How to Think Like a Woman Quotes

“the male glance.” Not to be confused with the male gaze, which objectifies women’s bodies, the male glance does the opposite to women’s creative work: it barely gives it a second look.”
― Regan Penaluna, How to Think Like a Woman: Four Women Philosophers Who Taught Me How to Love the Life of the Mind

“Years later I cam across an article by the critic Lili Loofbourow introducing an expression that I thought uncannily captured some of my graduate school experience: "the male glance." Not ot be confused with the male gaze, which objectifies women's bodies, the male glance does the opposite to women's creative work: it barely gives it a second look. Those under its spell decide after cursory examination that the work in question isn't of much value. The male glance "looks, assumes, and moves on. It is, above all else, quick. Under its influence, we rejoice in our distant diagnostic speed . . . it feeds an inchoate, almost erotic hunger to know without attending--to omnisciently not-attend, to reject without taking the trouble of analytical labor." It turns away without care.”
― Regan Penaluna, How to Think Like a Woman: Four Women Philosophers Who Taught Me How to Love the Life of the Mind

“to be a self is to be profoundly connected to others, and to be free is to aid in the freedom of others. Perhaps this is all there is to rapture—to free each other to hear our own voices.”
― Regan Penaluna, How to Think Like a Woman: Four Women Philosophers Who Taught Me How to Love the Life of the Mind

“the brief time we are here matters, that it is meaningful and contains beauty. We’ve learned to talk to ourselves in this expansive and dark vacuum to keep ourselves company, so that we can transcend our finite, perplexing condition—if not in fact, then in our imaginations. We’ve learned to free ourselves—if only for the duration of a poem, an equation, a book, a prayer—from our despair.”
― Regan Penaluna, How to Think Like a Woman: Four Women Philosophers Who Taught Me How to Love the Life of the Mind

“In an exchange between a beguine and a French church master, the beguine asserted her superiority: “You glow, we take fire. / You assume, we know.”572”
― Regan Penaluna, How to Think Like a Woman: Four Women Philosophers Who Taught Me How to Love the Life of the Mind

“For too long we have ignored the dissenting voices that complicate the canon. The men of the Enlightenment were brave thinkers challenging traditional modes of thought, but the women of the Enlightenment were also brave, highlighting the ways in which men’s thinking fell short of their own ideals.”
― Regan Penaluna, How to Think Like a Woman: Four Women Philosophers Who Taught Me How to Love the Life of the Mind

“all life is suffering and that the trick is to find the suffering that’s worth longing for.”
― Regan Penaluna, How to Think Like a Woman: Four Women Philosophers Who Taught Me How to Love the Life of the Mind

“transcendence through interdependence. The love of others is a treacherous but necessary path and the only one available to us, because we are not gods.”
― Regan Penaluna, How to Think Like a Woman: Four Women Philosophers Who Taught Me How to Love the Life of the Mind

“your belief in your own victimhood is blinding you to your own powers”
― Regan Penaluna, How to Think Like a Woman: Four Women Philosophers Who Taught Me How to Love the Life of the Mind

“It’s not surprising that the philosopher who introduced the idea of radical doubt was a woman, since women learn to question themselves from a young age.”
― Regan Penaluna, How to Think Like a Woman: Four Women Philosophers Who Taught Me How to Love the Life of the Mind

“the epistemic state of many a thinking woman is one of self-doubt.”
― Regan Penaluna, How to Think Like a Woman: Four Women Philosophers Who Taught Me How to Love the Life of the Mind

“mothers emerge from her philosophical vision in a vital role: the transmitters of love who set us on the path of inquisitive engagement with the world. Mothers help make philosophy possible.”
― Regan Penaluna, How to Think Like a Woman: Four Women Philosophers Who Taught Me How to Love the Life of the Mind

“Household Affaires are the Opium of the Soul.”
― Regan Penaluna, How to Think Like a Woman: Four Women Philosophers Who Taught Me How to Love the Life of the Mind

“There is nothing challenging about being good or doing what’s right when you have no passion for life, let alone the wish to sin.”
― Regan Penaluna, How to Think Like a Woman: Four Women Philosophers Who Taught Me How to Love the Life of the Mind

“intelligence could also be accumulative, a function of effort and curiosity, a construct dependent upon a community and its norms.”
― Regan Penaluna, How to Think Like a Woman: Four Women Philosophers Who Taught Me How to Love the Life of the Mind

“I longed to connect to something greater than myself, to ponder reality and my place in it. I wasn’t looking for a personal god. I was after truth, which didn’t promise to yield a universe that I would like but rather one that was real.”
― Regan Penaluna, How to Think Like a Woman: Four Women Philosophers Who Taught Me How to Love the Life of the Mind

“It's not surprising that the philosopher who introduced the idea of radical doubt was a woman, since women learn to question themselves from a young age. Contemporary philosopher and artist Adrian Piper noticed this too. She says that women are especially adept at philosophical doubt because "their judgement, credibility and authority start to come under attack during puberty, as part of the process of gender socialization. They are made to feel uncertain about themselves, their place in society and their right to their own opinions.”
― Regan Penaluna, How to Think Like a Woman: Four Women Philosophers Who Taught Me How to Love the Life of the Mind

“Women continued to be criticized for wondering about the wrong sorts of things, and were still considered unfit for the new method of inquiry. And the curious women whose smarts men couldn't deny faced the disturbing likelihood that they would become scientific curiousities themselves. Medical doctors at the time were persuaded by Galen's theory that women were colder than men and had slower thoughts. Women who had quick thoughts must not be female but rather hybrids they termed freaks of nature. When Astell wrote that learned women were "star'd upon as Monsters, Censur'd, Envy'd, and every way Discourag'd," she was being literal.”
― Regan Penaluna, How to Think Like a Woman: Four Women Philosophers Who Taught Me How to Love the Life of the Mind

