Whether it be in universities’ curricula or in traditional accounts of the history of philosophy, early modern women philosophers have frequently been treated as secondary, inconsequential characters. Although many valuable efforts are being made to counter this state of affairs, a generalized tendency to focus on well-known male philosophers and to establish them as representative figures of the early modern period still seems to exist. But does this strategy produce an accurate historical account of early modern philosophy? This essay explores diverse causes of the exclusion of early modern women philosophers from the canon, reflecting on the historical and political aspects of this phenomenon. This piece also intends to highlight the importance of the innovative projects that have been recently created in the field of the digital humanities, which aim to mitigate and to counter said exclusion.

In the early modern period, a significant number of women developed original philosophical works and were considered rigorous and insightful thinkers by their contemporaries. Many of these women were in fact intellectual interlocutors of prominent male canonical thinkers (for example: Descartes, Locke, Hobbes, Leibniz, Voltaire, Hume, Rousseau, Kant, and others): Elisabeth, Princess of Bohemia (1618–80), Anne “Ninon” de l'Enclos (1620–1705), Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle-upon-Tyne (1623–73), Christina, Queen of Sweden (1626–89), Electress Sophie of Hanover (1630–1714), Anne Conway (1631–79), Sophie Charlotte of Hanover, Queen of Prussia (1668–1705), Damaris Masham (1659–1708), Mary Astell (1666–1731), Catharine Trotter Cockburn (1679–1749), Gabrielle Émilie Le Tonnelier de Breteuil, Marquise Du Châtelet, known as Émilie Du Châtelet (1706–49), Louise-Marie-Madeleine Guillaume de Fontaine, known as Mme Dupin (1706–99), Laura Bassi (1711–78), Louise Florence Pétronille Tardieu d'Esclavelles d'Épinay (1726–83), Julie de Lespinasse (1732–76), Sophie Grouchy (1764–1822), and Mary Shepherd (1777–1847), among others.Footnote ¹

Furthermore, many of these women actively participated in the “querelle des femmes” (“the woman question”) as well,Footnote ² that is, the debate concerning the nature of women, our differences and similarities with respect to men in terms of our intellectual, emotional, and physical capacities, and also women's rights, particularly our right to receive a formal education and to participate in civic and political decision-making. Some of the women who theoretically and/or literarily tackled these issues were: Camilla Erculiani (c. 1540–90), Modesta di Pozzo di Forzi, known as Moderata Fonte (1555–92), Marie de Gournay (1565–1645), Lucrezia Marinella Vacca (1571–1653), Margueritte Buffet (?–1680), Arcangela Tarabotti (1604–52), Anna Maria van Schurman (1607–78), Gabrielle Suchon (1632–1703), Anne Dacier (1645–1720), Anne-Thérèse Marguenat de Courcelles, known as Mme Lambert (1647–1733), Juana Inés de la Cruz (1651–95), Judith Drake (1670?–1723), Aretafila Savini de’ Rossi (1687–1731), Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (1689–1762), Fukuda Chiyo-ni, also known as Kaga no Chiyo (1703–75), Teresa Margarida da Silva e Orta (1711–93), Dorothea Christiane Leporin de Erxleben (1715–62), Madeleine Darsant de Puisieux (1720–98), Marie Geneviève Charlotte Thiroux d'Arconville (1720–1805), Im Yunjidang (1721–93), Mercy Otis Warren (1728–1814), Catherine Macaulay (1731–91), Inés Joyes y Blake (1731–1806), Marie Elisabeth de la Fite (1737–94), Muddupalani (1739–90?), Stéphanie Félicité du Crest, comtesse de Genlis (1746–1830), Olympe de Gouges (1748–93), Wang Yun (1749–1819), Josefa Amar y Borbón (1749–1833), Judith Sargent Murray (1751–1820), Phillis Wheatley (1753?–84), Elizabeth Hamilton (1758–1816), Mary Wollstonecraft (1759–97), Marie-Joseph Peyrennit de Lescun, or Josephine von Sydow, also known as Mme Montbart (1760?–1829), Anne-Louise-Germaine Necker, Mme de Staël (1766–1817), Carolina Arienti Lattanzi (1771–1818), Anna Petrovna Bunina (1774–1829), Sidney Owenson, known as Lady Morgan (1776–1859), María de las Mercedes Santa Cruz y Montalvo, known as Condesa de Merlin (1789–1852), Nana Asma'u (1793–1864), Petrona Rosende (1797–1863), and Flora Tristan (1803–44) among others. Already in these nonexhaustive lists, we find a significant number of early modern women thinkers, which shows us that the intellectual contributions of women, far from being accidental or anomalous, were constant during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

