Introduction to nineteenth-century British and American women philosophers

Since the 1980s, an immense wave of scholarship has recovered the voices of the many women who contributed to early modern philosophy, transforming our picture of the period. It is now typical for accounts of early modern philosophy to cover Elisabeth of Bohemia, Margaret Cavendish, Mary Astell and Catherine Trotter Cockburn, to mention just a few. Similarly, it is now generally recognised that women made massive contributions to twentieth-century philosophy – on both the ‘continental’ side, as with Arendt and Beauvoir, and the ‘analytic’, as with Anscombe, Murdoch and Foot.

Women’s contributions to nineteenth-century philosophy, however, largely remain to be rediscovered. It remains standard for histories of nineteenth-century philosophy to include no coverage of women at all, or very little (see, e.g. Mander, Oxford Handbook of British Philosophy in the Nineteenth Century; Wood and Hahn, Cambridge History of Philosophy in the Nineteenth Century; Stone, Edinburgh Critical History; Moyar, Routledge Companion; Stedman Jones and Claeys, Cambridge History of Nineteenth-Century Political Thought; Goodman, American Philosophy Before Pragmatism).¹ Admittedly, nineteenth-century philosophy as a whole tends to be somewhat forgotten within the history of philosophy, sandwiched uncomfortably between the early modern and twentieth-century periods that draw the lion’s share of attention. But within this already somewhat overlooked period, women are overlooked even more.

Now, however, feminist-informed historians of philosophy are increasingly turning attention to women in the nineteenth century. A pioneering study here was Dorothy Rogers’s America’s First Women Philosophers in 2005. Rogers looked at women connected to the idealist tradition: Susan Blow, Anna Brackett, Grace Bibb, Marietta Kies, Ellen Mitchell, Eliza Sunderland, and Lucia Ames Mead. Within its longer timespan of 1600–1900, Mary Ellen Waithe’s History of Women Philosophers, vol. III, includes chapters on the nineteenth-century authors Clarisse Coignet, Antoinette Brown Blackwell and Julie Velten Favre, with shorter sections on nine further nineteenth-century figures, amongst them Catharine Beecher, Harriet Martineau, Harriet Taylor, George Eliot, and Christine Ladd-Franklin. In addition, the fourth, twentieth-century volume of Waithe’s History features several authors who began publishing at the end of the nineteenth century, such as E. E. C. Jones, Victoria Welby, and Mary Whiton Calkins. A 2004 special issue of Hypatia on nineteenth-century American women philosophers (see Rogers and Dykeman, “Women in the American Philosophical Tradition”) dealt with Beecher, Julia Ward Howe, Ednah Dow Cheney, Lydia Maria Child, Anna Julia Cooper, Kies and Ames Mead, and – extending into the early twentieth century – the pragmatist Jane Addams. Also notable are Contributions by Women to Nineteenth-Century American Philosophy: Frances Wright, Antoinette Brown-Blackwell, Marietta Kies, edited by Dorothy Rogers and Therese Boos Dykeman, and Catherine Villanueva Gardner’s Empowerment and Interconnectivity: Towards a Feminist History of Utilitarian Philosophy, on the nineteenth-century authors Anna Doyle Wheeler, Catharine Beecher, Frances Wright and Harriet Taylor Mill. The most comprehensive studies so far, in terms of mapping the overall nature and trajectory of women’s contributions in the nineteenth century, are both anticipated: the Oxford Handbook of Women Philosophers in the Nineteenth Century (The German Tradition), edited by Kristin Gjesdal and Dalia Nassar; and the Oxford Handbook of British and American Women Philosophers in the Nineteenth Century, edited by Lydia Moland and Alison Stone.

We mention these studies, though, as exceptions to a wider pattern of neglect. Moreover, general histories of nineteenth-century philosophy have as yet accommodated little of the above scholarship. This prompts the question: What have been the obstacles impeding women’s inclusion in histories of nineteenth-century philosophy? After all, women were philosophically active in that century. It is not the case that no women engaged in philosophical discussion at that time. That much is evident from the works on nineteenth-century women which we have just mentioned. Yet the contributions made by women have tended to get forgotten, be eclipsed, and go unacknowledged. Nineteenth-century women’s fate is the same that Eileen O’Neill diagnosed for women in the history of philosophy generally (O’Neill, “Disappearing Ink”): the problem lies at least as much with how we narrate the history of philosophy than with the actual intellectual contexts about which we are narrating. Whereas both women and men were philosophically active in the nineteenth century, it is only (some) men’s contributions that are remembered by historians.

