posts often worked at women’s colleges; Jones at Girton, Stebbing and Macdonald at Bedford in London, Kneale at Lady Margaret Hall in Oxford, Ambrose and Wrinch at Smith in Massachusetts. These institutions were often poor, with heavy teaching loads and few opportunities for promotion – Susan Stebbing made the newspapers in 1933, when she was promoted to become the UK’s first female Professor of Philosophy. But she was told that, due to her gender, she would not be considered for the Knightbridge Professorship in Cambridge which would have freed up more of her time (Chapman, Susan Stebbing). Administration was also a burden often unequally shared between male and female academics. Senior faculty at women’s colleges often needed to spend significant time fundraising, because their institutions might otherwise be under threat of closure (Jones, As I Remember). Arruda, though employed in a co-educational state university, felt compelled to spend much energy and even her own financial resources supporting workshops and conferences on logic. She also supported them with her own labour, performing secretarial tasks such as typing up proceedings of these conferences on computers she had bought with her own money (see Secco and Lisboa’s paper). Time spent on teaching and administration, however necessary it might be to support their students and communities, was time which female philosophers could not spend on their own research.

Having only or primarily female teachers and mentors, or only female students, was a double-edged sword for many female academics. Many pioneers of women’s education highly valued the work of teaching the next generation of female scholars. They relished the exchange of ideas with other intellectual women in their single-sex colleges, and perhaps the respite from the patronising attitudes of the powerful men in their fields (Janssen-Lauret, “Grandmothers of Analytic Philosophy”). But being in women-only environments also served to separate women from key networks of patronage, their early promise spotted only by female, less powerful lecturers at their women’s college, their letters of recommendation from female mentors taken less seriously than letters from men, their ideas not heard as much by (male) journal editors and (male) potential job appointment committee members, their works less read and less cited. Those who did have male teachers and mentors ran into different problems. Wrinch received some support from Russell but did not benefit hugely from it. In her early career, she followed her husband to Oxford, doing some teaching at the various women’s colleges, and remained in a state of precarity (see paper by Felappi and Senechal, I Died for Beauty). Ambrose’s PhD supervisor, Wittgenstein, harnessed her skills to support his own work, leaving her little time for hers. She subsequently had difficulty emerging from his shadow (see Connell’s paper in this issue).

3. Social factors and gendered expectations

Female philosophers’ careers were further hampered by sexist societal expectations. Female socialization, in the mainstream Western and Latin American societies to which the authors featured here belong, instils in women a range of expectations, including that they ought to help and support others, be mindful of the needs of their families, partners and friends, and give due credit to others for their contributions. Although these are in themselves laudable ambitions, they can be harmful in excess, leading to women putting themselves last, consistently prioritizing their partners’ and families’ wishes over their own needs, and being overly modest in their self-descriptions. They are also difficult to square with the expectations for success in academia, which require, in addition to teaching and service, pushing an original line of research, protecting one’s time to complete books and articles, and promoting one’s own views. Where women chose instead to override their socialization and assert themselves, they had to weather responses ranging from acerbic to brutal. Alice Ambrose chose to make clear her wish to free up more time for her own research by devoting less to supporting Wittgenstein’s, and to go on the academic job market. Wittgenstein responded by withdrawing his support for her PhD. Ambrose persisted; she finished her PhD with Moore and did secure academic employment (see paper by Connell). While women have made inroads into academia and other workplaces, the catch-22 situation of having to be assertive and protective of one’s time to succeed at work, but having to be caring, nurturing, and considerate towards one’s students and colleagues in order not to be perceived negatively and penalized, persists for women and other minorities to the present day.

Women who had children (like Ladd-Franklin, Wrinch, Kneale, and Barcan Marcus) or other caring responsibilities (like Jones, who took some years out to care for her beloved aunt, and Wrinch, whose first husband had severe mental illness) generally shouldered the bulk of the caregiving work within their families, receiving little support in this area from male partners or relatives. Heal’s paper on Kneale explains how Kneale’s family responsibilities combined with consistent condescension or discouragement from fellow philosophers lead to a gradual disengagement from research. The young Wrinch, insecurely employed, a new mother, and following her husband in pursuit of his career, chafed against domestic expectations, even publishing a book under the alias ‘Jean Ayling’, called Retreat from Parenthood. Wrinch subsequently found her situation intolerable as her husband became incapacitated by his illness, resulting in his being sectioned and her being granted a divorce. Wrinch and her daughter moved to the USA, where she remained insecurely employed for the rest of her life (Senechal, I Died for Beauty).

A further compounding social factor is the tendency to subsume women’s thought to that of their male teachers, mentors, or partners, particularly if they were married. Ladd-Franklin’s thought is not sufficiently distinguished from that of her mentor Peirce (see paper by Boyd). Wrinch’s development of Russell’s theory of judgement makes a great leap forward, instead of merely spelling out what Russell thought (see paper by Felappi). Stebbing is often erroneously described as a ‘follower’ of her mentor G.E. Moore, despite the fact that much of Stebbing’s work is on philosophy of physics, a subject Moore was not expert in, and that her work makes clear advances on his (Janssen-Lauret, “Susan Stebbing’s Metaphysics”). Ambrose felt forced by an irate Wittgenstein to add footnotes to her papers on finitism attributing the main ideas to him, even after her papers had been accepted by the journal editor, Moore. Her work with her husband, Morris Lazerowitz, is considered more his than hers, although the work was genuinely joint, and her name came first (see paper by Connell). Martha Kneale published a key text on the history of logic with her husband, William Kneale, but even though the introduction clearly states that the work on ancient logic is all hers, she rarely receives credit for the original views expressed there (see paper by Heal). Female socialization expecting women to be helpful and supportive led some women to concentrate on supporting their male associates; others had this role forced upon them.¹⁰