The acerbic philosophical debates on the woman question had a great impact in the formation of a consensus that was vital for the affirmation and the achievement of women's civil and political rights, even though no conclusive conceptual solutions were uniformly adopted or drawn from those exchanges. At present, both the woman question and the feminist proclamations that stemmed from it have evolved and moved beyond the notion of “the sexes,” because of the incorporation of the pivotal concept of “gender” and the subsequent deconstruction of the male–female binary opposition.

However, during the Enlightenment's apogee, leading up to the French Revolution, the “equality of the sexes” was not a given. The philosophical and political activism of Olympe de Gouges and Mary Wollstonecraft, among others, fostered the diffusion of feminist ideas centered around the proclamation of “the equality of the sexes.” The reaction to de Gouges's and Wollstonecraft's advocacy for women's rights was brutal: in France, de Gouges (as well as other female intellectuals such as Mme RolandFootnote ³) was executed in 1793. Mary Wollstonecraft's reputation was severely damaged by the publication of her husband's memoirs, which revealed intimate details about her life (see Godwin Reference Godwin1798). As Geneviève Fraisse argues, during the French Revolution, both the demand for equality and the exclusion of women from the public sphere intertwined and coincided (Fraisse Reference Fraisse1989/1995).Footnote ⁴

The eighteenth century's twilight brings about what Eileen O'Neill describes as the “purification of philosophy” (O'Neill Reference O'Neill2005). As Mary Waithe and O'Neill indicate, the doxographical compilations published during the second half of the seventeenth century, which sought to reconstruct the history of the philosophical discipline, highlighted the intellectual labor of various women philosophers from classical antiquity and the Middle Ages (Waithe Reference Waithe1987–1994). Some examples are: Le cercle des femmes sçavantes (1663) of Jean de la Forge, Nouvelles Observations sur la langue française… avec les éloges des Illustres Sçavantes tant anciennes que modernes (1668) of Marguerite Buffet, and the Historia mulierum philosopharum (1690) of Gilles Ménage. So what changed? Why and how did the ink of these women philosophers’ texts disappear? (O'Neill Reference O'Neill and A1998, 33). O'Neill affirms that, in fact, large manuals of the history of philosophy started to exclude women near the end of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth century, with some isolated exceptions. Sabrina Ebbersmeyer has also studied this phenomenon, focusing on German historiography, confirming and further developing O'Neill's thesis (Ebbersmeyer Reference Ebbersmeyer2020).

O'Neill uses the phrase “the purification of philosophy” to describe the historiographical tendency imposed by the Göttingen school of history that identifies Kantianism as the culmination of modern philosophy and as the measure of all future philosophical endeavors (Rée Reference Rée2002). Since many of the theoretical contributions of women philosophers at that time reflected on the role of women in society or concerned theological and religious issues,Footnote ⁵ they were considered by these German historians as “pre-critical”. They failed to spark these historians’ interest because they saw them as pertaining to anthropology rather than philosophy.

