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Landmark moments for women in philosophy [timeline]

This March, the OUP Philosophy team are celebrating Women in Philosophy. Throughout time, women have had to fight for their place in history, academia, and the philosophy discipline. Women have made hugely significant contributions to both philosophy and academia as a whole and we believe it is crucial to look back at the landmark achievements of women in their work and recognize their importance.

To honour their contributions, we will be highlighting women and their achievements in the field of philosophy all throughout Women’s History Month.

Browse our interactive timeline of some of the most empowering moments in the history of women in philosophy. For more of our Women in Philosophy Month content, check out #WomenInPhilMonth on Twitter.

Which female achievements in academia would you add in? Let us know in the comments.

Featured image: Nine Living Muses of Great Britain by Richard Samuel. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons

Recent Comments

  1. Eyja M. Brynjarsdóttir

    Are you sure you have the right Susanne Langer in the accompanying picture?

  2. Carol C Gould

    The first collection on feminist philosophy was published in 1974, entitled Women and Philosophy: Toward a Theory of Liberation, edited by Carol C. Gould and Marx Wartofsky. It appeared as a Special Issue of the Philosophical Forum, (volume V, nos. 1-2, 1973-74), edited by Wartofsky, and was subsequently published as a book with the same title (and a new introduction) by G. P. Putnam’s (New York) in 1976.

  3. Corey W. Dyck

    Dorothea Christiane Erxleben (1715-62) was the first woman in Germany to obtain a medical doctorate in 1754.

  4. Lisa Shapiro

    Mary Calkins becomes first woman president of the American Philosophical Association in 1918.

  5. Carolina Sousa

    It would be nice if the timeline had mentioned the specific fields and main works done by the philosophers…

  6. Emily Thomas

    This is great to see. However, I can think of at least one woman “professional philosopher” who published earlier than Susanne Langer. The British idealist Hilda Oakeley began publishing philosophy from the 1910s, including a 1915 paper in Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, and a 1922 paper in Philosophical Review. She studied at Oxford and worked at Manchester and KCL.

  7. Gary Ostertag

    E E Constance Jones published “The Import of Categorical Propositions”in Mind in 1893, 32 years before the Langer publication cited.

    An even earlier publication by a woman in Mind was Christine Ladd Franklin’s critical notice of Jones’ book, Elements of Logic as a Science of Propositions, in 1890.

  8. Gary Ostertag

    Also: the first feminist work to be published in the United States was not Fuller’s Women in the Nineteenth Century, but “On the Equality of the Sexes” by Judith Sargent Murray (1751-1820), published in 1779.

  9. […] exercício de reconstrução da linha filosófica do tempo (histórico) com mulheres, no blog da Oxford University […]

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