Unfortunately, once canons that omit women have been established, changing them is difficult (Rée, “Women Philosophers”). These canons shape our sense of the trajectory of philosophy within a given period: what positions and landmarks existed in the then philosophical landscape, what its key issues and debates were. Thus, our sense of trajectory further cements existing canons, creating a double-bind. We will come back to this problem below.

First, we note another obstacle to including women in the history of nineteenth-century philosophy: the obstacle presented by what we count as philosophy in the first place. Consider the immense amount of abolitionist and women’s rights activism in the nineteenth-century United States. The two movements intertwined: some female abolitionists came to chafe against the sex-based restrictions that they encountered – as when the Grimké sisters (Sarah Moore Grimké (1792–1873) and Angelina Emily Grimké (1805–1879)) found themselves castigated for publicly speaking against slavery. Thus discovering that they were not regarded as equal partners in the anti-slavery movement, the sisters came to advocate women’s rights in the later 1830s (see Birney, Grimké Sisters). From another angle, some – such as Elizabeth Cady Stanton (1815–1902) – argued that women’s prominent role in abolitionism was evidence of women’s more developed conscience, or moral sensibility, or powers of empathy, on account of which women deserved rights, including voting rights. These kinds of beliefs about women’s moral superiority were widely held in the nineteenth century (see Stoper and Johnson, “Weaker Sex”). The same beliefs were also regularly used to support opposing, anti-feminist conclusions: that women should not have the vote, or rights to higher education or professional jobs, because their superior moral faculties could only be properly exercised in the home, especially in care of family and maintenance of personal relationships. Otherwise, the self-interest that organizes the public domain would contaminate and degrade women’s higher, special moral sensibilities.

What all this brings to light is a rich world of public argument and debate in which women were heavily involved on all sides. This included opposition to women’s rights. Catharine Beecher (1800–1878) was one who objected to the Grimkés’ public oratory.² Women were chief architects of the ‘angel in the house’ ideology of women’s special moral capabilities – see, especially, Sarah Lewis’s classic statement in Woman’s Mission of 1839.³ And, later in the century, Mary Augusta Ward (1851–1920), or Mrs Humphry Ward as she preferred to be known, organized and authored the 1889 “Appeal Against Female Suffrage”, objecting to women’s suffrage on the basis that women’s proper sphere was home and family, and by extension philanthropic work in wider society, but not national government as such.⁴

On the other side of these debates, advocates of women’s rights made arguments as to what rights women should have, and why; and women abolitionists similarly advanced reasoned arguments as to why slavery was wrong, and about what actions and political changes ought to follow from that given the nature of equality and justice. Female abolitionists and women’s rights advocates aimed to persuade, but to do so in part by deriving their conclusions from reasoned arguments. As such, women’s anti-slavery and feminist advocacy was philosophical, even if most of it was not done as professional philosophy. The same goes for arguments for and against the idea of woman as ‘the angel in the house’, and of women’s superior moral capabilities; and for arguments made apropos of other social campaigns, such as Josephine Butler’s (1828–1906) campaign for the repeal of the Contagious Diseases Acts of 1864, 1866 and 1869. These Acts, eventually repealed in 1886, authorized certain police forces to arrest any woman suspected of prostitution and subject her to regular physical inspections. Butler saw these Acts as enforcing a sexual double standard – only women could be arrested under their terms – hence as an instrument of patriarchal control (see Caine, Victorian Feminists).

Some might baulk at the suggestion that these public-focused arguments constitute philosophy, preferring to say that they merely contain material that is of philosophical interest. Why might someone thus doubt the philosophical credentials of this public-focused work? One reason offered might be that these arguments were not being authored by professional philosophers. Yet it was only over the course of the nineteenth century that philosophy became professionalized – along with many other academic disciplines, including the various natural and social sciences. Consequently many already-canonized nineteenth-century philosophers were not professionals, such as J. S. Mill – whose Subjection of Women (for one) is nevertheless generally regarded as a work of philosophy.

Even had professional philosophy been fully developed, this was a century when women were generally excluded from higher education. Indeed, what level and kind of education women should be allowed to have was itself a matter of philosophical debate. Emily Davies (1830–1921) argued for women to study the same university curricula as men, pace advocates of different or special education for women such as Henry Sidgwick (see, again, Caine, Victorian Feminists; and Davies, Higher Education of Women). Women began to enter higher education in growing numbers from the mid-century onwards, partly thanks to activism by figures such as Davies. But women remained largely blocked from holding professional academic posts right across the period. For instance, in the U.S., Eliza Sunderland (1839–1910) obtained a PhD in philosophy in 1892 on “The Relation of the Philosophy of Kant to that of Hegel”. But despite students petitioning the University of Michigan to appoint her when openings arose in the philosophy department (one insisted: “I know that Dr Sunderland is second only to Dr Dewey”), the university stood by its policy against hiring women (see Rogers, America’s First Women Philosophers, 119–20). A few women did start to take up professional posts in philosophy from the 1880s and 1890s onwards. One was E. E. C. Jones (1848–1922), who became a lecturer in Moral Sciences at Girton College, Cambridge, in 1884 – the college Davies had co-founded in 1869. But women such as Jones achieved this against a wider background where professional exclusion remained pervasive.

To philosophise in the nineteenth century, then, the majority of women perforce had to do so outside professional academic settings and in other contexts – such as social and political activism, campaigning and philanthropy; or religious and spiritualist thought;⁵ or around the banner of ‘literature’;⁶ or in connection with the education of children, a field in which many women were involved (from amongst the American Hegelians, Susan Blow (1843–1916) founded one of the earliest kindergartens in 1873 while Anna Brackett (1836–1911) became the first female secondary school head in 1863; while Mary Everest Boole’s (1832–1916) programme of work disseminating and fulfilling the legacy of her late husband, George Boole, included writing the 1909 children’s book Philosophy and Fun of Algebra).⁷ In sum, “we often have to look beyond academic philosophy to find the women who were influential … philosophers” (Whipps and Lake, “Pragmatist Feminism”).

Along with this, we need to be open to forms of writing and communication beyond the conventional philosophical treatise. To be sure, there were women in the period who wrote straightforward articles and books of philosophy, such as Mary Shepherd (1777–1847), with the Essay upon the Relation of Cause and Effect of 1824; Caroline Frances Cornwallis (1786–1848), with Philosophical Theories and Philosophical Experience, by a Pariah in 1841; Frances Power Cobbe (1822–1904), with the Essay on Intuitive Morals of 1855/57 and “Darwinism in Morals” of 1871; Constance Naden (1858–1889), who defended induction in Induction and Deduction of 1890; and the aesthetician Vernon Lee (1856–1935) with such works as Art and Life of 1896. Others philosophized within popular tracts, essays, pamphlets and speeches, as with, e.g. Frances Wright (1795–1852) and Annie Besant. Others philosophized within the medium of literary work – for example, Mary Shelley’s (1797–1851) incredibly successful 1818 novel Frankenstein advances a philosophical stance on children’s rights (Hunt Botting, Mary Shelley and the Rights of the Child), and equally is a thought-experiment about the possibility of artificial life, while George Eliot’s (1819–1880) novels embody her distinctive version of evolutionary and socially progressive positivism.

There is also translation and editorial work. Harriet Martineau’s (1802–1876) two-volume condensed translation of Comte’s Cours de Philosophie Positive as The Positive Philosophy of Auguste Comte (Martineau, Positive Philosophy, 1853) reflected, and tacitly expounded, her own interpretation of positivism – meaning that positivism as received in Britain effectively bore Martineau’s stamp.⁸ Likewise, Ada Lovelace’s (1815–1852) translation of Menabrea’s “Sketch of the Analytical Engine” in 1842 includes her extensive notes on the topic, the touchstone for her own views on artificial intelligence (as we now call it).⁹ And Eliot, we should remember, before turning to fiction, translated Strauss’s Life of Jesus (in 1846), Feuerbach’s Essence of Christianity (1854) and Spinoza’s Ethics (in 1856, although this remained unpublished until very recently, as Spinoza’s Ethics), also becoming the anonymous editor of the Westminster Review in the early 1850s (Gray, “George Eliot”) – the journal that Mill described as the organ of philosophical radicalism in Britain.

