Maria Gaetana Agnesi was born in Milan, Italy, to a wealthy family. Recognized as a child prodigy, she spoke Italian and French by age five and Latin, Greek, Hebrew, Spanish, and German by eleven. From an early age, she showed interest in mathematics and philosophy, and with her father’s encouragement, Agnesi learned with the best available tutors. At 15, her father started hosting regular gatherings of the most educated men in Bologna, and Agnesi presented and defended a series of theses on profoundly complex philosophical questions. A compilation of 191 essays based on her discussions was published in 1738. By then, 20 years old Agnesi, who became strongly religious, intended to join a convent, but her father refused since she was the oldest child and he wanted her to teach her siblings. Instead, he agreed that she could live in a semi-retirement form, with no social interactions, so that she could devote her time to learning mathematics. Her father hired the monk and professor of mathematics, Ramiro Rampinelli, to tutor her; Rampinelli introduced her to the new fields of differential and integral calculus. Around that time, Agnesi wrote a commentary on the work of the Marquis de l’Hôpital, Traité antique des sections coniques, but it was never published. In 1748, at 30, Agnesi published a two-volume book titled The Instituzioni Analitiche ad uso della gioventù italiana (Analytical Institutions for the Use of Italian Youth). In this work, she discussed integral and differential calculus and defined the cubic curve, today known as the ‘witch of Agnesi.’ Her work got recognized as the finest existing introduction to the works of the Swiss mathematician Leonhard Euler, translated into French and English, and received praise even from Pope Benedict XIV, who appointed her professor of mathematics at the University of Bologna. Even though she never served in the position, she is considered the second woman ever to be granted a professorship at a university, Following her father’s death in 1752, Agnesi became free to devote her time to charitable work and theological studies. She worked with sick and poor people and founded several hospices. In 1783, at 65, she established a home for Milan’s elderly and moved to live there. She died at 81 and was buried in a mass grave for the poor. Read more...

Luce Irigaray was born in Blaton, Belgium. Not much is known about her upbringing and personal life because she believes that revealing details in the male-dominated academic establishment was usually used to challenge and criticize the works of women. She earned her bachelor’s and master’s degrees from the Catholic University of Leuven and later worked as a high school teacher in Brussels. In 1960, at 30, she moved to Paris to further her education, receiving a doctorate in linguistics from the University of Paris VIII in 1968. Her dissertation, an attempt to establish the grammar of dementia patients, was the basis of her first book Le Langage des déments, published in 1973. During the 1960s, she studied to become a psychoanalyst at Jacques Lacan’s psychoanalytic seminars at the École Freudienne de Paris (Freudian School of Paris). She then held a research position at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (National Centre for Scientific Research). Combining her knowledge in both psychology and linguistics, she researched gender differences in language and concluded that speech is never neutral but always marked by sexual differences. In 1974, Irigaray published her second doctoral thesis, Speculum of the Other Woman, criticizing the roots of Western psychoanalysis. In this pioneering text, she argued that because Freud always used a boy as his paradigm of psychosexual development, the masculine was the norm, and girls and women got reduced to being inferior to males and functioned as commodities. She also claimed that in a culture where the line of descent goes from father to son, whose symbolism takes no account of the mother-daughter line, women do not exist as women but only as mothers subordinate to a patriarchal order, preferably as the mothers of sons. Her work received much criticism from Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis, and she got dismissed from her teaching positions at the University of Vincennes. In 1977, she published the book This Sex Which is Not One, arguing that in a phallic-centered economy, women were a commodity because all forms of transactions were done and managed only between men. She played on the two meanings of “One” in the book title. The female was not sex because women got demoted to being nothing more than inferior men and did not exist in their own right, and the sex of women was not one because it was not reducible to one organ as men. In 1982, at 52, Irigaray began to serve as head of the Philosophy department at Erasmus University in Rotterdam. There, she worked on research that resulted in her 1984 book, An Ethics of Sexual. The book, in which she stated that Western culture is unethical because of gender discrimination, established her as an influential continental philosopher. She is also considered to be one of “The French Feminism,” together with the philosopher Helen Helene Cixous and others. Over the following decades, in addition to giving seminars and lectures throughout Europe, Irigaray continued to explore the differences between men’s and women’s languages. Through this research, she discovered a correlation between the language of men and women and the suppression of female thought and that gendered language patterns indicate subjectivity in women and male dominance. Her later work delved into the possibility of creating a female imagination that would allow women to speak as women and not as “lesser to men” and incorporate utopian speculation about possible ethics of sexual differences, in which she implied a recognition of a distinct male and female psychosexual economics that can coexist without one being reduced to the other. Read more...

