5 Women in Political Philosophy You Should Know

Being deprived of political rights for most of world history, women tried to contribute to political theory and philosophy as soon as they could find themselves pen, paper, and free time from making the world spin around. Furthermore, institutional political philosophy often ignored the private sphere and civil society, which were the very areas where women spent much of their lives. For this reason, these five ladies in political philosophy thought that the fight was far from over. This, in turn, inspired their scholarly publications and political activism.

The Enlightenment era introduced remarkable women thinkers who aspired to establish political rights for their sex. It wasn’t until the 20th century, however, that their intellectual and activist descendants—the suffragettes and feminists—triumphed in championing these rights.

Nonetheless, the right to vote and be voted for did not water down the deeply entrenched biases and discrimination against women.

For reasons like this, women in philosophy were largely excluded from the greater conversion. These five women highlighted here were able to break through the historical exclusion.

1. Martha Nussbaum

Martha Nussbaum (1947-) is the Ernst Freund Distinguished Service Professor of Law and Ethics at the University of Chicago and the author of 21 books. Her readership extends way beyond the walls of academia. Her area of expertise ranges from Greek and Roman philosophy and literature to political and legal philosophy, as well as the theory of emotions. Nussbaum wrote a doctoral dissertation on Aristotle at Harvard in 1975 but previously gained a strong background in classical philology at New York University during her undergraduate studies. She received the Kyoto Prize in Arts and Philosophy in 2016, the Berggruen Prize in 2018, and the Holberg Prize in 2021. Nussbaum is also a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, the Academy of Finland, and a Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy. She disagreed with and argued against several influential philosophers like Noam Chomsky, Judith Butler, Jacques Derrida, Susan Moller Okin, and John Rawls, among others.

From her first and probably most famous book, The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy (1986), Nussbaum has been concerned with the notion of good life. In her book Creating Capabilities (2011), she embedded this notion in a wider perspective of global justice. In her view, GDP and foreign investments are not a measure of quality of life given the prevalence of gender discrimination, nutritional deficiency, unequal property and inheritance laws, religion-based discrimination, domestic violence, etc. Instead, the focus should be shifted from quantitative and aggregative measures of well-being to individual freedoms and opportunities that would allow one to flourish.

Once even burned in effigy, Judith Butler (1956-) has been setting fires across political theory and philosophy for the last four decades. After earning PhD from Yale University in 1984, they proceeded to teach at Wesleyan University, George Washington University, and Johns Hopkins University before finally joining the University of California, Berkeley, in 1993. Raised in a reformist Jewish family, Butler was introduced to philosophy by their Rabbi, who wanted to punish them for being too talkative during classes by making them read ethics and Jewish philosophy.

Their truly impressive academic work covers political theory and philosophy, critical theory, gender and sexuality studies, literary theory, and third-wave feminism. They have published 19 books so far, hundreds of academic papers, and were awarded 14 honorary doctorates. Butler is also the recipient of the Andrew Mellon Award for Distinguished Academic Achievement in the Humanities, the Adorno Prize from the City of Frankfurt in honor of their contributions to feminist and moral philosophy, and the Brudner Prize from Yale University for lifetime achievement in gay and lesbian studies.

Butler is best known for her theory of gender performativity, which was elaborated in her early books, Performative Acts and Gender Constitution (1988) and Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (1990). According to Butler, gender is not something we are but something we do—an ongoing performance shaped by societal norms and repeated actions rather than a static label. She argues that what society perceives as natural gender roles are actually constructed through repetitive behaviors and cultural expectations. By emphasizing the performative nature of gender, Butler opens up possibilities for resistance and subversion, encouraging us to break free from rigid gender binaries and explore a broader spectrum of identities.

