Elodie Pinel. “Women philosophers are capable of thinking about all subjects, what they lack is recognition.”

Madame Figaro. – The history of Western philosophy looks like a “boy’s club”, you say. How did this observation of the woman’s ignorance, in short, lack of knowledge, force you?
Elodie Pinel. – While teaching, I wanted to include women in my classes. But there were hardly any in textbooks or on the Internet, and very few names were mentioned in the program. I realized that philosophy was behind other subjects. My aim is to go a step further by explaining the reasons for this invisibility and, above all, the way in which women were able to think anyway.

Why do rarely recognized women philosophers often return to the question of the body or the tradition of feminist essays?
I understand it as one of the symptoms of male dominance. To bring a philosopher’s thought to feminism, in this view, is to misrepresent her work in order not to take it seriously. Fortunately, things are starting to change.

Work, ecology, democracy, life, end-of-life, digital ethics are the topics they grasp. You remember how crucial concepts such as totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt’s ‘cyborg’, Donna Haraway’s ‘care’, Carol Gilligan’s intention, Elizabeth Anscombe’s animate current thinking…
Philosophy is still perceived as a very closed circle, moreover, the teaching of philosophy in high school dedicates a pantheon that is not very sensitive to the problems of modern society. Our school lacks the desire to support the dissemination of texts by female philosophers. I am very dedicated to this issue, it is progressing slowly.

Which of these neglected philosophers particularly struck a chord with you?
The only philosopher I was ever told about at university was Elizabeth Anscombe; I discovered others myself and somehow ended up with my philosophy degree with a single feminist distinction. I then defended a doctoral thesis on Marguerite Porete, whose philosophical importance is increasingly recognized today, especially in Quebec. Margarita is my guide. She is a woman of the end of the 13th century.^e century that wrote an unclassifiable book, A simple mirror of broken souls, which he broadcast alone during public readings. His influence was such that his book was condemned twice, notably by the thirty theologians of the Sorbonne. It was burned in Place de Grève in Paris in 1310. she is the first woman convicted for the book.

You bring up some forgotten philosophers like Emile du Chatelet, Flora Tristan, Mary Astell… Why have their thoughts caused such indifference?
These women have been erased from official history because they were disqualified at the time. Emilie du Châtelet had difficulties with the Academy of Sciences, which refused to consider her work; Flora Tristan, the victim of an attempted femicide, died of exhaustion, erased for the benefit of socialist thinkers. Mary Astell’s proposal to found a girls’ college was scorned and ridiculed. It should be noted that Olympe de Gouges is currently in the French baccalaureate program. Not only did he advocate for women’s right to divorce and the abolition of slavery, he also rewrote: Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen putting it in a feminine way. We know his sentence. he should also have the right to ascend to the podium.” This is the scaffolding he himself erected in 1793. His last words were: “Children of the Motherland, you will avenge my death.” Its installation in the Pantheon has been required for several years. There is a petition circulating on the Internet, which I signed.

How have these philosophers, from Simone Weil to Hannah Arendt, Carol Gilligan to Joan Tronto, often renewed thinking about work and working conditions?
The focus of female philosophers in the workplace is both a surprise and an obvious fact. A surprise, since women in France did not have the right to work without the consent of their father or husband until the 1960s. It is clear that in fact working-class women have always worked, and that those from the wealthier classes often helped their husbands. in the shade Flora Tristan visited London factories before Karl Marx and first formulated the concept of “workers’ union”. Simon Weil went to work in a factory to understand assembly line work and wrote Working condition. Upon arriving in the United States, Hannah Arendt worked as a journalist, researcher, but also as a homemaker. He defined the work by its repetitive nature. Finally, Carol Gilligan and Joan Tronto define an ethics of “caring” that places concern for others at the heart of morality, and care professions that are undervalued. So many concepts and ideas that shed light on the labor crisis we are going through today.

And on environmental philosophy, on the question of life, how important do you think the works of many of these philosophers are?
According to many gender stereotypes, women are supposed to have an intuitive knowledge of nature, like a witch. In fact, women have been strongly questioning life since the Middle Ages. Let’s quote Hildegard of Bingen, which is still very popular in Germany today. It was Frenchwoman Françoise d’Aubon who first spoke about ecofeminism in the 1970s; he finds that the same logic of dominance is at work between men and women as it is in the relationship between being, man, and other living species. Kathryn Lahrer and Isabelle Stengers question our ethical stance toward the environment, Donna Haraway and Elizabeth de Fontenay question the place of animals in our classification of living things. This obliges us to change our view of our place in the universe and to move beyond the “possession and mastery” model of nature advocated by Descartes.

Do these women embody their own way of thinking?
There is no specific feminine philosophy. Women are capable of thinking about all topics. what they lack is recognition. When I read the words of Simone de Beauvoir Second gender, according to which there has never been a female genius, I fell out of my chair. But I connected with this false syndrome that haunts us women; am i smart enough Do I have the right to speak? Shall I listen? It is to respond to this complex that I wrote this book, As Women Philosophers We Are Legitimate. But we need models so that we don’t doubt it anymore.