To include women in the canon of nineteenth-century philosophy, then, we need to broaden our conception of what we take the forms, scope, domain, methods and subject-matter of philosophy to be. However, what we have said so far may give the impression that women of the time were very largely occupied with social and political matters, and that the broadening of scope that we are advocating is primarily to recognise social and political campaigning, advocacy, and persuasion as constituting philosophy in an extended sense. This would be an unfortunate position. It would reinforce pre-existing assumptions that women are somehow suited to ‘soft’, social and political, rather than ‘hard’ epistemological and metaphysical, theorizing – and perhaps to the even softer ‘practice’, rather than theory proper. Arguably these assumptions are an indirect legacy of the nineteenth-century idea of women’s supposedly greater moral capacity to care for others – indeed to sacrifice their interests for the sake of others – as we mentioned earlier. But as we have also seen that idea of women’s moral vocation was double-edged, effectively leading to women’s extensive involvement in social campaigning and philanthropy across the nineteenth century.¹⁰ Thus, the study of women in nineteenth-century philosophy helps us to see some of the historical origins of the lingering assumption that women are inherently suited to caring and social matters.

That said, we want to respond to the worry that we are reproducing associations between women and ‘soft’ social thinking in two ways. On the one hand, women can and do engage in the most abstract as well as more concrete intellectual fields, and so they did in the nineteenth century. Take for example, Lovelace’s technical analysis of the principles behind Babbage’s analytical and difference engines; Shepherd’s metaphysics of causation; Martineau’s advancement of naturalism, hard determinism, and an empiricist philosophy of science; E. E. C. Jones’s work in logic; and Victoria Welby’s programme of ‘significs’ within philosophy of language.

On the other hand, given the constraints under which women operated in the nineteenth century, it is not surprising that no small part of the philosophical writing done by women in this period concerns social and political matters or was value-facing. This goes for some of those just mentioned. Welby, for instance, was concerned with meaning both in relation to scriptural interpretation and as the source of value, stating in 1893 that “meaning – in the widest sense of the word – is the only value of whatever “fact” presents itself to us” (Welby, “Meaning and Metaphor”, 524). That women of the period often wrote, in whole or part, about value-related topics was a consequence of the fact that, of necessity, women did much of their intellectual work within practical, political, literary, educational, and spiritual contexts – and against a background where their very right and ability to engage in intellectual work was contested.¹¹ In short, we need to say both that women were perfectly capable of doing abstract, highly technical philosophizing, and that for contextual reasons in the nineteenth century, women often philosophized in value-facing ways.

Let us now return to the pattern noted earlier whereby canons and inherited narratives tend to reinforce one another in feedback loops, impeding us from including women in the history of nineteenth-century philosophy. Our received narrative about the contours of nineteenth-century philosophy is less clear and well-defined than those for early modern (rationalism versus empiricism up to the Kantian synthesis) and early twentieth-century philosophy (the dual revolutions of logical positivism and phenemenology). Potentially, a less settled narrative can be more easily reshaped to take account of women’s contributions. Yet one overarching narrative about the nineteenth century has taken a degree of hold. On this, the nineteenth century was marked by a struggle between two central currents – idealism and naturalism (Skorupski, English-Language Philosophy; Stern, “Nineteenth-Century Philosophy”; Stone, Edinburgh Critical History). These two outlooks divide on whether value and value-related phenomena can be adequately understood naturalistically, i.e. as features of the natural world amenable in principle to empirical scientific study; and on the adequacy of scientific methods for grasping reality as a whole and accounting for the possibility of knowledge.