Angela Davis (1944-) is a living legend in both scholarly and activist circles. Believe it or not, she even did some time in jail because of her role in the politically charged murder in the 1970s committed by the Soledad Brothers and was even among the FBI’s Most Wanted before getting caught. Davis worked under the supervision of Herbert Marcuse and moved to East Germany to obtain a PhD since the FBI confiscated her manuscripts. She obtained three honorary doctorates in 1972 from Moscow State University, the University of Tashkent, and Karl-Marx University in Leipzig. She was almost fired from her first teaching position at the University of California, San Diego, due to her flirting with communism within the Che-Lumumba Club, the all-Black branch of the Communist Party USA and the Black Panthers Party.

Before retiring, she held the position of Distinguished Professor Emerita and Head of the Department of Feminist Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Davis received the Soviet Union’s Lenin Peace Prize and was inducted into the National Women’s Hall of Fame. She was also named Time magazine’s Woman of the Year in 2020 and made Time’s list of the 100 most influential people in the world.

Davis mostly published about race, gender, and class. However, she also contributed to the theory of punishment and argued for years that prisons are the main locus of racial and class inequality. In her 2010 book Are Prisons Obsolete, Davis claimed that Black, Latino, and Native American people have a greater chance of going to prison than getting an education. Instead of marking these people as violent aberrations, American society would be better off with a rehabilitation and restoration system.

A leading political philosopher who wrote about gender, family, and culture, Susan Moller Okin (1946-2004) was the Marta Sutton Weeks Professor of Ethics in Society and a professor of political science at Stanford University. Before coming to Stanford, Moller Okin taught at Harvard, Brandeis, Vassar, and Auckland. She also earned her DPhil at Somerville College, Oxford. A liberal feminist who focused on the exclusion of women in Western political thought, Okin was a leading political philosopher who wrote about the exclusion of women in Western political thought.

In her groundbreaking 1989 book Justice, Gender, and Family, Susan Moller Okin criticizes modern justice theories by big shots like John Rawls, Robert Nozick, Alasdair MacIntyre, and Michael Walzer for their flawed assumptions about gender and family relations. She argues that these theories, rooted in male perspectives, mistakenly view the family as a just institution, ignoring its role in perpetuating gender inequalities as children internalize sexist values from their parents and reinforce bias in society. In other words, without a fundamental change in the focus of theories of justice, we are to proliferate gender inequalities. It is worth noting that this book landed Moller Okin the Victoria Schuck Award for the best book on women in politics.

5. María Lugones

María Lugones’ (1944-2020) work spanned several academic fields and topics, such as political philosophy, decolonial feminism, Andean and Latino philosophy, and theories of resistance. Originating from Argentina, she identified as a woman of color. Lugones did her PhD at the University of Wisconsin in 1978 and then taught Philosophy, Women’s Studies, and Comparative Literature at Carleton College and Binghamton University. In 2016, she was honored as a Distinguished Woman Philosopher by the Society for Women in Philosophy, while in 2020, she received the Frantz Fanon Lifetime Achievement Award from the Caribbean Philosophical Association. Interestingly, Lugones left her mark outside academia as well.

Lugones was among the theorists who coined and developed the term “coloniality of gender.” The term captures the central argument of decolonial feminists that gender is an imposition by colonial powers and global capitalism, which further dehumanizes and alienates people. Lugones points out that Native American tribes, such as the Hopi or Iroquois Confederacy, had matriarchy, and full equity between men and women was promoted within their political systems. The colonization of Indigenous people of North America brought the false dichotomy of gender and the notion of agency that must be linked to autonomy and sovereignty. It follows, from Eurocentric logic, that colonized people are not agents since, from the very moment of colonization, they lost autonomy and sovereignty.

Lugones, therefore, turned to spelling out strategies of resistance that are at the disposal of those who are oppressed. In her article “Purity, Impurity, and Separation” (1994), she introduced the metaphor of curdling, through which people should surpass false dichotomies and Eurocentric categories. Thus, curdling involves mixing and transforming elements that colonial narratives attempt to separate and purify. In other words, we should embrace our plural identities through liberatory political and cultural activities.