In my mind, the title of this book is How to Read Like a Woman. I noticed last week how often I had been referring to it incorrectly, but even still I had to correct the title of this post just a moment ago.
Straight away you can see that I was expecting something slightly different. More reading, less thinking!
And I didn’t properly attend to the subtitle either—Four Women Philosophers Who Taught Me How to Love the Life of the Mind—the deliberately personal “Me” which indicates that this is a book as much about its author as it is about books philosophy.
A couple of chapters in, I was antsy, questioning whether I was the right audience for this presentation. The top of my bookmark gathered some dust over the holidays but, when I returned, and perhaps had just slightly adjusted my expectations, I settled right into Penaluna’s story.
It really is a personal story and, appropriately, in that context, she gets into the details of the women whose lives and work she’s found so meaningful: Mary Astell (1666-1731), Damaris Masham (1659-1708), Mary Wollstonecraft (1757-1797), and Catherine Cockburn (1679-1749).
Regan Penaluna’s book actually begins with her own story, however; she writes about her experiences as young girl looking for answers, not finding them in religion but, eventually, discovering philosophy—a process of exploration she finds more satisfying.
She writes about beginning her philosophy studies and working her way up the ladder in the faculty; she writes about meeting her boyfriend and their relationship developing into a marriage. In both situations, she finds limitations—and changes direction to accommodate her growing awareness and understanding.
When Mary Astell called London home, there were more than 150 bookshops there, but no women lived as professional writers—except Aphra Behn (in whom Penaluna doesn’t find kinship because Behn was producing poetry and fiction and plays…but not philosophy).
Astell takes the position of the Cambridge Platonist—“God did nothing in vain”—and she adds a twist: because since women possessed reason, then God must have intended for them to use it. “For since GOD has given Women as well as Men intelligent Souls, why should they be forbidden to improve them?”
Damaris Masham agreed with that: “I see no Reason why it should not be thought that all Science lyes as open to a Lady as to a Man.” But she took issue with Astell’s support of Nicolas Malebranche, a French philosopher who declared that mothers cause their babies irreversible cognitive damage while in the womb.
In reading these women’s publications over and over, Penaluna began to reflect on women’s professional pursuits and how difficult it was to remain dedicated when women were expected to pursue marriage and family too. Although increasingly dissatisfied with the support she was receiving, both with her personal relationship and her professional goals, she was reluctant to step off either path.
“Only years later, when men have outpaced most women in their careers, will women begin to discover how they nearly snuffed themselves out. Just like I was doing. I took Masham’s recommendation to be: Do not retreat. A Woman’s path to self-knowledge requires her to risk losing herself to find herself.”
Mary Wollstonecraft urged greater scrutiny on society’s expectations of women. “She was better suited to philosophize about women, because she was both a philosopher and a woman, because she was both a philosopher and a woman—a clever inversion of the claim that being a woman disqualified her from doing philosophy.”
Penaluna is particularly intrigued by Wollstonecraft’s expression of her philosophy in Mary: A Fiction: “Rather than overcoming a series of obstacles to marriage, her protagonist strives to overcome the obstacle of marriage itself. “ And, so: “a woman’s journey to self-actualization isn’t about finding a husband but rather admiring the details” that surround her in the world.
But it’s Catherine Cockburn whose philosophy truly and irrevocably inspires Penaluna—who, by this point, has had a child—with Cockburn’s thoughts on motherhood and the difficulty of managing so many sets of expectations. She articulates a view of the world that encourages Penaluna to take action and ask a new set of hard, maybe unanswerable, questions. (Saying too much more would spoil this aspect of the narrative and it’s really the only element of tension in the book.)
What I most enjoyed about the book was the way that Penaluna summarises these women’s lives and work. Her language is clear and, although there are a lot of footnotes, it feels conversational. And there’s always at least one completely unexpected and strange detail, which almost feels overly familiar, that makes each person seem undeniably human and relatable.
I read it with The Australian Legend’s Gen 0 week in mind (running January 14th through 21st), only a little intimidated by the philosophy-ness of it all. Thanks, Bill, for inspiring me to take my reading in a slightly different direction.
This sounds like something child #3 might like – she loves her philosophy courses!
She probably would, but she might feel like the memoir bits are somewhat removed (I don’t want to say much and risk spoiling); I bet you’d like both parts (even if you don’t think of yourself as a philosophy queen). It should be out in paperback before too long.
I’ve got this on my TBR list and if it hadn’t been there already I’d be adding it after reading what you said about it.
I bet you’ll find it good company. And maybe you’re also more likely to run into others who are reading it too, given the nature of your work.
I love this Marcie “The top of my bookmark gathered some dust over the holidays”. Nicely said!
This book reminded me a tiny bit of the one I’ve just read, Nell Stevens’ Mrs Gaskell and me – but only because she’s paralleling her life with that of Mrs Gaskell, while also trying to understand Mrs Gaskell. Her driver is very different to Penaluna’s as she’s not looking for “meaning” and I sense that hers is more lightly narrative, so I should not perhaps draw a comparison at all.
I tend to run from philosophy, which shows you just how shallow I am! I like thinking about values, morals and ethics, but I haven’t really, since I hit my twenties, worried too much about “looking for answers”, because, fundamentally, I don’t think there are any! That sounds flippant, and I can perhaps understand that even that belief of mine perhaps creates a question needing answering, as in “why do you think there are no answers”. Oh, philosophy, it makes my brain hurt!
Hahahahaha, exactly! That’s similar to my musings on it too. And because it requires the kind of focus that I currently expend on other non-fiction reading, and I know I would have to set aside something there to read more in philosophy, it remains in the “oh, it hurts” stage.
I know what you mean; there’s still an active dialogue between writer and books, so whether the balance between personal/scholarly or ruminative/directed is a little different, I’d tend to shelve those two books together too.
Really, I did very little reading over the holidays, so it wasn’t Penaluna’s fault (I also did no dusting, obviously).
Thank you for your enthusiastic participation in this Week, Marcie. I have a much better understanding now of the evolution of both the New Woman and of the Independent Woman in Australian Lit. Interestingly, if early Australian women writers cite a source for their thinking it’s generally JS Mill on The Subjection of Women (1869); but as CH Spence, like the Brontes, was already writing by then, their real sources must be earlier. I wonder to what extent did Penaluna’s four women philosophers stay in print (time I re-read Dale Spender).
My understanding is still fledgling, but your week definitely got me thinking in directions I’ve not been exploring in my reading for years, so that’s exciting. (I’d pulled off two other Spender-ish books to write about, too, but it quickly became clear that choices must be made!) It really IS curious to step outside and try to imagine the earlier influences. Hard enough to imagine other times and places, let along creative thinking in those different scenarios. Yes, I saw more talk of Mill too. (And his book was assigned reading for me in history, but not the others…I either forced them into essays where I had some freedom to choose topics or they were part of classes in arts/humanities.) When I looked up the philosophers, their works are all available in epubs (at least). There are some university press publications too.
[…] In reading these women’s publications over and over, Penaluna began to reflect on women’s professional pursuits and how difficult it was to remain dedicated when women were expected to pursue marriage and family too. Although increasingly dissatisfied with the support she was receiving, both with her personal relationship and her professional goals, she was reluctant to step off either path. Read on … […]