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Non fiction

As mulleres na Filosofía

By Inés Fernández Buján

About this book

This essay tries to show two implicit aspects in the ambiguity of its title: women as objects and subjects of thought; in other words, on the one hand, what philosophers thought about women and, on the other, what women thought when they accessed the study of Philosophy. The book also tries to relate these two facts, as many women philosophers thought, first and foremost, about what male philosophers had said about them, and that is why their first moves in philosophy were direct responses and rationalised answers to the prejudice and ideas of their male counter-parts. That is why the idea is to deconstruct the conceptualisation of the feminine by some male philosophers and to reconstruct a female genealogy of the history of thought.

Therefore, in the first part of each historical division, we present a small criticism of patriarchal reason and on the other hand the Feminist theory and practice in order to make visible and recover the past, to enlighten our identity and guide us towards our future.

Book fragment

Helene von Druskowitz (1856-1918)

She was born in Vienna and was educated in a religious family. She obtained a doctorate in philosophy with a dissertation on Byron’s Don Juan. She met Nietzsche and Rilke, and she refused the thoughts of the former. In 1887 she published her first philosophical work entitled “Are responsibility and justice possible without freedom of choice?” In 1891 she was admitted to the mental asylum of Mauer-Ohling, where she stayed until her death. There she worked constantly, despite the fact that she was treated with hypnosis, and she wrote up to seventeen works between 1891 and 1917, some of them are (...)

The asylum was then the most appropriate institution to control a conflictive and “deviated” personality, such as Helene's; later on psychoanalysis was started as a new “scientific” discipline to standardise and channel socially undesirable conduct (especially of women; for example, hysteria) such as homosexuality or the non acceptance of pre-established rules.

Her great knowledge, her sexual “deviation”, her habits of an “emancipated woman”, her feminist, socialist and spiritist “philosophical delirium”, make of her the real summit of culture at the end of the 19th century.