How to Think Like a Woman: Four Women Philosophers Who Taught Me How to Love the Life of the Mind

Regan Penaluna’s memoir-history braids together her bruising experiences in academic philosophy with the blazing lives and ideas of four early modern women thinkers: Mary Astell, Damaris Cudworth Masham, Mary Wollstonecraft, and Catharine Trotter Cockburn. From hostile classrooms and the male glance to the quiet courage of women who argued for their intellects in eras that tried to deny them, Penaluna travels across centuries to understand how a woman can think freely—and keep thinking when the world won’t make room for her. Along the way she widens the lens, offering a lively tour of the tradition’s long misogynist streak, a constellation of women philosophers from around the globe, and a candid look at love, work, motherhood, and rage. Clear-eyed and warm, this book is both a reckoning and an invitation: to listen to the voices we’ve ignored, to notice the nets that tangle us, and to practice a more human philosophy.

• Listeners who love big ideas told as a personal journey
• Students, scholars, and teachers rethinking the philosophy canon
• Anyone who has felt erased or underestimated in intellectual spaces

Regan Penaluna is a journalist and former philosophy professor. She holds a PhD in philosophy and has written and edited for science and culture magazines. Her work often explores how ideas live in real lives. In this book, she braids her experiences in academic philosophy with the lives of early modern women thinkers to ask what it takes for a woman to think freely—and keep thinking.