Recovering Women's Voices in the Early Modern Canon

The systematic exclusion of women such as Elisabeth of Bohemia, Anne Conway, Mary Astell, Damaris Masham, Émilie du Châtelet, Catharine Trotter Cockburn, and Mary Wollstonecraft from the standard narrative of early modern philosophy is not primarily a product of their own era's total indifference — several were read, cited, and corresponded with by the leading male philosophers of their day, as the individual figures above make clear — but of a subsequent historiographical process, running roughly from the late 18th through the mid-20th century, in which university philosophy curricula and canonical anthologies narrowed to a small set of named "great" (and exclusively male) figures: Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, Locke, Berkeley, Hume, and Kant, with women's philosophical writing reclassified, where remembered at all, as literature, letters, devotional writing, or biographical curiosity attached to a canonical man rather than as philosophy in its own right.