About

Sometimes friendship and work go together. This was the case for this collaborative project on women philosophers in the nineteenth century. Working on nineteenth-century philosophy—figures such as Herder, Kant, Schleiermacher, Schelling, Hegel, Nietzsche, and Kierkegaard—we were looking with envy at our early modern colleagues. In their field, there seemed to be no shortage of women philosophers. Elisabeth of Bohemia, Margaret Cavendish, Anne Conway, Mary Astell, Émilie du Châtelet, Mary Wollstonecraft, Catherine Macauley, to mention just a few.

In the nineteenth-century German tradition, however, no women philosophers were included in standard syllabi and reading lists. Were there no women philosophers in this period? Could it be that women had philosophized in the early modern period and then, abruptly, stopped in the years following the Enlightenment and the French Revolution? That seemed less than plausible.

We knew that women, at the time, had no access to formal university education. But in the nineteenth century, the category “philosophers” cannot be reduced to that of “academic philosophers.” Such a reduction would indeed exclude many of the most well-known philosophers from the period (Schopenhauer and Kierkegaard, for example). With expertise in idealism and romantic philosophy, we also knew that women, in this period, were salon hosts and letter-writers. But did they also write more comprehensive philosophical work?

We decided to spend weeks, months and what turned out to be years—burying ourselves in library resources, archives, and research already conducted in German Studies, International History, and other fields—to get a sense of what was available. And the answer to our question was a resounding yes!

We were surprised by the quality and relevance of the work written by women philosophers from the period of romanticism to that of phenomenology. Women philosophers addressed social issues (poverty, gender inequality, militarization), ecological imbalance, and our duties towards nature; they also sought to answer questions relating to art and aesthetic experience, metaphysics, epistemology, and aesthetics. There is, in short, not a single area of philosophy to which women did not contribute in the nineteenth century.

What is more, being excluded from the ivory towers of academia, women philosophers often produced philosophy that is engaging, direct in form, and bold in its conclusion. In the hope that our enthusiasm for these philosophers would be more widely shared, we worked on a volume with English translations of and introductions to some of the figures and their works. This volume, we hope, can be used in university classes and among general readers of nineteenth-century philosophy. The rich philosophical period between the French Revolution and World War I does not only include the names of Kant, Schelling, Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, and Kierkegaard, but also Staël, Günderrode, Brentano von Arnim, Dohm, Salomé, Zetkin, Luxemburg, Stein and Walther.