Nineteenth-Century Women Philosophers in Britain and America

This book advances the rediscovery of forgotten women philosophers in the nineteenth century who have been unjustly left out of the philosophical canon and omitted from narratives about the history of philosophy. Women often did philosophy in a public setting in this period, engaging with practical issues of social concern and using philosophy to make the world a better place. This book highlights some of womens interventions against slavery, for womens rights, and on morality, moral agency, and the conditions of a flourishing life. The chapters are on: Mary Shepherds idea of life; the collaborative authorships and feminist perspectives of Anna Doyle Wheeler and Harriet Taylor Mill; the roles of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott in the American womens rights movement; the influence of classical German philosophy on Lydia Maria Childs abolitionism; George Eliots understanding of agency; the views of agency and resistance developed by Harriet Tubman and Elizabeth from within the abolitionist tradition; Annie Besants search for a metaphysical basis for ethics, which she ultimately found in Hinduism; E. E. Constance Jones on the dualism of practical reason; Marietta Kies on altruism and positive rights; and Anna Julia Coopers black feminist conception of the right to growth. The book unearths an important and neglected chapter in the history of women philosophers, showing the variety and vitality of nineteenth-century womens intellectual lives. Nineteenth-Century Women Philosophers in Britain and America will be of great use to students and researchers interested in Philosophy, Womens Studies, and the politics of gender at the heart of British and American societies. This book was originally published as a special issue of British Journal for the History of Philosophy.