O'Neill's thesis could also be extended from the point of view of intersectional feminism (Crenshaw Reference Crenshaw1991; Collins and Bilge Reference Collins and Bilge2016) by considering the diverse forms of oppression and exclusion, apart from the sexist-patriarchal one (for example, those associated with socioeconomic status, nationality, and ethnicity) that affect vulnerable individuals (or those made vulnerable) and certain women in particular. In consonance with O'Neill, Peter Park maintains in Africa, Asia, and the History of Philosophy: Racism in the Formation of the Philosophical Canon, 1780–1830 that European universities’ curricula from the beginning of the nineteenth century started to exclude women and non-European thinkers, given that the history of philosophy was represented as a linear evolution whose starting point was Greco-Roman philosophy and whose ending point was Kant (Park Reference Park2013). The cultural heritage of other civilizations, such as ancient Egypt, was classified as religious thought and thus left out of the origins of the philosophical discipline. An example of this position can be observed in Wilhelm Tennemann's Geschichte der Philosophie (Tennemann Reference Tennemann1798; see also Meiners Reference Meiners1781). Additionally, when explaining the historicity of the process of male philosophers’ canonization, Waithe points out that the argumentative nature of Western philosophical writings has been taken as universal (Waithe Reference Waithe2015). Therefore, the nonwritten traditions of the indigenous peoples of Africa, Asia, Oceania, and the Americas have not been valued as philosophical. In sum, non-European women intellectuals suffered multicausal discrimination.

Jacqueline Broad highlights another relevant factor that could explain (some) scholars’ reluctance to include women philosophers from the early modern period in their syllabi or in their reconstruction of the history of philosophy: their writing style (Broad Reference Broad2002). This factor does not depend on the content of their reflections or on their female condition, and it might also help make sense of the exclusion of other male thinkers who did not adopt in their writings the form of the treatise. Broad argues that contemporary scholars tend to ignore those intellectual exchanges that are not easily adapted to the preponderant formats of “philosophical” practices and expressions of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Since many women philosophers developed their ideas in their epistles, their writing is evaluated as inferior or, at best, as complementary to the great works already established as classics in philosophy. John Conley uses the same argument in favor of the moral reflections of female authors such as Louise Françoise de La Baume Le Blanc, Duchesse de La Vallière (1644–1710), Madeleine de Souvré, Marquise de Sablé (1599–1678), Antoinette de Lafon de Boisguérin Deshoulières (1637–94), Marguerite Hessein, Dame de La Sablière (1640–93), and Françoise d'Aubigné, Marquise de Maintenon (1635–1719) (Conley Reference Conley2002).Footnote ⁶

Another source of complexity resides in the collective modes of authorship that arose during the eighteenth century in France in the “salons.” As Joan DeJean affirms, the women who organized these gatherings were involved in the intellectual debates that took place there, which they later recounted in their writings, in the form of philosophical fictions, essays, memoirs, and letters (DeJean and Miller Reference DeJean and Miller1991). The traditional interpretation of the salonnières, which undermines their intellectual contributions to describe them as mere hostesses who embodied the superficiality of the upper classes of the period, has been expounded by Antoine Lilti (Lilti Reference Lilti, Racine and Tresbitsh2004; Reference Lilti2005). This vision clashes with those of other scholars like Dena Goodman or Florence Lotterie (Goodman Reference Goodman1994; Lotterie Reference Lotterie2013), the latter seeking to show the overlap that occurred during the siècle des Lumières between the plethora of texts that praised some women philosophers (emphasizing their exceptional skills), on one hand, and other discourses that spurned the women's desire and demand for equal access to knowledge and education, on the other. Despite the efforts of some interpreters, who seek to underscore the salient philosophical nature of these women's thought (thus reclaiming their texts for the domain of philosophical studies), the salonnières are usually considered “writers.” Cultural, literary, and historical studies, as well as women's studies, appear to have been much more receptive to questions and research inquiries about the lives of women and their writings than philosophical ones.

