Nineteenth-Century Women Philosophers in Britain and America

Alison Stone, Charlotte Alderwick, Alison Stone, Charlotte Alderwick

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2023
• Print ISBN: 9781032521725
• eBook ISBN: 9781000958409
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Modern Philosophy

This book advances the rediscovery of forgotten women philosophers in the nineteenth century who have been unjustly left out of the philosophical canon and omitted from narratives about the history of philosophy.
Women often did philosophy in a public setting in this period, engaging with practical issues of social concern and using philosophy to make the world a better place. This book highlights some of women's interventions against slavery, for women's rights, and on morality, moral agency, and the conditions of a flourishing life. The chapters are on: Mary Shepherd's idea of life; the collaborative authorships and feminist perspectives of Anna Doyle Wheeler and Harriet Taylor Mill; the roles of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott in the American women's rights movement; the influence of classical German philosophy on Lydia Maria Child's abolitionism; George Eliot's understanding of agency; the views of agency and resistance developed by Harriet Tubman and Elizabeth from within the abolitionist tradition; Annie Besant's search for a metaphysical basis for ethics, which she ultimately found in Hinduism; E. E. Constance Jones on the dualism of practical reason; Marietta Kies on altruism and positive rights; and Anna Julia Cooper's black feminist conception of the right to growth. The book unearths an important and neglected chapter in the history of women philosophers, showing the variety and vitality of nineteenth-century women's intellectual lives.
Nineteenth-Century Women Philosophers in Britain and America will be of great use to students and researchers interested in Philosophy, Women's Studies, and the politics of gender at the heart of British and American societies. This book was originally published as a special issue of British Journal for the History of Philosophy.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction: Introduction to nineteenth-century British and American women philosophers
• 1 Mary Shepherd and the meaning of ‘life’
• 2 “Political…civil and domestic slavery”: Harriet Taylor Mill and Anna Doyle Wheeler on marriage, servitude, and socialism
• 3 Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott: radical ‘co-adjutors’ in the American women’s rights movement
• 4 Lydia Maria Child on German philosophy and American slavery
• 5 The fragility of rationality: George Eliot on akrasia and the law of consequences
• 6 “Count it all joy”: black women’s interventions in the abolitionist tradition
• 7 “Friendly to all beings”: Annie Besant as ethicist
• 8 E. E. Constance Jones on the dualism of practical reason
• 9 Marietta Kies on idealism and good governance
• 10 Race and the ‘right to growth’: embodiment and education in the work of Anna Julia Cooper
• Index