Making Room for Women in Masculine Spaces
Perhaps those who don’t belong can teach us that it is our communities, and not the individuals who stand outside of them, that need to adapt and expand.
Image credit: Beck Seamons
In the fall of 2022, I stepped into my first upper division philosophy course. I was happy to have graduated from the dim basement lecture halls to the small, bright conference room on the fourth floor of the humanities building. From the corner of the room, a t-shirt displaying Bertrand Russell’s stern face welcomed me to the top of the ivory tower. Lips pursed around his cigar, he looked on skeptically as I chose my seat at the oblong table. To my left, there hung a black and white picture of BYU’s former philosophy faculty—ten men posed in crisp suits with gentle smiles. In spite of Russell’s judgmental gaze, I was thrilled to be there. I loved philosophy, felt that I was predisposed to it, and wanted to pursue it professionally. I was excited to be in advanced classes with a more experienced cohort and elevated discussions.
As my peers trickled in, I noticed that only two other women had enrolled in the course. I reasoned that it was an anomaly until all my other upper division classes followed the same pattern. There were at least four men for every one woman enrolled in each class. Often, it was an even more disproportionate ratio. I later learned that there are fewer women per capita in philosophy than there are in math or astrophysics. Among the few women in my classes, chances of finding a full philosophy major were slim. Some were interdisciplinary humanities or political science majors, some were double majors, and others were philosophy minors. Most women had one foot in philosophy and the other in an academic community outside of the major.
But the most striking imbalance of all: none of us spoke in class. Most of my male classmates offered comments frequently, with ease and confidence. But the women, despite our professors’ attempts to coerce us through participation grades, would not speak. The men in the class set the quota for how many comments amounted to a good participation grade, and my female classmates and I could never meet it. During one visit with a professor, I asked what I could do to improve my participation grade. He encouraged me to be more assertive, and to not allow other classmates’ perceptions of me to define me.
I tried to take him up on the advice, but willing myself to speak more was exhausting and largely unsuccessful. I felt much like Elizabeth of Bohemia, a challenger to Descartes’s substance dualism and one of the only female philosophers you’ll find on a philosophy course syllabus. Descartes famously proposed that the mind and body are entirely distinct—the former being immaterial and the latter material. Elizabeth, his astute correspondent, wondered how mind and body could interact if they are entirely different substances. Historical context suggests that her letters to Descartes were motivated by concerns that stretched beyond mind-body metaphysics. Among other hardships, her family was exiled and her uncle had been beheaded. Her inquiry was in part motivated by neurosis—a condition thought to be characteristically female. She writes, “know then, that I have a body filled with a great many of the weaknesses of my sex; it very easily feels the afflictions of the soul and does not have the force to bring itself into harmony with the soul.” Descartes prescribed the male panacea, stoicism, but she still could not seem to will her body out of its depressive state. Her question about how mind and body interact is celebrated for its philosophical rigor, but it is just as much a personal question. How, Elizabeth wondered, could she align her stubbornly unhealthy body with her desire to heal? I too want to ask Descartes, how can I will assertiveness to the point that it actually raises my hand in class? Why doesn’t encouraging female students to be assertive cause them to speak? It’s discouraging to think that we still perpetuate Descartes’s solution. Be stoic. Be male. Elizabeth’s question went a long way philosophically, but we’re still deaf to her personal query.
As I reached the end of my time in the major, I started applying to philosophy PhD programs. Professors began bombarding me with well-meaning but discouraging advice. Getting accepted into graduate school and getting a job in the humanities are notoriously difficult tasks, and they understandably wanted to warn me of the risks. But they also rarely made me feel able or excited to go. One professor told me that if I didn’t wake up thinking about philosophy and go to bed dreaming about philosophy, then I wasn’t cut out for graduate school. I was struck by this unhealthy, unsustainable, and gendered standard. Those who have a spouse or children might not have the “luxury” of thinking about mind-body metaphysics in their armchair all evening. Nonetheless, I held on to my enthusiasm for philosophy (an enthusiasm which did not consume my every thought), and started the grueling application process. As I tried my hand at the game of “guess what the admissions committee is thinking,” I was slowly losing faith in myself and the joy I once felt in doing philosophy. The slog of applying to graduate school combined with the toll of trying to be a man in order to fit into a man’s world were chipping away at my naive passion.
I began to question if philosophy was even worth pursuing. During this time of mild crisis, I was once asked in class to group up with those around me and share my thesis for an upcoming paper. I awkwardly wiggled my way into a conversation between the two men next to me. As the man closest to me talked through his proposed thesis, he didn’t look at me a single time. His attention, his craving for validation, and his respect were entirely directed towards the other man. I left that class feeling intellectually dehumanized and a bit enraged. I had now been interrupted, talked over, and dismissed one too many times to believe that I needed to be more assertive. Philosophy had been sending me a subtle message for three years, and finally it became clear: you are an imposter. There are two female faculty members, two females on your syllabus, and two females in your class if you’re lucky. If you’re not a bachelor who sits cloistered in your office all day smoking a cigar and thinking genius thoughts, then you don’t belong.
