How to Think Like a Woman: Four Women Philosophers Who Taught Me How to Love the Life of the Mind

By Regan Penaluna

As a young woman growing up in a small, religious community, Regan Penaluna daydreamed about the big questions: Who are we and what is this strange world we find ourselves in? In college she discovered philosophy and fell in love with its rationality, its abstractions, its beauty.

What Penaluna didn't realize was that philosophy - at least the canon that's taught in Western universities, as well as the culture that surrounds it - would slowly grind her down through its devaluation of women and their minds. Women were nowhere in her curriculum, and feminist philosophy was dismissed as marginal, unserious.

Until Penaluna came across the work of a seventeenth-century woman named Damaris Cudworth Masham. Reading Masham's work was like reaching through time: writing three hundred years ago, Masham was speaking directly to her about knowledge and God, but also the condition of women. Her work eventually led Penaluna to other remarkable women philosophers of the era: Mary Astell, Catharine Cockburn and Mary Wollstonecraft.

Together these women rekindled Penaluna's love of philosophy and taught her how to live a truly philosophical life. She combines memoir with biography to tell the stories of these four women, weaving throughout an alternative history of philosophy as well as her own search for beauty and truth. Formally inventive and keenly intelligent, How to Think Like a Woman is a moving meditation on what philosophy could look like if women were treated equally.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Grove Press UK
• Release date: Mar 16, 2023
• ISBN: 9781804710012

Reviews for How to Think Like a Woman

[pomo58 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

How to Think Like a Woman by Regan Penaluna is an interesting book as a bit of history and a memoir, and less so as a book on philosophical thought.I guess I was fortunate to have gone to a school with a less prestigious philosophy department, because during my undergrad in the early 90s I became familiar (though admittedly not very) with three of the four main philosophers Penaluna concentrates on. The male-centric presentation of philosophical thought meant I got little more than a brief introduction, but I didn't have to stumble across them on my own, they were part of my formal study. This doesn't take away from the bigger point, namely that women, as both subjects of study and as members of faculty within philosophy departments, are tremendously underrepresented, even now after decades of trying to fix it.Just because the recovery work on these philosophers is more for Penaluna than an actual recovery for academia itself doesn't change the role they played in her growth. And that aspect of the book is probably the most interesting, the memoir part. I didn't care for her authorial voice but ending up in journalism partially explains it. The writing itself is fine, I just never really felt the kind of trust one needs in a memoirist to fully appreciate it. Every memoirist does a bit of image construction, just as we all tell our own stories with a bias toward ourselves. I just didn't completely trust the personal parts, even when I had no doubt the infrastructure around her was not designed to support her or any other woman. I would recommend this to readers who want a memoir and a bit of a history of women in philosophy, particularly those readers who don't have a philosophy background and thus will be unfamiliar with the philosophers covered.Reviewed from a copy made available by the publisher via NetGalley.