Roughly, in Britain, forms of naturalism prevailed through much of the century – especially in the guise of utilitarianism, and to a lesser extent of positivism – but became superseded by British idealism as the century closed. Conversely, in Germany, idealism prevailed earlier in the century to become superseded by naturalism after around 1850. The U.S. picture is closer to the German, with transcendentalism (as a form of idealism) prevailing earlier in the century followed by St Louis idealism, with pragmatism – a more naturalistic approach – taking over in the later century. But this picture has been framed with reference to male philosophers – the German idealists Fichte, Schelling, Hegel; the transcendentalists Thoreau and Emerson; the British idealists Green and Bradley; with more naturalistic positions represented by such figures as Bentham, J. S. Mill, Nietzsche, Dewey and James. What happens when we factor women in?

We certainly find a divide between more idealist and naturalist approaches in the philosophical writings of many women of the time. For example, as Deborah Boyle shows in this issue, Shepherd takes an idealist view that life requires a non-material explanation. Cobbe argues in idealist vein, influenced by both Kant and Transcendentalism, that the moral law is known intuitively, intrinsically obligates us as rational agents, and transcends the natural world. Martineau and Eliot, in opposition, endorsed versions of positivism. And we find in many nineteenth-century women an overarching concern about whether morality and value can be accommodated naturalistically, especially in light of Darwin’s work and other scientific discoveries. Cobbe thought they could not; whereas Besant, having been a follower of Cobbe in the early 1870s, came to think in the mid-1870s that morality could be put on a scientific, utilitarian and atheist basis that was more secure than the traditional Christian one. But Besant subsequently changed her mind again and came to think that morality did need spiritual underpinning – from the new religious framework she espoused from 1889 onwards, Theosophy (as Leland discusses in this issue).

To some extent, then, existing narratives about the nineteenth century can illuminate the thought of women of that time. Reciprocally, by factoring women’s thought into those narratives we build up a richer picture of the range of idealist-to-naturalist perspectives then debated. Including women fills out our sense of the period beyond a few ‘big names’ – in recognition that these ‘big names’ operated within a crowded spectrum of figures and movements.

But, in the end, it will not suffice to simply extend pre-existing narratives to women, as this prevents us from genuinely learning about and expanding our conception of the period on the basis of its female participants. We need to read these women’s work with relatively open minds as to what they were discussing and arguing about, and what their preoccupations and approaches were. We have to look and see. We can then construct new generalizations about women’s overall philosophical interests and agendas at that time, and revise our overall narratives about the period’s philosophical trajectory in that light. At the moment, we barely even know what revisions are needed, because we still have so much to learn about nineteenth-century women philosophers.

The goal of this issue, then, is to help to fill in this blank in historical knowledge with ten articles on figures who span the whole century and cross a variety of areas of philosophy. For manageability’s sake the focus is limited to authors who wrote in the English language, largely in Britain and North America. The figures covered are Mary Shepherd, Anna Doyle Wheeler, Harriet Taylor, George Eliot (Marian Evans), Annie Besant and E. E. C. Jones from the UK; and, from the U.S., Harriet Tubman, Lucretia Mott, Lydia Maria Child, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Marietta Kies and Anna Julia Cooper.

Some of the authors covered are well known outside philosophy, e.g. George Eliot in literature; Harriet Tubman (c.1822–1913) as anti-slavery activist. But the philosophical dimensions of these authors’ work have been neglected, and are explored here. Other authors covered here have been overshadowed by their male associates, as with Harriet Taylor compared to her husband and intellectual companion J. S. Mill, and Anna Doyle Wheeler compared to her co-author Edward Thompson. Others of our authors are largely forgotten today – such as the neo-Hegelian political philosopher Marietta Kies, the abolitionist Lydia Maria Child, and the logician and ethicist E. E. Constance Jones. In all cases we hope to help restore these authors to their places in philosophical history.

We begin the volume with Boyle’s account of Mary Shepherd’s contribution to the nineteenth-century debate on the nature of life. Boyle outlines Shepherd’s critiques of Lawrence, one of the most prominent immanentist theorists of the day (holding that life is a property which can be accounted for from an organism’s material or structural properties alone). As Boyle argues, Shepherd demonstrates that Lawrence’s view merely constitutes a description of life, rather than an account of how life arises. Using an analysis of Shepherd’s critiques of the Humean account of causation, and an outline of Shepherd’s own unique account of causation (which looks strikingly similar to contemporary accounts of causation as power-based), Boyle sketches Shepherd’s novel version of the transcendentalist view of the origins of life. Boyle argues that for Shepherd, life itself is a distinct kind of causal power, but one which is only effective when combined with the causal powers of mind and body.

