Hipparchia's Choice

Your book is a joy. It has a strength which permeates its every tone of voice. You are renewing the whole problem of thought, tracking down a distinctively masculine cogito. Already you are sketching the outline of a thought which would be free from such constraints, and estimating its cost. I admire your book and am impatient for the next one. Think of me as someone close to you and be assured, if you will, of my friendship. -- Gilles Deleuze Le Doeuff is a feminist thinker of unparalleled brilliance and originality. Hipparchia's Choice is a deep, sustained series of meditations on women and philosophy; it is perhaps even more important and relevant now than it was when first published. I cannot recommend a book with more enthusiasm. -- Nancy Bauer, Tufts University and author of Simone de Beauvoir, Philosophy, and Feminism Hipparchia's Choice takes many of the themes and problems brought to life by Simone de Beauvoir fifty years ago and deepens and recreates them for the twenty-first century. -- Emily Grosholz, Pennsylvania State University

Takes on the history of philosophy, viewing it as a history of masculine texts and male problems and questioning its social and legislative conclusions. This work argues that the position of women in philosophy is a question of exclusion by men rather than, as some suggest, of a hypothetically imminent "femininity.""To be a philosopher and to be a feminist are one and the same thing. A feminist is a woman who does not allow anyone to think in her place."-from Hipparchia's Choice A work of rare insight and irreverence, Hipparchia's Choice boldly recasts the history of philosophy from the pre-Socratics to the post-Derrideans as one of masculine texts and male problems. The position of women, therefore, is less the result of a hypothetical "femininity" and more the fault of exclusion by men. Nevertheless, women have been and continue to be drawn to "the exercise of thought." So how does a female philosopher become a conceptually adventurous woman? Focusing on the work of Sartre and Beauvoir (specifically, his sexism and her relation to it), Michele Le Doeuff shows how women philosophers can reclaim a place for feminist concerns. Is The Second Sex a work of philosophy, and, if so, what can it teach us about the relation of philosophy to experience? Now with a new epilogue, Hipparchia's Choice points the way toward a discipline that is accountable to history, feminism, and society.