Rozalia Luksenburg was born to a Jewish family in Zamość, Poland, then part of the Russian Empire, and grew up in Warsaw. Her parents supported the Jewish Reform and Polish national movements, raising her as Pole first and a Jew second. From 1884 to 1887, Luxemburg attended the all-girls gymnasium, a Russian school, where she was among the few Polish students who got accepted and one of the only Jewish children. There, she participated in secret study circles that studied Polish writers and poets and became a member of an illegal Polish left-wing Proletariat Party. As a result of her continued involvement in the proletariat after graduation, she became wanted by the tsarist police and lowered her profile. In 1889, at 18, she fled to Switzerland and studied politics, economics, history, philosophy, and mathematics at the University of Zurich. In 1897, Luxemburg became one of the first women in the world to receive a Ph.D. While in Zurich, she continued her social activism and befriended many leading figures of the Russian social democratic movement. With her fellow activist and long-time friend, Leo Jogiches, Luxemburg founded the Social Democracy of the Kingdom of Poland and Lithuania (SDKPiL) party, which later merged into the Communist Workers Party of Poland. Luxemburg and her party opposed the Polish Socialist Party, which supported Polish independence, arguing that nationalism is a concession to the bourgeoisie, and advocated for socialist internationalism. By 1898, Luxemburg moved to Germany and married a family friend’s son to receive German citizenship. She settled in Berlin and became a leading member of the Social Democratic Party of Germany. The following year, Luxemburg published the brochure Social Reform or Revolution? in which she attacked Eduard Bernstein’s revisionism theory, defending Marxist orthodoxy and the need for revolution to achieve international socialism. Luxemburg returned to Warsaw after the Russian Revolution of 1905 to join the fight against the Tsar. She wrote for the SDKPiL’s illegal newspaper Czerwony Sztandar (The Red Banner). Within two years, she published over 100 articles, speeches, and brochures supporting the revolution and advocating for mass strikes, stating that this was the most essential and powerful tool for the proletariat to achieve socialist victory. Her actions led to her arrest by the tsarist authorities on March 4th, 1906. After three months, Luxemburg was released and went back to Berlin. There, she taught at the Social Democratic Party school and continued to promote her socialist agenda. In 1913 she published Die Akkumulation des Kapitals (The Accumulation of Capital), claiming that imperialism results from capitalism’s expansion into underdeveloped regions. In 1914, Luxemburg co-founded with Karl Liebknecht the Spartakusbund (Spartacus League), a movement dedicated to ending WWI through revolution and forming a proletarian government. She also established the league’s newspaper Die Rote Fahne (The Red Flag). Through the Spartacus League, Luxemburg aimed to lead Germany’s proletariat into an anti-war general strike. She got arrested again, this time for two-and-a-half years, during which she continued writing articles smuggled out of prison and published by her fellow activists. After her release in November 1918, Luxemburg immediately returned to work on promoting the revolution and co-founded the Communist Party of Germany (KPD) on January 1st, 1919. Four days later, a second revolutionary wave broke in Berlin, and Luxemburg, through the Red Flag, encouraged the rebels to occupy all positions of power, for which she received the vilified nickname of “Bloody Rosa.” On January 15th, 1919, German Cavalry Guards abducted Luxemburg and Liebknecht and questioned them under torture before killing them and throwing the bodies into the Landwehr Canal. Their assassination inspired a new wave of violence across Germany, and the authorities killed thousands of revolutionaries and civilians. Four months later, Luxemburg and Liebknecht’s bodies were found and brought to burial at the Friedrichsfelde Central Cemetery in Berlin. Read more...

