You might not hear much about it if you study philosophy, but this rich intellectual tradition is centuries old and often more open to the mess of life than its male counterpart
As a graduate student in philosophy years ago, I had a life-changing insight: there were women philosophers. Lots of them. So many in fact that it was laughably tragic how easy it had been for me to study the history of philosophy completely oblivious to their existence.
I also discovered, unsurprisingly, that like their male counterparts, female philosophers were interested in all sorts of topics and represented a rich variety of intellectual sensibilities and temperaments. But I was drawn especially to the messier types. Those who didn’t respect the distinction between the abstract and the everyday, and whose experience of being a woman in the world bled into her work – in some cases just a little and in others consuming her entire opus.