McCabe’s piece focusses on two British feminists – Harriet Taylor Mill and Anna Wheeler – both of whom co-wrote with their partners (John Stuart Mill and William Thompson, respectively) as well as producing works in their own right. McCabe makes a strong case for reconsidering the role of these women both in the works that they co-authored with their male counterparts, but also for their role in works traditionally considered to be the sole work of their partners. As well as providing arguments for this claim and investigating the nature of these co-authoring relationships, and what they may have bought to the texts, McCabe also gives an account of the two women’s positive views. As McCabe demonstrates, both women were committed to a version of the claim that marriage is a form of slavery; both women were engaged in the endeavour of freeing women from patriarchal structures and relationships; and both argued that co-operative socialism was the best way to ensure the emancipation not just of women, but of society as a whole.

Vetter’s article focuses on another philosopher who has been historically overshadowed by someone she worked closely with – Elizabeth Cady Stanton is typically seen as a central figure in the feminist movement in nineteenth-century America, while much less is known about the work of her collaborator, the Quaker abolitionist and women’s rights advocate Lucretia Mott. However, Vetter argues that despite leaving fewer published works, and taking a less central role in some of the organized events promoting women’s suffrage at the time, there is still a distinctive and important philosophical position that emerges with a more careful look at Mott. As Vetter shows, once we reconsider Mott it becomes clear that her quietism on particular issues, her tendency to prefer informal networks of activism, and her lack of published works, in fact reflect a distinctive position, which is more inclusive and therefore more radical in its emancipatory aims than Stanton’s.

Another philosopher whose ideas were disseminated through less traditional means (much of her work comes from the column “Letters from New York” which she wrote in her capacity as editor of the National Anti-Slavery Standard in the early 1840s) is Lydia Maria Child. As an outspoken abolitionist, Child’s advocacy of practical action is apparent throughout her life. However, as Moland argues in her contribution to this volume, Child also drew heavily on classical German philosophy both to provide a theoretical backbone to her abolitionism, and to guide her actions. Moland identifies three central themes from classical German philosophy and demonstrates how each one had a distinctive impact on elements of Child’s thinking. First, a Spinozist/Romantic conception of the unity and interconnectedness of nature, inherited from thinkers such as Novalis and Herder, which underpinned her core belief in human equality: as mere parts united in a larger whole, all human beings share the same rights, and all share the same responsibility for promoting the rights of others. Second, a commitment to something like a Kantian account of duty, underpinning her conviction that continuing to take action for the abolitionist cause was always necessary, even if it led to further violence; if an action is right, then there is an obligation for it to be performed whatever the cost. Her own lifelong commitment to activism is itself a testament to her adherence to this way of thinking about ethics. Finally, Child thinks a lot about progress in history, and Moland highlights a Hegelian influence. However, Child’s commitment to practical action is also shown to be in play here; she understands progress in history to be driven by morality and individual action, thus underpinning the importance of the abolitionist movement for social change and progress.

One of the better-known figures covered in this collection is George Eliot (Marian Evans), however the paper we include here forms part of a recent recognition of her work as having significant philosophical as well as literary significance. In this paper, Fessenbecker argues that the trend in the literature to see Eliot as primarily concerned with causal determinism is misguided, and obscures the more nuanced and subtle problems of agency that she deals with across her works. Fessenbecker demonstrates that the central issue for Eliot is a specific type of determinism, whereby the agent’s past actions (akratic actions in particular) determine her present actions, entailing that she is bound by her past decisions to act against her better judgement. Thus Eliot’s ‘law of consequences’ does not, Fessenbecker argues, refer to external influences determining human action, but isolates the particular cases where a free agent is nonetheless determined by her own previous choices. As Fessenbecker shows, understanding Eliot’s view in this way also enables her accounts of the fragility of virtue, the importance of sympathy for moral action, and her critiques of consequentialism to come into view.