Married women also had difficulties publishing under their own names, where they chose to either keep or hyphenate their original last names. Christine Ladd married her colleague Fabian Franklin, and confused numerous editors and indexers with her (for the nineteenth-century) unusually feminist double-barrel; citations and references to her often erroneously list her as ‘Mrs Franklin’ or ‘CL Franklin’ (Janssen-Lauret, “Grandmothers of Analytic Philosophy”). Several women sought to avoid the associations of a feminine first name by publishing under their initials, like E.E.C. Jones, L.S. Stebbing, and G.E.M. Anscombe. Wrinch published as ‘Wrinch’, despite being married first to a Dr. Nicholson and then to a Dr. Glaser. But Ruth Barcan, having published her pioneering symbolic quantified modal logic while still a graduate student in 1946–1947, received a ‘testy’ note from a journal editor informing her that, since she was married, she must publish all future papers under her ‘legal name’, and so she appended ‘Marcus’, her husband’s last name, to her preferred name (see paper by Janssen-Lauret). Alice Ambrose, following her marriage to Lazerowitz, also saw her name removed or replaced with her husband’s first and last name. Refusing to use a woman’s own name is one additional way to subsume a woman’s work under her husband’s, especially where the work was joint, as it was for some of Ambrose’s and Kneale’s books.

Such attitudes were very often internalized, resulting in a tendency in women to underplay their own part or their ideas. Indeed, this is a common theme across the generations, evident in medieval and early modern women philosophers,¹¹ and still going strong almost up until the present. Because certain women explicitly propose that their views are ‘tentative’ or that they have not made any strong contributions, there is a temptation to take them at their word. By the very act of assertion, male philosophers’ confidence in their ideas lends their views more immediate credence.¹² While women’s tendencies to downplay their own originality or insight is partly unconscious it can also be a strategy for seeking acceptance in male-dominated domains. By appearing meek and putting themselves forward as subsidiary, they seek approval from those in charge and try to find a way into the intellectual spaces previously denied to them.

This Special Issue encourages the reader to listen to the lost voices of female philosophers in the late nineteenth- and early to mid-twentieth centuries. Each paper aims to closely read their actual works and consider their ideas, separately from what the male contemporaries said of them and from any expectation that they ‘fit into’ a more familiar historiography. The practice of probing the works of these marginalized figures in order to shore up the neo-traditional male genealogy is rejected.¹³ Reading these works carefully reveals a complex of outstanding ideas and arguments expressive of the minds of these women. Our histories of philosophy must adapt to include them.

Notes

1 Stone and Alderwick (“British and American Women Philosophers,” 193) rightly identify a lacuna in our knowledge of nineteenth-century women philosophers, but are too swift to suggest these difficulties have been overcome for twentieth-century figures. While Arendt and De Beauvoir have become more prominent, their more analytical cousins continue to be ignored, as have continental figures like Plümacher, discussed in this special issue by Janaway.

2 For example, Beaney writes: “Through his critical histories and rational reconstructions, and his methodological discussion of logical analysis and justification, Russell did more than any other philosopher to establish analytic philosophy as the tradition that it is now generally recognized as being” (“Historiography of Analytic Philosophy,” 39). Although Russell’s early philosophical works are crucial to the history of contemporary philosophy, the inordinate respect shown to his judgement requires some reassessment.

3 MacDonald’s life and philosophical contributions are detailed in the papers by Michael Kremer and Justin Vlastis. Ambrose’s work is discussed in Sophia Connell’s paper, while’s Kneale’s early research is explained in Jane Heal’s.

4 Rorty, Skinner and Schneewind, “Introduction”.

5 Originally a hermeneutical concept, as noted in Wilson, “Substances without Substrata”, it was developed into a strategy for translation by Quine and Davidson. The more general idea of it as giving a past philosopher the benefit of the doubt is now widely applied when working in the history of philosophy.

6 As noted in the previous section.

7 Arguably, bringing women back is not simply a case of adding them in but redescribing what the philosophy of the period was really up to. Hutton, “Blue-Eyed Philosophers”, 7 explains as follows: “To include women in the history of philosophy requires changing not just the canon, but the grounds on which the canon is selected”. See also Reé, “Women Philosophers”, 644 and most recently concerning nineteenth- and twentieth-century philosophy, Janssen-Lauret, “Grace de Laguna”.

8 Hutton, “Blue-Eyed Philosophers”, 10 – “The canon enshrines a consensus on great thinkers reached without women in mind”. See also Janssen-Lauret, “Grandmothers of Analytic Philosophy”.

9 For dismissals of women’s philosophical writing in the early modern period along similar lines see Hutton, “Blue-Eyed Philosophers”, 14; O’Neill, “Early Modern Women Philosophers”, 194.

10 See Witt and Shapiro, “Feminist Histories of Philosophy”, on this ‘Best Supporting Actress’ role.

11 Adamson, “Finding Their Voices”; Reé, “Women Philosophers”, 643.

12 See Le Doeuff, The Philosophical Imaginary, ch.6.

13 Hutton, “Blue-Eyed Philosophers”, 16 – ‘to make the primary interest of any philosopher his or her approximation to a canonical figure is indefensible’.