An additional obstacle hinders not only the acknowledgment of the philosophical nature of these women's writings but also their overall identification and authorship attribution. Many of these female thinkers chose to publish their texts anonymously or with pseudonyms,Footnote ⁷ in some cases because exhibiting themselves as authors in the public sphere drew negative attention and was considered as lacking in modesty. Hence, as O'Neill maintains, scholars face diverse challenges when trying to reconstruct the history of these women's works, such as plagiarism accusations (Cavendish) (see Lewis Reference Lewis2001), false attributions of authorship to other male intellectuals (Conway),Footnote ⁸ claims of “excessive tutorship” of other male thinkers that indirectly question and/or tarnish the intellectual reputation of the female philosopher (Du Châtelet) (see Zinsser Reference Zinsser2006; Roe Reference Roe2017),Footnote ⁹ and other even more complex situations, like Oliva Sabuco's (1562–1622) (O'Neill Reference O'Neill2005).Footnote ¹⁰

As Sandrine Berges notes, sometimes it is these women philosophers themselves who did not feel the need to mention their own female contemporaries or predecessors in their reflections (Berges Reference Berges2015). By these omissions, they aimed to proclaim themselves the first and the only ones to have written about the ontological and/or sociopolitical differences between men and women. Berges identifies this gesture in Christine de Pizan, Gabrielle Suchon, Mary Wollstonecraft, and Simone de Beauvoir. However, she names Anna Maria van Schurman, Marie de Gournay, Madeleine de Scudéry, and Elisabeth of Bohemia as counterexamples. As Waithe and María Luisa Femenías indicate (Waithe Reference Waithe1987–1994; Femenías Reference Femenías2019), women also took on the task of building genealogies of “learned women” or “mujeres doctas,” in the words of Juana Inés de la Cruz.Footnote ¹¹

Berges understands that reconstructing the philosophical dialogues these women thinkers had between them, and integrating said reconstruction into the study of modern philosophy and the early modern period, is strategically crucial to counter the male-centered (and particularly Kant-centered) hegemonic historiography that permeates the curricula. As a matter of fact, according to Berges, courses and seminars about early modern philosophy are frequently organized as a chronologically arranged study of Kant's metaphysical male predecessors. Correspondingly, Lisa Shapiro explicitly argues against the impulse to restrict the disruption of the canon only within research, thus leaving the curriculum intact (Shapiro Reference Shapiro2016, 380). Even though this tendency seems to be changing, with more courses and seminars about early modern women philosophers currently being taught, the inattention to these women's works in higher education curricula is still very noticeable.

One could nevertheless object that other male intellectual figures suffer a similar fate: Diderot could be an example. This suggests that, besides all of the aforementioned difficulties for the historiographical integration of women thinkers to the study of early modern philosophy, there are others, of an institutional, pedagogical, pragmatic, and political nature. For instance, the problem of the scarcity of translations, teaching materials, and available and suitable bibliography could affect the syllabi's planning (and outcome). Furthermore, universities remain in some cases conservative work environments. Well-reputed male thinkers might be considered not only a “safe choice” but also a “good choice” for syllabi and curricula in philosophy, which, in turn, reinforces and perpetuates the traditionally established narrative of the history of philosophy as a male-dominated canon. According to Waithe, however, one should be wary of extremes and avoid creating an alternative canon (Waithe Reference Waithe2015, 27) as a counter-measure.

Faced with the scarcity of printed editions of works by women philosophers, scholars have begun to employ digital resources as solutions. The continuous technological innovation that defines our era, the globalization of the internet, and the availability of web-based apps and media have produced new forms of scholarship in the humanities and the social sciences. The digital humanities is currently one of the leading domains for the study and the diffusion of works by early modern women philosophers, with several projects created with that aim within this innovative field. These projects apply multidisciplinary methodologies and a collective work dynamic. They target both a heterogeneous, nonspecialized public and the academic community dedicated to the study of the humanities, cultivating new audiences. They may involve the digital curation of editions and of research and teaching materials, as well as the creation of bibliographical databases that gather metadata of the works authored by women philosophers of the early modern period, thus ensuring and facilitating the retrieval and the reuse of these resources worldwide. The Women Writers Project's creators, for instance, explain: “As a method of bringing inaccessible texts back into use, the electronic archive seemed like the ideal successor to the physical archive, since it promised to overcome the problems of inaccessibility and scarcity which had rendered women's writing invisible for so long. This partnership of archival scholarship and electronic technology has become a model for text encoding projects all over the world.”Footnote ¹²