Stewart’s paper on the role of black women in the abolitionist tradition, focussing on Harriet Tubman and Elizabeth from The Memoir of Old Elizabeth, a Coloured Woman, clearly demonstrates the way that gendered understandings of agency and resistance necessitate the erasure of female agency and resistance, and particularly black female agency and resistance. Stewart shows that the abolitionist tradition has historically understood both resistance and emancipation in problematic gendered ways: resistance is exemplified by the black man committing violent acts in order to protect the black woman made to submit to the slave owner; the paradigm case of emancipation is the freed black man. This is exacerbated by a conflation of agency with active and violent resistance: the black woman is overlooked as a genuine agent because of a narrative that depicts black female submission as at the heart of the black man’s motivation for resistance. Stewart demonstrates that by rejecting these masculinized accounts of resistance and agency, forms of resistance, agency, and emancipation that black women were engaging in come in to view. Stewart also shows that submission can be a key element of active agency: the struggle of these women to find internal emancipation takes the form of a submission to God and religious joy. This spiritual emancipation in turn leads to non-violent forms of political and religious resistance which, as Stewart demonstrates, deserve to be taken equally seriously as violent forms of resistance.

Another of the better-known figures in this collection is Annie Besant, however again she is rarely seen as a philosopher but rather as a populariser of the views of others. Besant’s varied life and involvement with a range of different social and political causes as well as spiritual and religious groups have also led to a narrative that she lacked a consistent view or focus. Leland’s paper challenges both of these claims, arguing that Besant should be understood as a philosopher, and specifically as an ethicist whose work is structured by the central question of whether ethics is possible without metaphysics. Leland shows that, far from being disconnected leaps between disparate views, Besant’s changes in focus throughout her life stem from her ongoing project to find a satisfying answer to the question of how to ground ethics. Besant finds this, as Leland shows, in Hinduism, as its emphasis on the unity of self and world is capable of providing a metaphysical basis for the virtues of happiness and ‘friendliness to all beings’ that she had espoused throughout her life.

Ostertag and Favia’s paper focusses on E. E. Constance Jones, one of the few women in this collection who was known in her lifetime for her philosophical work. However, while most of Jones’ work is in philosophical logic, Ostertag and Favia focus here on her lesser known work in ethics, specifically her response to Sidgwick’s dualism of practical reason. They argue that Jones recognized that this issue (that the demands of self-interest and the demands of duty to others provide competing but equally rational bases for action) could only be satisfactorily solved if the different demands entail one another. The paper outlines Jones’ 3 different attempts at a solution to the dualism, demonstrating that the view she outlines is unique and provides a promising line of response to this issue.

The other paper which focusses on a women who was recognized as a philosopher in her lifetime is Rogers’ contribution on Marietta Kies, one of the first women to formally study philosophy and political theory in the USA, and to work as a professional academic philosopher there. Rogers’ focus here is on Kies’ political philosophy, in particular her ideas of positive rights and the importance of altruism as a principle for effective states. Drawing on Hegel’s conception of the organic state, Rogers shows that Kies is able to mount a defence of the rights of individuals against large-scale industry and the state itself. Further, Kies extends Hegel’s account of the state with her arguments that altruism should be a central feature of an effective state: if, as Hegel’s account entails, the whole has a mutual relationship of dependence with its parts, this implies that the state should take an active role in redistributing wealth and opportunity to ensure the flourishing of as many of its parts as possible. This argument is then shown to underpin Kies’ defences of measures such as taxation, guaranteeing public access to education, and laws to support those members of society who find themselves facing hardship.

We finish the collection with Cedeño-Pacheco’s paper on Anna Julia Cooper, whose 1892 work A Voice from the South was and remains an important articulation of the claim that both black men and white women and men have failed to grasp the unique and pressing nature of the issues facing black women. As well as writing extensively on black women’s experience and emancipation, Cooper also wrote on black issues more broadly, and on the philosophy of education. Cedeño-Pacheco approaches her work through two themes which recur throughout her writing: vitality and corporeality. He argues that by taking this systematic approach to her works and reading them in the context of these themes, new aspects of her view are able to come to light. Specifically, Cedeño-Pacheco argues that his approach enables us to read Cooper as claiming that one of the central ways that black Americans have been wronged is through the denial of their right to growth – to freely self-determine their evolution as individuals and a community.

