This book is an exercise in the recovery of historical memory
about a set of thinkers who have been forgotten or purposely
ignored and, as a result, never made it into the canon of Western
political philosophy. Penny Weiss calls them "canon fodder,"
recalling the fate of soldiers in war who are treated by their
governments and military leaders as expendable. Despite some real
progress at recovery over the past few decades, and the
now-frequent references to a few female thinkers like Mary
Wollstonecraft, Hannah Arendt, and Simone de Beauvoir, the surface
has only been scratched, and the rich resources of women's writings
about political ideas remain still largely untapped. Included here,
and intended to further whet the palate, are figures from Sei
Shōnagon, Christine de Pizan, and Mary Astell to Elizabeth Cady
Stanton, Anna Julia Cooper, and Emma Goldman.
Restoring female thinkers to the conversation of political
philosophy is the primary goal of this book. Part I deploys a range
of these thinkers to discuss the nature of political inquiry
itself. Part II focuses on alternative approaches to and visions of
core political ideas: equality, power, revolution, childhood, and
community. While mainly an intellectual act of revival, this book
also affects practical political life, because "remote and academic
as they sometimes appear, debates about what to include in the
canon ultimately touch almost everyone: students handed texts from
lists of 'great books' to guide them . . . and citizens whose
governments justify their actions with ideas from political texts
deemed classic."
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