How to Read Like a Woman

Australian Women Writers Gen 0 Week 14-21 Jan. 2024

Mary Astell (1666-1731)

Marcie McCauley/Buried in Print has reviewed a contemporary book, Regan Penaluna’s How to Think Like a Woman (2023), whose subject, ostensibly at least, is four early English women thinkers from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Mary Wollstonecraft we have looked at before, but Mary Astell, Damaris Masham and Catherine Cockburn I don’t know at all.

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Buried in Print

In reading these women’s publications over and over, Penaluna began to reflect on women’s professional pursuits and how difficult it was to remain dedicated when women were expected to pursue marriage and family too. Although increasingly dissatisfied with the support she was receiving, both with her personal relationship and her professional goals, she was reluctant to step off either path. Read on …