Nevertheless, some digital humanities projects may struggle to ensure their sustainability, update, and maintenance, because many of them are funded by short-term grants and hence their continuity is not guaranteed. Digital humanities scholars may also encounter difficulties concerning the academic evaluation of their work, that is, its recognition as a new form of scholarship.

Diverse digital projects, accessible online, developed by teams of professors, researchers, postgraduate and undergraduate students, as well as IT professionals offer valuable information about women intellectuals from the early modern period. They also provide access to digital editions of their works. For instance, Project Vox,Footnote ¹³ created by a team from Duke University co-directed by Andrew Janiak and Liz Milewicz, provides exhaustive presentations of female philosophers such as Mary Astell, Émilie Du Châtelet, Margaret Cavendish, Anne Conway, Elisabeth of Bohemia, Damaris Masham, and Anna Maria van Schurman, women who were unfairly underrepresented and left out of the canon, according to the website's statement. The members of this project also observe deficiencies concerning the scholarly bibliography that studies these women's texts, which is scarce in comparison to the copious number of articles and books written about canonical male philosophers. Project Vox provides teaching materials, an image gallery with portraits of the women philosophers in question (which enables readers or visitors to “put a face” to these lesser known thinkers), as well as images of diverse editions of their publications and, in some cases, digital editions of their works, for example, Émilie Du Châtelet's Essai sur l'Optique. They've also created a blog series titled “Revealing Voices” and produced short introductory videos about some of the women philosophers, like Du Châtelet. The historico-biographical presentation of the selected women thinkers includes a timeline that organizes central events of their lives and works chronologically, as well as a detailed account of their biography, a list of sources and editions of their texts, complementary scholarly bibliography, and a summary of their correspondence and their connections (dialogues, enemies, friends, and so on) with other intellectuals of their time, among other elements.

The Center for the History of Women Philosophers and Scientists, from Paderborn University, displays on its website many digital humanities projects.Footnote ¹⁴ Directed by Ruth Hagengruber, the Center has launched an Encyclopedia of Concise Concepts by Women Philosophers, where various scholars introduce the main ideas of women philosophers of all ages. Other resources created by this team include the Directory of Women Philosophers, and Conversations with Diotima, a series of interviews, conversations, and presentations of and about women philosophers, among many other initiatives such as a project to produce digital editions of Émilie Du Châtelet's works. The Center for the HWPS also organizes academic events, such as conferences and summer schools.

Digital Cavendish Footnote ¹⁵ focuses solely on philosopher Margaret Cavendish. Shawn Moore and Jacob Tootalian direct this open-access scholarly collaborative, which offers many resources for the study of Cavendish's life and work. Various data analysis and visualization tools are used to examine Cavendish's social network, the thematic continuity between her philosophical treatises, the different genres she explored, and other topics. An interactive map indicating the locations of Cavendish's works (published in 1675 or earlier) in European and North American libraries is also accessible on the website.

The site grants access to electronic texts and editions, both reading and scholarly, and promotes crowdsourcing intended to generate “reliable digital transcriptions of Margaret Cavendish's printed works” through the 18thconnect Footnote ¹⁶ digital platform. This team has created an audiobook of Cavendish's The Blazing World and collaborated with Dawn of the Unread, Footnote ¹⁷ a public humanities initiative that produces graphic novels, for an issue that introduces “Mad Madge” to young readers.

