The cod is getting a work-out today...

[oursin]

Three words used in a sense that seems particular and cryptic*, because in context they don't make no sense to me:
the world's first feminist philosopher
This is the strapline to Julie Bindel's obituary of the late Mary Daly.

WHUT.

*Ties copy of Dale Spender's Women of Ideas round the cod's neck, first*

Maybe Bindel means the first woman to hold a formal academic post in philosophy and be a open feminist.

And even so I suspect that erases some significant predecessors.

*Or, of course, just plain wrong.

Comments

[nja.livejournal.com]

I started reading that obituary at lunchtime today, and nearly choked on my baked potato. Then I looked to see who had written it. Ah, Julie Bindel, 'nuff said. I occasionally wonder if that's a nom-de-plume for the other Julie B to publish stuff that even she thinks is too barking to own up to.

[laughingrat]

Look, someone recently posted an extensive quote from The Book of the City of Ladies which sounded an awful lot like feminist philosophy, and I'm pretty sure Christine de Pizan predated Mary Daly by like 400 years or something. Also, I need to dig out my as-yet-unread copy of that and crack it open.

[jonquil]

It's a charmer. Don't miss the instructions to the poor on how to be truly *good* poor people.

[laughingrat]

Oh, so it's not as full of win as the quote made it look? Sad.

[jonquil]

Um... it's written for the medieval aristocracy. Class consciousness is deeply embedded in the worldview, and social class is the will of God.

It is full of win, but it's not written for modern sensibilities. Some of it resonates, some of it maddens.

[laughingrat]

Well, I understand those concepts. I was just unfamiliar with the book itself.

[jonquil]

Um... John Stuart Mill, anyone? And, as he always insisted, his partner, Harriet Taylor?

[egret]

Bindel seems not to have read any of Daly's actual books, which spend lots of time praising the "foremothers."

[badgerbag]

Hmm well I do think of Sor Juana Inez de la Cruz. and Catherine Macaulay (who's very cool).

I wouldn't expect Bindel to go that far, but surely de Beauvoir counts and she would be aware...?!!!

Mary Astell! FFS!!!

Aspasia? Too slutty? Diotima?

[ironed_orchid]

de Beauvoir was defiitely in academia and a feminist, if that is the criterion used.

[legionseagle]

If you don't count as a philosopher if you're slutty that knocks out one hell of a lot of the blokes.

[ironed_orchid]

I'm too boggled to make a list of feminist philosophers starting from the 18th Century, but I may come back to it.

[legionseagle]

What about Hypatia*? You have to admire a woman who copes with a student who has an inconvenient crush on her by hoicking up her dress to expose her genitalia, saying, "What you are in love with is the symbol of an unclean generation and not anything noble", dropping her dress and going on with the lecture without missing a beat.



*Mathematics, philosophy and music were sufficiently intertwined at the relevant date for her to qualify, methinks

[madam-silvertip.livejournal.com]

I would agree that Hypatia has beaten Mary Daly to the finish line by a wide margin. One would expect Julie Bindel to be more aware of that, especially since Hypatia paid with her life. (I didn't know this story about her, delicious.)

[(Anonymous)]

I doubt very, very much that Mary Daly was the first open feminist to hold an academic position in philosophy, even accepting for the sake of the argument that this was what Bindel meant.

I would guess, from what I know about Bindel, that she's being picky not about the definition of "philosopher" but the definition of "feminist." That is that there were no real feminists before the more radical wing of the second wave. It would be closer to what she had in mind to say "the first radical feminist professional philosopher of the second wave." Although I believe Robin Morgan, Andrea Dworkin, Elizabeth Gould Davis, and several others were writing radical feminist books that were about intellectual issues, not just practicalities, before Daly became a true radical with "Gyn/Ecology" or even "Beyond God the Father."

One sometimes still finds this sort of locution among people who believe that the self-identified radical feminists of the second wave set the bar for true feminism, although there is relatively little in any of them that was not touched upon by some feminists earlier on. Daly herself owes a lot to Matilda Joslyn Gage and "The Woman's Bible."

[madam-silvertip.livejournal.com]

That was me just now with the observations that Mary Daly really was not quite the first even by Julie Bindel's (possible) standards.

[madam-silvertip.livejournal.com]

Never mind, it seems this comment didn't make it here. All that needed to be said was said more concisely above anyway--Hypatia really was far and away the first.