(THIS ARTICLE IS MACHINE TRANSLATED by Google from Norwegian)
Boken How to Think Like a Woman is based on a thorough review of the lives and work of four feministphilosophers of the 1600th and 1700th centuries. Damaris Masham, Mary Astell, Mary Wollstonecraft and Catherine cockburn were "influential but scandalously overlooked" (to put it with one of the reviewers).
Regan Penaluna brilliantly explains how finding information about them helped her understand her own difficulties as a female philosopher in contemporary American academia. She eventually left university and specialized in science communication. With success. In the book, she addresses some key questions about women's equality in a refreshing way. Even if you are not interested in the history of philosophy, you will enjoy reading How to Think Like a Woman.
Prejudice
To mention Equality may seem outdated today. There is plenty of information about extraordinary women from the past and present that is available to the new generations. The demand for equal opportunities has become part of language and employment policy in several countries far outside the global north. Therefore, the author's personal experiences are absolutely crucial. That women are in no way inferior to men has become a given, but the misogynistic mentality has not died out. This is one of the many hypocrisies that characterize our time, and we all experience it from time to time.
Working on the book helped the author understand her own difficulties as a female philosopher in contemporary American academia.
Penaluna's experience is particularly important, because as her memoir so beautifully reminds us: Philosophy is like no other field. It is about the most outstanding human quality: reason. One incident is particularly telling. As a doctoral student in Boston, USA, Regan Penaluna was present at a philosophy lecture in which a renowned philosophy professor invited the students to consider the possibility that women are not as smart as men. He suggested that this is the real reason why women have not reached the highest levels of thinking.
This is, of course, 'just' a repetition of philosophers' millennia-old prejudices. Aristotle argued that women were destined to be ruled by men; Baruch Spinoza wrote that women "by nature do not have the same rights as men"; and August Comte believed that women were intellectually inferior to men. Darwin claimed that man can reach "a higher eminence, in whatever he undertakes, than woman can," and in 1873 a professor of medicine at Harvard, using Darwin's arguments as his backing, spoke out against higher education for girls in the United States. Until 1869, women were barred from the University of Cambridge, and until 1920, from the University of Oxford.
These prejudices are from the past, but fundamentally define what is specific about the female mind.
What gender does the mind have?
Penaluna's critics flatly reject her assumption that it is possible to "think like a woman." There is no one way to think like a woman, argued one reviewer, who wrote that "most women find it annoying that they are assumed to think alike."
Nana Asma'u was the daughter of the founder of the caliphate and a preacher in a scholastic Sufi sect that believed that women were worthy of learning.
In other words, the mind has no gender. Although this view is essentialist, Penaluna invites her readers to adopt a historical perspective. A perspective in which we, different women who obviously do not think alike, all have in common the prejudices with millennial traditions that we encounter in our culture as women. This is what obliges us to “think like a woman”. The beauty of Penaluna’s book is that it guides the reader from one thing to another. From what she believed at the beginning, that intelligence was something you were born with, to what she learned during her studies and because of the events she describes in the book – namely that “intelligence can also be cumulative, a function of effort and curiosity, a construction that depends on a society and its norms”. At the end of the book, she therefore claims: “I am a female thinker.” A thinker whose intellect “was not shaped in the brilliance of transcendent questions, but rather in response to the insidious systems of oppression.”
Change canon
By uncovering the stories of feminist pioneers Damaris Masham, Mary Astell, Mary Wollstonecraft and Catharine Cockburn, Penaluna makes an important contribution to the body of knowledge about Western feminism. She exposes the “double standards” of their male contemporaries – Enlightenment philosophers who promoted ideals of freedom and equality but did not extend these ideals to women.
Her book also features many outstanding female thinkers from other parts of the world. For example, Nana Asma'u bint Usman 'dan Fodio of the Sokoto Caliphate (1804–1903), a Sunni Muslim caliphate in West Africa. With a population of around 10–20 million people, it was the most populous kingdom in West Africa, and its borders united parts of present-day Cameroon, Burkina Faso, Niger, and Nigeria. Nana Asma'u was the daughter of the caliphate's founder and a Sufi preacher, a scholastic Sufi sect that believed women were worthy of learning. Nana Asma'u was known as one of the leading scholars of the Caliphate, and she wrote extensively about female leaders and women's rights. She left behind a large body of writing, many historical narratives – but also poems that were used in teaching.
Penaluna has explored these early female philosophers to place them alongside the more well-known white, male European thinkers.
Penaluna's most groundbreaking achievement is reaching beyond white middle-class feminism. She has explored these early female philosophers to situate them alongside the more well-known white male European thinkers. Her goal was to expand the canon itself, but she eventually realized that this was not enough. "We must rethink the very concept of the canon," Penaluna writes, arguing for including the undisciplined parts of spiritual historyone, create an idea story that is "dynamic and wild like a big cat."
Translated by MODERN TIMES' editor.