Notes

1 Although Claeys and Stedman Jones include Lucy Delap’s chapter “The Woman Question and the Origins of Feminism”; Wood and Hahn include Christine Blaettler’s “Social Dissatisfaction and Social Change”; and Mander includes Barbara Caine’s “British Feminist Thought”.

2 See Grimké Weld, Letters, in which she replies to Beecher.

3 Before Lewis, the Evangelical author Hannah More (1745–1833) is another source of these views. In her 1799 Strictures on the Modern System of Female Education, More advanced her view of women’s moral role and the proper purpose of women’s education in opposition to Wollstonecraft’s radical egalitarianism. On the Wollstonecraft/More disagreement, see Taylor, New Jerusalem, 13–15.

4 Interestingly, Ward was influenced in these views by T. H. Green’s idealism; see Loader, Mrs Humphry Ward.

5 Notably, several religious movements that sprang up in the century, amongst them Christian Science and Theosophy, were female-headed – respectively by Mary Baker Eddy (1821–1910) and Helena Blavatsky (1831–1891) succeeded by Annie Besant (1847–1933). Overlapping with these movements were the emergence of Spiritualism, in which women were also central (see, inter alia, Owen, The Darkened Room), and Black spiritual traditions such as hoodoo (discussed here by Stewart). By bypassing established churches, these religious currents allowed new openings for women. Spiritualism, for instance, retained the idea of women’s self-sacrificial, submissive nature and yet turned it around subversively, changing it into the idea that women are especially receptive to spirit communications, capable of spirit possession, and attuned to spiritual and religious truths. Such views provided a background that enabled women to say things, when possessed, without having their speaking authority questioned as it would be if they were directly speaking in their own voices. Stewart explores this here apropos of Harriet Tubman. While these alternative spiritual traditions might seem esoteric to many contemporary naturalist-inclined philosophers, at the time they interested many philosophers, William James – who co-founded the Society for Psychical Research in 1884 – being a case in point. Moreover, some of the work by these religious or spiritual women is itself directly philosophical, as with Besant: e.g. her discussion of materialism in philosophy of mind in “Why I Became a Theosophist” of 1890. Arguing against Vogt’s materialism, Besant claims “We study the nerve-cells of the brain; we find molecular vibrations; we are still in the object world, amid form, colour, resistance, motion. Suddenly there is a THOUGHT, and all is changed. We have passed into a new world, the subject world” (Why I Became a Theosophist, 8).

6 It is striking just how many philosophical women of the period wrote fiction. Amongst those mentioned in this introduction, this goes inter alia for Ward, Boole, Martineau, Lee, More, and Shelley.

7 And on Mary Everest Boole’s broader programme, see Valente, “Wings to Logic”.

8 Martineau’s influence on British positivism is rarely acknowledged – but on one occasion when it is, by Mike Gane, he complains that Martineau “dumbed down” Comte (Gane, Comte, xiv); apparently, she was “insensitive to theory”, as she was “a novelist” (23). Martineau did write the novel Deerbrook, as well as a fictionalised biography of Toussaint L’Ouverture, but this was just part of her vast, multi-disciplinary and highly philosophical output; see Sanders and Weiner, Martineau.

9 See Lovelace, “Sketch”. Amongst other things, Lovelace here introduces the idea of a “science of operations” – i.e. in effect, computing; and she also claims: “The Analytical Engine has no pretensions whatever to originate anything. It can do whatever we know how to order it to perform. It can follow analysis; but it has no power of anticipating any analytical relations or truths”. Some have found here a “Lovelace test” for artificial intelligence, different from the Turing test (Bringsfjord, Bello, and Ferrucci, “Creativity”).

10 That activity was manifest, inter alia, in Florence Nightingale’s establishment of nursing as a profession, and her work reforming and modernizing hospitals; and in Octavia Hill’s establishment of social work and the beginnings of social housing. Hill also co-founded the National Trust. See Boyd, Butler, Hill, Nightingale.

11 Moreover, nineteenth-century American philosophy overall had a marked practical orientation, across its transcendentalist, idealist and pragmatist phases.