It was since the 17th Century that women were trained not to study philosophy and instead to give them attractive wit, train them to master pleasant conversation and to teach them Italian and singing. During this period the sexual division of education and instruction has been well established. Explaining the plight of young women at the time, Frederick Engels wrote: "Girls would learn only to spin, weave and sew, and most to read and write’. (Engels Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State). Imposing limits on the culture of women is quite sufficient to bar them from philosophical and theoretical education.

Male dominance in the intellectual sphere could be seen continued in the 20th century too. But the male thinkers in this century, unlike in the Greek and the medieval periods, influenced a quite good number of females. For example, Sigmund Freud, an Austrian neurologist and the founder of psychoanalysis, molded three female intellectuals, Anna Freud, Karen Horney and Melani Kliene. The British analytical philosophers such as Bertrand Russell, Ludwig Wittgenstein, D.W.Hamlyn, J.L. Austin, John Searle, Armstrong, G.E. Moore, C.L. Stevenson. R.M. Hare and a few others have influenced a number of analytical female philosophers. Though they were very few in number their contribution to philosophy was immense and adorable.

Mary Warnock, Oxford fellow, and later the mistress of Girton College, Cambridge, probably the most famous female philosopher in Britain in the fifties.She was one of the generation of women philosophers for whom the second world war provided a chance to step out of the shadow of their male peers. By her own reckoning she has been more of an efficient than a star philosopher. She has written a number of books aimed beyond the usual readership of academics and students. The academic community very well received her book Intelligent Person’s Guide to Ethics, which has been recommended as a textbook for the students of ethics. She has also published an anthology of writings by women philosophers. Mary Warnock stands out as a highly successful woman philosopher in a field dominated by males (at least at the top level).

With the notable exception of Elizabeth Anscombe, most of the work done by women thinkers in the post-war period was in the field of moral philosophy. While their male peers C.L.Stevenson, R.M.Hare, and D.W. Hamlyn were engaged themselves in building meta-theories of moral behaviour (emotivism, prescriptivism and so forth), the female thinkers focused on the way in which moral values are actually expressed in their practical contexts. Phillipa Foot, renowned female ethicist wrote extensively on the nature of ethics. She also wrote a number of articles on rudeness, which is not the kind of subject that most male philosophers were interested to delve into. Most of these women philosophers in Britain and elsewhere wrote primarily on ‘real –life ethical issues’ such as abortion, divorce, domestic violence, euthanasia and on practical themes pertaining to good and bad.

Not only into the field of ethics that women entered but they also intruded into the other philosophical territories dominated by males Sussan Stebbing, for example, was a logician and wrote. Modern Elementary Logic; Modern Introduction to Logic and other works which brought her name and fame in the field of logic. Mary Hesse, another famous British woman was the professor of philosophy of science at the University of Cambridge and contributed immensely to her specialized field, namely, philosophy of science.

While females in Britain contributed to philosophy in their respective chosen fields, ethics, logic and philosophy of science, there were female intellectuals in the continent who focused primarily on themes such as psychoanalysis, language, feminism, deconstruction and post- colonialism. Julia Kristeva, Luce Irigaray, Gayathri Spivak stand out among other female thinkers but not excluding Hanna Arendt.

Julia Kristeva is one of the most famous proponents of French feminist theory (l’ ecritique feminin). She was a Bulgarian but moved into Paris in 1966 and became associated with the radical journal Tel Quel. Kristaeva’s earliest major work was Revolution in Poetic Language published in 1974, in which she set out her basic theories concerning language and its role in the construction of the identity. Kristeva differs from Freud and Lacan in citing the origin of language in the pre-Oedipal phase, where the relationship between mother and child is still intact. This is a major theoretical contribution to the field. She also has made significant and inspirational contribution to Semiotics,(or semiology), the science of signs.

Luce Irigaray, another female thinker was the director of Research in Philosophy at the Center National de Recherches Scientifiques and held that prestigious post since 1964. Irigaray’s work has been challenging and varied, ranging in methodology from the densely psychoanalytic to deconstructive to the visionary, lyrical, and expressive.

Speculum of the Other Woman (1974) offers critique of Freudian psychoanalysis and western philosophy from a feminist point of view. Here Irigaray argued that woman as subject is excluded from Western philosophy (her observation is true even with the Eastern tradition), and this mode of thought allows full subjectivity to only one sex: male. Her quest for the feminine voice is demonstrated with her works. The Sex which is Not One (1977, Ethics of Sexual Difference(1984), and Sexes and Geneologies (1984.

Gayathri Spivak is a well-known contemporary woman philosopher, who has been variously labeled as feminist, Marxist, deconstructivist and post-colonialist. She became famous when she translated and prefaced Jaques Derrida’s La Grammatologie into English in 1976 with the English title Of Grammatology. Derrida’s deconstruction is the theory underlying Spivak’s work. She held the post of professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University, New York. Her main works have included In Other Worlds: in Cultural Politics (1987) ; Can the Subaltern Speak? (1988) ; Outside in the Teaching Machine,(1993).

Most of these female thinkers, however, were feminists but Marxist thinkers, male and females, present a different view and we will listen to them in the next and the final article of this series of articles on women philosophers.