New Narratives: Bibliography of Works by Early Modern Women Philosophers,Footnote ¹⁸ directed by Lisa Shapiro, Karen Detlefsen, and Marguerite Deslauriers, seeks to “enrich and reinvigorate the philosophical canon” by offering a set of tools and resources for the study of early modern women philosophers. This digital project offers a bibliography of works by early modern women philosophers (an open-access searchable database, available for download), a digitized collection of texts not readily available from other search engines, with, for instance, images of some manuscripts (such as Elisabeth of Bohemia's letters). It also produces podcasts in the form of interviews with specialists or introductions to some female philosophers and organizes conferences, seminars, and various academic events. The project directors recently launched the Extending New Narratives website,Footnote ¹⁹ as the scope of the initial project has been broadened; it now encompasses the retrieval of “philosophical works of women and individuals from other marginalized groups across historical periods from 1400 through 1940.”Footnote ²⁰

Finally, Querelle, Footnote ²¹ led by Marguerite Deslauriers, Laura Prelipcean, and Andrew Piper, focuses on granting access to materials about the querelle des femmes. It provides a list of authors who have actively participated in this quarrel, with a brief biographical introduction and digital plain-text editions of their main texts (it includes authors who wrote in Italian, French, Latin, and English). The site also offers an interactive timeline of the querelle des femmes.

There are other Digital Humanities projects that we could not cover here, devoted to women intellectuals and/or noncanonical philosophical currents, but generally with a broader or narrower scope, such as BIESES (Bibliografía de Escritoras Españolas),Footnote ²² the Women Writers Project, Footnote ²³ The Orlando Project, Footnote ²⁴ A Celebration of Women Writers, Footnote ²⁵ the RECIRC Project, Footnote ²⁶ NEWW network (New approaches to European Women's Writing),Footnote ²⁷ SIEFAR (Société Internationale pour l’Étude des femmes de l'Ancien Régime),Footnote ²⁸ Center for New Narratives in Philosophy, Footnote ²⁹ Women Intellectuals of 18th Century Germany, Footnote ³⁰ History of Philosophy without Any Gaps Footnote ³¹ (a series of more than 450 podcasts produced by Peter Adamson, which introduce ancient Greek philosophy, as well as medieval, Renaissance, Indian, Islamic, and African philosophy), Philosophie cl@ndestine (a comprehensive database of philosophical clandestine manuscripts),Footnote ³² Feminist History of Philosophy, Footnote ³³ Women philosophers dot com/Society for the Study of Women Philosophers, Footnote ³⁴ The Perdita Project,Footnote ³⁵ Margaret Cavendish's Poems and Fancies,Footnote ³⁶ Grupo de Investigación Escritoras y Escrituras,Footnote ³⁷ CIRGEN Footnote ³⁸ and more. Other general resources that provide access to early modern texts are Early English Books Online (EEBO), Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO), and Gallica (through the Bibliothèque Nationale de France).

Undoubtedly, the choice to create and work on a digital humanities project about women philosophers as a professional academic undertaking stems from a feminist, egalitarian, historiographical perspective that favors a curated “viralization” of the ideas and texts of these female thinkers.Footnote ³⁹ These websites are useful and attractive to both academics and the general public. In fact, they are frequently promoted through social media, with the aim of sharing these initiatives and getting the word out to a wider audience. Those involved in and responsible for the development of these projects have understood that introducing these women philosophers to the canon may be more easily done if they are introduced first into our culture through accessible tools and media with which we are already familiar and that we use every day. They also promote collaboration among various professionals of the humanities and the IT community, sharing these resources among peers and thus inviting them to reflect on the exclusion of women philosophers from the canon. In this way, technology democratizes the study of early modern women philosophers and discourages a snobbish approach to these female thinkers, who, instead of becoming historical oddities who might be of interest only to a few scholars, start making their way into our collective imagination. There is still much more to be done. However, the wheels are in motion.