My island of relief in the department became the office of one of the two female faculty members. When I stepped into her office, I may as well have stepped into a different world. Her back wall was filled, top to bottom, with colorful drawings from her children. There was a stuffed animal basket next to a well-loved couch and a pillow to help you identify your emotions. Occasionally her children would accompany her to work and sit in on her meetings and lectures. I always admired the way she engaged with them. If they raised their hand in a lecture, she would treat their comment as if it had come from one of the other students and not from a five-year-old. She was a brilliant philosopher according to traditional standards, but also spoke compellingly about emotions, empathy, and attachment. Our discussions reignited my nearly suffocated interest in philosophy. My interests, my values, and my very existence as a female in philosophy were validated. I felt like the woman who’d been greeted by Bertrand Russell in her first upper division philosophy class, but instead of looking at Russell, I was now looking at a five-year-old’s marker masterpiece.
The same professor recommended that I read Metaphysical Animals, a book about how four female philosophy students at Oxford saved ethics in the wake of logical positivism. In the early twentieth century, philosophers were unwilling to endorse propositions that were not empirically verifiable. For example, the statement “the sky is blue” was deemed meaningful because we can observe that the sky is, in fact, blue. On the other hand, the statement “Hitler is bad” is unverifiable. “Badness” cannot be observed in any objective sense; it is metaphysical fluff. Hence, the statement “Hitler is bad” was rendered completely meaningless. The four women at Oxford were unwilling to accept this conclusion. Their heretical idea that ethics still has meaning was given some room to breathe as their male classmates left to fight in WWII. Between 1940 and 1945, Oxford’s philosophy department became a motley crew. Women and refugees, who were previously minorities, were left to philosophize at their fancy, without aggressive classmates demanding verification.
As I read about these four brave women who all faced and surmounted challenges on account of their gender, I felt my discouragement and anger slowly dissipate. I began to realize that the path forward was not stubbornly lone-wolfing my way through philosophy. The burden of trying to earn my place there every day was too heavy. In order to develop a sense of security in my womanhood, I needed to untangle the past. Both my own past, and the broader past of women in philosophy. In The Second Sex, Simone De Bouvior asks, “what precise opportunities have been given us, and which ones have been denied? What destiny awaits our younger sisters, and in which direction should we point them? It is striking that most feminine literature is driven today by an attempt at lucidity more than by a will to make demands.” As I connected with the stories of these four women, for the first time, I felt empowered by my gender. Clarity about my history as a woman in philosophy propelled me forward. Because I finally felt understood and grounded, I could forgive those who had unknowingly hurt me. I no longer felt the need to demand respect from my male classmates.
Some might say that the opportunities I have now far outweigh those of women in the mid-twentieth century. What am I complaining for? Generally I would agree. But still, I couldn’t help but see my much smaller struggle to belong in their stories. If Elizabeth Anscombe, despite her nerves, courageously stood in front of the Oxford dons who were about to award Harry Truman an honorary degree and denounced the heinous bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, I thought, maybe I too could venture to speak in class. Maybe my intuitions are important, even if they are not always validated by the men around me.
One afternoon, I was sitting on the well-loved couch in my professor’s office with her five-year-old son. He was drawing, but also periodically attempting to participate in our discussion. In a flash of five-year-old inspiration, he asked his mom, “Can the stronger one teach the weaker one?” She replied, “That’s a really interesting question. Perhaps a better question is, can the weaker one teach the stronger one?”
Can the weaker one—not weaker in terms of ability or temperament, but weaker in terms of representation and perceived value—teach the stronger one? Perhaps those who don’t belong can teach us that it is our communities, and not the individuals who stand outside of them, that need to adapt and expand. If philosophy is to be a place where women belong, then it cannot require that women adopt the qualities of assertiveness and stoicism. Rather, the discipline must extend its borders to include the unique voices, interests, and intuitions of women, and exchange the myth of the solitary genius for the far more fruitful reality of charitable collaboration.
As a man of color, I understand the feeling as I sit with taller, louder, white man and women whose discussion of personal taste in music, food, books is sometimes foreign to me. I love shop talk because there is at least some commonality in the subject matter, but still my voice does not carry across the room, my thoughts are not their thoughts, and my topics seem so less connected to theirs even when they are by nature so much more than those of their white colleagues. They don't listen to me when we are in a collective, though they seem attentive in private. I don't exist in public, but I'm praised for always being there in the personal. This is why scholars of color often gravitate toward each other. It is about becoming public in spaces often reserved for others of a different shade.
I love this and know of other women who have had similar experiences in various fields. You did an excellent job in presenting this!