When French feminist Simone de Beauvoir wrote her groundbreaking book The Second Sex in 1949, she underpinned her argument that women as the “Other” was the result of men’s self-interest with the following epigram: “Everything that men have written about women should be viewed with suspicion, because they are both judge and party.”[1] What is remarkable is that these were not only the words of a man, but of a man who produced some of the most radical feminist philosophy of the early modern period.

It wasn’t that women were excluded from centers of learning, such as universities and scientific academies, and therefore never had a chance to contribute to the development of philosophy during this time in European history. On the contrary, as Kant’s discussion of Madame Du Châtelet indicates, they did in fact contribute a great deal.