Tales from the Trenches: On Women Philosophers, Feminist Philosophy, and the Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy

Abstract

journal of speculative philosophy, vol. 26, no. 2, 2012 Copyright © 2012 The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA The fiftieth anniversary of the Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy (SPEP) provides a good occasion for reflecting on the history of women and feminist philosophy in the society. I’m not in a position to provide anything like a real history. But I can offer some memories and impressions of my own experiences. These will of necessity be personal and idiosyncratic. But they might nevertheless shed some light on certain historical events while also revealing something about how the women and feminist philosophers of my generation encountered the society’s practices and how some of us sought to change them. I belong to the generation of women and feminist philosophers who did their graduate work in the 1970s, the generation who sought to enter the profession in the late 1970s and early 1980s. We had a tough row to hoe. In graduate school, many of us labored alone as the sole woman in the cohort or class. And many of us pursued our work in departments that had not a single woman professor, let alone one interested in feminist Tales from the Trenches: On Women Philosophers, Feminist Philosophy, and the Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy