Most Famous Feminism Philosophers

Feminist philosophy is the philosophical tradition concerned with the social, political, and metaphysical status of women, the analysis of gender as a category, and the critique of patriarchy across institutions and discourses. Early modern precursors include Mary Wollstonecraft and John Stuart Mill, but the field took recognisable disciplinary shape in the 20th century with figures including Simone de Beauvoir, Angela Davis, bell hooks, and Iris Marion Young. It encompasses ethics, political philosophy, epistemology, and the philosophy of science, and is internally diverse across liberal, radical, socialist, intersectional, and post-structuralist strands. Beauvoir's The Second Sex, with its claim that one is not born but rather becomes a woman, is a foundational text of the modern tradition.

Philosophers in this tradition

Mary Wollstonecraft 1759 – 1797 · English
Mary Wollstonecraft was an 18th-century English writer and philosopher, regarded as one of the founding figures of modern feminist political thought. Her 1792 work A Vindication...
Judith Butler b. 1956 · American
Judith Butler is an American philosopher whose Gender Trouble made the performative theory of gender central to contemporary feminism, queer theory, and political thought. Drawi...
Mary Daly 1928 – 2010 · American
Mary Daly was an American radical feminist philosopher and theologian who taught for more than thirty years at Boston College, where she insisted on the right to teach women-onl...
Charlotte Perkins Gilman 1860 – 1935 · American
Charlotte Perkins Gilman was an American sociologist, philosopher, novelist, and one of the leading feminist theorists of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Wome...
Jane Addams 1860 – 1935 · American
Jane Addams was an American social philosopher, reformer, and pacifist and the most influential American woman public intellectual of her generation. In 1889 she co-founded Hull...
Sarah Grimke 1792 – 1873 · American
Sarah Moore Grimke was an American abolitionist, philosopher, and one of the founding figures of nineteenth-century American feminist thought, the elder sister of Angelina Grimk...
Simone de Beauvoir 1908 – 1986 · French
Simone de Beauvoir was a 20th-century French philosopher, writer, and political activist, a central figure of post-war French existentialism and a foundational thinker of modern...
Mary Astell 1666 – 1731 · English
Mary Astell was an English philosopher and one of the first advocates in English of the equal education of women. In A Serious Proposal to the Ladies she argued for the founding...
Anna Julia Cooper 1858 – 1964 · American
Anna Julia Cooper was an American philosopher, educator, and one of the founding voices of African-American feminist thought, the fourth African-American woman to receive a doct...
Kate Manne b. 1983 · Australian
Kate Manne is an Australian moral philosopher, associate professor at Cornell University, whose work has reshaped contemporary feminist analytic philosophy of misogyny and patri...
Christine de Pizan 1364 – 1430 · Italian-French
Christine de Pizan was a 14th and 15th-century Italian-French author and one of the earliest professional women writers in European history. Widowed in her mid-twenties, she sup...
Margaret Fuller 1810 – 1850 · American
Margaret Fuller was a 19th-century American journalist, critic, and women's rights advocate, the first major figure of American feminist political thought and a central figure o...
Patricia Hill Collins b. 1948 · American
Patricia Hill Collins is an American sociologist and Black feminist philosopher, distinguished university professor at the University of Maryland and the first African-American ...
Audre Lorde 1934 – 1992 · American
Audre Lorde was an American Black feminist philosopher, poet, and essayist whose work shaped contemporary thinking on race, gender, sexuality, and difference. Sister Outsider an...
Sylvia Wynter b. 1928 · Jamaican
Sylvia Wynter is a Jamaican philosopher, dramatist, and professor emerita at Stanford University, whose work has reshaped contemporary thinking on humanism, race, and the very c...
bell hooks 1952 – 2021 · American
bell hooks, born Gloria Jean Watkins, was an American Black feminist philosopher, cultural critic, and the most widely read public writer of Black feminist thought in the late t...
Donna Haraway b. 1944 · American
Donna Haraway is an American philosopher of science, biologist, and feminist theorist who has been one of the most influential voices in late-twentieth and twenty-first century ...
Madeleine de Scudery 1607 – 1701 · French
Madeleine de Scudery was a French novelist, salonniere, and philosopher of the seventeenth century, the most widely read living writer of her age in any language and the central...
Margaret Fell 1614 – 1702 · English
Margaret Fell was an English philosopher, religious organizer, and the principal early architect of the Religious Society of Friends, the Quakers, alongside her second husband G...
Marilyn Frye b. 1941 · American
Marilyn Frye is an American radical feminist philosopher, professor emerita at Michigan State University, and one of the most influential feminist analytic philosophers of the l...
Sara Ahmed b. 1969 · British-Australian
Sara Ahmed is a British-Australian feminist philosopher and independent scholar, formerly professor at Goldsmiths, University of London, whose work has shaped contemporary femin...
Virginia Held b. 1929 · American
Virginia Held is an American moral and political philosopher, distinguished professor emerita at the City University of New York Graduate Center, and one of the leading philosop...
Adriana Cavarero b. 1947 · Italian
Adriana Cavarero is an Italian feminist philosopher, professor emerita at the University of Verona, and one of the leading voices of contemporary Italian thought of sexual diffe...
Bathsua Makin c. 1600 – c. 1675 · English
Bathsua Makin was an English educator, philosopher, and the most learned woman of her age in early modern England, tutor to the daughters of Charles I and the author of the most...
Iris Marion Young 1949 – 2006 · American
Iris Marion Young was an American political philosopher and feminist theorist whose work reshaped late twentieth-century thinking about justice, oppression, and democratic inclu...
Olympe de Gouges 1748 – 1793 · French
Olympe de Gouges, born Marie Gouze, was a French playwright and political philosopher of the Revolution, the author of the 1791 Declaration of the Rights of Woman and of the Fem...
Helen Longino b. 1944 · American
Helen Longino is an American philosopher of science, professor emerita at Stanford University, and one of the leading defenders of social epistemology in the late twentieth and ...
Luce Irigaray b. 1930 · Belgian-French
Luce Irigaray is a Belgian-born French philosopher, psychoanalyst, and linguist, and one of the most influential feminist thinkers of the late twentieth century. Speculum of the...
Maria Lugones 1944 – 2020 · Argentine-American
Maria Lugones was an Argentine-American philosopher, long associated with Binghamton University, and a foundational figure in decolonial feminism and Latina philosophy. Pilgrima...
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak b. 1942 · Indian-American
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak is an Indian-American literary theorist and philosopher, professor at Columbia University, and one of the founding figures of postcolonial studies. He...
Julia Kristeva b. 1941 · Bulgarian-French
Julia Kristeva is a Bulgarian-French philosopher, literary critic, and psychoanalyst whose work has shaped semiotics, feminist theory, and contemporary continental philosophy. R...
Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz 1648 – 1695 · Mexican
Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz was a Mexican Hieronymite nun and the foremost writer of the Spanish Baroque. Self-taught and celebrated as a child prodigy, she chose the convent over...
Anna Doyle Wheeler 1780 – 1848 · Irish
Anna Doyle Wheeler was an Irish-born British socialist and feminist philosopher of the early nineteenth century, the principal philosophical collaborator of William Thompson and...
Anna Maria van Schurman 1607 – 1678 · Dutch
Anna Maria van Schurman was a Dutch polymath, painter, and philosopher, widely celebrated in seventeenth-century Europe as the most learned woman of her age. Her Whether a Chris...
Anne Phillips b. 1950 · British
Anne Phillips is a British political philosopher, Graham Wallas Professor of Political Science emerita at the London School of Economics, and one of the most influential contemp...
Carol Gilligan b. 1936 · American
Carol Gilligan is an American moral psychologist and feminist philosopher, professor at New York University, whose 1982 In a Different Voice transformed the field of moral psych...
Catharine Macaulay 1731 – 1791 · English
Catharine Macaulay was an English historian and republican political philosopher whose eight-volume History of England from the Accession of James I to the Hanoverian Succession...
Gabrielle Suchon 1632 – 1703 · French
Gabrielle Suchon was a French philosopher and one of the most original feminist political philosophers of the Grand Siecle, who escaped the Dominican convent into which her fami...
Hortense Spillers b. 1942 · American
Hortense J. Spillers is an American Black feminist literary critic and philosopher, Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Chair in English emerita at Vanderbilt University, and one of the...
Linda Martin Alcoff b. 1955 · Panamanian-American
Linda Martin Alcoff is a Panamanian-American philosopher, professor at the City University of New York, and a leading voice in feminist epistemology, philosophy of race, and Lat...
Madame de Lambert 1647 – 1733 · French
Anne-Therese de Marguenat de Courcelles, the Marquise de Lambert, was a French moralist, salonniere, and philosopher of the early Enlightenment, whose Paris salon, held weekly f...
Marie de Gournay 1565 – 1645 · French
Marie le Jars de Gournay was a French writer, editor, and philosopher, the adopted daughter and literary executor of Michel de Montaigne. After Montaigne's death she edited his ...
Mary Anne Warren 1946 – 2010 · American
Mary Anne Warren was an American moral philosopher long associated with San Francisco State University, whose work in applied ethics shaped the late-twentieth-century debates ov...
Miranda Fricker b. 1966 · British
Miranda Fricker is a British philosopher, professor at the City University of New York, and the originator of the influential concept of epistemic injustice. Epistemic Injustice...
Nancy Fraser b. 1947 · American
Nancy Fraser is an American philosopher, professor at the New School for Social Research, and one of the leading contemporary critical theorists working in the second generation...
Rosi Braidotti b. 1954 · Italian-Australian
Rosi Braidotti is an Italian-Australian philosopher, distinguished university professor at Utrecht University, and one of the leading figures of contemporary feminist philosophy...
Seyla Benhabib b. 1950 · Turkish-American
Seyla Benhabib is a Turkish-American political philosopher long associated with Yale University, whose work brings together critical theory, feminist political philosophy, and t...
Sophie de Grouchy 1764 – 1822 · French
Sophie de Grouchy, the Marquise de Condorcet, was a French philosopher, translator, and salonniere of the late Enlightenment, the wife of the philosopher and mathematician the M...