“She was hard on women because she [Mary Astell] believed them worth more than a life devoted to beauty practices. "To imagine that our Souls were given us only for the service of our Bodies, and that the best improvement we can make of these, is to attract the eyes of men. We value *them* too much, and our *selves* too little, if we place any part of our worth in their Opinion.”
― Regan Penaluna, How to Think Like a Woman: Four Women Philosophers Who Taught Me How to Love the Life of the Mind

“It’s unpleasant to face the ugliness of your own ignorance and error and to be open and charitable to unfamiliar logics that challenge the foundations of your own. What if what you learn breaks you—and then could you survive it? This may be another reason why the canon is still so white and male, as are the majority of philosophy faculty and students. In myself, I have observed that there is a terror in learning to speak, but there is also a terror in learning to listen.”
― Regan Penaluna, How to Think Like a Woman: Four Women Philosophers Who Taught Me How to Love the Life of the Mind

“If we don’t belong to a God, then at the very least, we belong to each other. I’m starting to think this insight is somehow relevant to the good life that the ancients were after; it’s something that Astell, Masham, Cockburn, and Wollstonecraft well understood—that to be a self is to be profoundly connected to others, and to be free is to aid in the freedom of others. Perhaps this is all there is to rapture—to free each other to hear our own voices.”
― Regan Penaluna, How to Think Like a Woman: Four Women Philosophers Who Taught Me How to Love the Life of the Mind

“Art, philosophy, and literature tell us a different story. That the brief time we are here matters, that it is meaningful and contains beauty. We’ve learned to talk to ourselves in this expansive and dark vacuum to keep ourselves company, so that we can transcend our finite, perplexing condition—if not in fact, then in our imaginations. We’ve learned to free ourselves—if only for the duration of a poem, an equation, a book, a prayer—from our despair.”
― Regan Penaluna, How to Think Like a Woman: Four Women Philosophers Who Taught Me How to Love the Life of the Mind

“I’d dreamed of becoming a philosopher like the one Aristotle described in his metaphysics, a person who spent her days contemplating eternal truths—an edifying experience and the closest a human could come to immortality. That’s not the sort of thinker I became. My intellect wasn’t shaped in the glory of transcendent questions but rather in response to the insidious systems of oppression. In this sense, I am a woman thinker. For centuries, men have told us how women think or how they ought to think. And it’s typically in a way that is inferior to their way of thinking and serves their purposes. I don’t believe that there is one way to think like a woman, just as I don’t believe there is a single way to be a woman. A few things are common to all of us: patriarchy makes it hard for a woman to think for herself, to voice her own thoughts, and for the most part, philosophy hasn’t done us any favors.”
― Regan Penaluna, How to Think Like a Woman: Four Women Philosophers Who Taught Me How to Love the Life of the Mind

“When I look at her portrait now, in the context of her opus, I see something more than a passing resemblance to Locke. There are no outward signs of agitation, although frustration was her first response to patriarchy. Her second response was a calm rejection of it: to live with personal integrity—while feeling the full complexity of human emotions ruled by reason—is key to facing an unfair world. As is the effort to change it. But there are her eyes, outsize and intelligent, the knowing look of the female gaze, constant, unmovable. Not letting up.”
― Regan Penaluna, How to Think Like a Woman: Four Women Philosophers Who Taught Me How to Love the Life of the Mind

“Part of thinking like a woman, I learned, is to be satisfied with ambiguity.”
― Regan Penaluna, How to Think Like a Woman: Four Women Philosophers Who Taught Me How to Love the Life of the Mind

“She didn’t have a perfect ethical solution to the dilemma of how to balance duty to self and duty to others. I don’t believe she saw this as an ethical issue an individual could resolve on her own but rather a systemic problem that would require a general shift in social attitudes. What we see through her letters and poems and longer works is the model of a woman who, in the details, lived an equivocal life as a mother and an intellectual.”
― Regan Penaluna, How to Think Like a Woman: Four Women Philosophers Who Taught Me How to Love the Life of the Mind

“Cockburn argued that a life based on selfish passions was not a free life. True freedom was not a license to do as one pleased but rather, as we have seen, the liberty to use one’s reason and follow one’s conscience. Since our conscience tells us the right thing to do, a free person is someone who knows and does what is good.”
― Regan Penaluna, How to Think Like a Woman: Four Women Philosophers Who Taught Me How to Love the Life of the Mind

“Cockburn rejected Hobbes’s well-known claim that self-preservation was the most consistent of human motives and should therefore form the basis of any theory of government that sought stability. She found it disturbing. Because it didn’t invoke benevolence as essential to our political bonds to one another but rather emphasized selfishness, she saw it as eroding a sense of obligation to others. More than anything, she believed Hobbes’s account threatened freedom—the essence of what it is to be human.”
― Regan Penaluna, How to Think Like a Woman: Four Women Philosophers Who Taught Me How to Love the Life of the Mind

“God didn’t intend for humans to be social and kind, he could have made us more selfish than he did: he could “certainly have created us more self-sufficient, less dependent upon one another, and less disposed for the offices of social life, if these duties, however distinct in idea, were not designed to be united in practice, and mutually to promote each other.”710 Her appeal to care and interdependence is an echo of the letter”
― Regan Penaluna, How to Think Like a Woman: Four Women Philosophers Who Taught Me How to Love the Life of the Mind

“If we reflect on our natures, we see that we’re rational, and this obligates us to treat each other as equals because we are “equal by nature.”707 She says it’s something we can know just by feeling. Cockburn says that, as emotional creatures, we’re motivated to care for one another.708”
― Regan Penaluna, How to Think Like a Woman: Four Women Philosophers Who Taught Me How to Love the Life of the Mind