
In "How to Think Like a Woman," Regan Penaluna resurrects four erased female philosophers while challenging philosophy's deep-seated misogyny. Named to Inc.'s Non-Obvious Book Awards, this memoir-meets-critique asks: Why were brilliant women thinkers systematically removed from intellectual history - and what does their erasure cost us?
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For centuries, women philosophers have been erased from intellectual history, their brilliant minds relegated to footnotes while men's ideas filled textbooks. In "How to Think Like a Woman," Regan Penaluna weaves her personal journey through academia with the excavation of forgotten female thinkers who challenged philosophical traditions. Imagine walking into a graduate seminar where your professor casually asks, "Why haven't women achieved the highest levels of thought?"-a question that implicitly questions your very capacity to belong in that room. This was Penaluna's awakening moment, revealing that in philosophy, she wasn't simply a thinker but a "woman thinker"-a category laden with assumptions about intellectual inferiority. Growing up in Iowa with a natural inclination toward metaphysical questions, she found her intellectual home in philosophy during college, only to have graduate school gradually erode her confidence as she completed her coursework without studying a single woman philosopher. The turning point came when she discovered a footnote mentioning Damaris Cudworth (Lady Masham), leading her to uncover brilliant women who had faced the same doubts and obstacles centuries earlier-women who had been systematically written out of history despite producing work that challenged the greatest minds of their eras.