Mary Wollstonecraft was born in London, England, the second of seven children. The family’s financial situation was unstable, and her father was abusive toward her mother. At 19, she found her way out of her home and took a position as a lady’s companion to a widow living in Bath. After two years, she got called back home to assist her ill mother. As soon as her mother died, Wollstonecraft moved in with her friend, the educator, and illustrator, Fanny (Frances) Blood. The two had envisioned a female utopia in which they meant to support each other financially and emotionally. Wollstonecraft, her sisters, and Blood established a school in Newington Green to make a living. Later, she detailed her teaching experiences in the pamphlet Thoughts on the Education of Daughters, published in 1787. Not long after, Blood became sick, and Wollstonecraft nursed her until she died in 1785. Afterward, the school closed, and she moved to Ireland to serve as governess for the Kingsborough family. After three years, she returned to London and decided to earn a living as a writer, an uncommon profession for a woman at the time. She befriended Joseph Johnson, a publisher of radical texts, and worked for him first as a translator and later as a regular contributor to his paper, the Analytical Review. He also published her first works, including the novel Mary: A Fiction; and the children’s book Original Stories from Real Life, both published in 1788. In 1790, at 31, she published a political pamphlet titled Vindication of the Rights of Men in response to MP Edmund Burke’s critique of the French Revolution. Two years later, she published her most famous work – A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. In this groundbreaking essay, Wollstonecraft argued that women must receive education equally to men, asserting that women are more than mere wives, rather companions to their husbands, and their education is essential to the nation because they are the ones who educate the children. Although the essay aroused controversy, it didn’t lead to reforms or further interest. That same year, Wollstonecraft moved to Paris to witness firsthand the French Revolution. There, she met Captain Gilbert Imlay, an American timber merchant, and in 1794, she had her first child, Fanny. While caring for her newborn, she wrote and published the critique essay An Historical and Moral View of the Origin and Progress of the French Revolution. Shortly afterward, Imlay left her, and she followed him back to London. In their attempt to reunite, she joined him on a business trip to Scandinavia, documenting her accounts in Letters Written During a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark. In 1796, on their return to London, Wollstonecraft and Imlay separated for good. She rejoined Johnson and became part of his radical group of friends, one of them was the philosopher William Godwin. Within a few months, she became pregnant, and the couple got married so their child would be legitimate. Suffering from post-partum infection, Wollstonecraft died 11 days after giving birth to her second child, who became the prominent novelist Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley. By the time she died at 38, she had published 10 of her works, and seven more were published posthumously. Although her legacy has been almost forgotten for nearly a century, her name was brought back by writers of the modern feminist movement, such as Virginia Woolf and Emma Goldman, who embraced her life story and achievements. The interest in her work increased during the 1960s and 1970s with the rise of feminist criticism in academia. Today, Wollstonecraft is considered one of the founding feminist philosophers. Read more...

Born Gloria Jean Watkins in Hopkinsville, Kentucky, one of six children of working-class parents. She discovered her love for books from an early age and performed poetry readings in front of her church community. Educated in the segregated public school system, she was very aware of racism, and being taught by mostly black women shaped her perspective as a girl of color. After high school, she studied English at Stanford University and continued postgraduate studies at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Later she completed her doctorate at the University of California, Santa Cruz. In 1976, at the age of 24, she began her long-life academic career. First, she taught English and Ethnic Studies at the University of Southern California, then African and Afro-American Studies at Yale, Women’s Studies at Oberlin College, and English at the City College of New York. In 1978, at 26, she published her first poetry collection titled “And There We Wept” under the name “bell hooks.” The pen name she chose is a tribute to her great-grandmother, Bell Blair Hooks. She persisted in righting the name in lowercase letters to focus the attention on her work and ideas rather than her name and personality. In 1981, she published her first book, which she had worked on since she was 19, “Ain’t I a Woman? Black Women and Feminism.” In the book titled after Sojourner Truth’s “Ain’t I a Woman?” speech, hooks explored the civil rights movement and feminist movements throughout the decades and examined how hundreds of years of racism and sexism affect Black women today. The book was recognized for its contribution to feminist thought and was named “One of the twenty most influential women’s books in the last 20 years.” Three years later, Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center was published, in which hooks accused second-wave feminism of racism and argued that the privileged white women’s experiences overshadowed the opportunity for multiracial feminist solidarity. During the 1980s, hooks organized a support group for Black women named the Sisters of the Yam. The group and its name were the inspiration for her 1993 book Sisters of the Yam: Black women and self-recovery, in which she celebrated Black sisterhood. The importance of sisterhood and the call to come together from an empowering point, rather than from a victim position, became a key notion in feminist thinking. After years of exploring and highlighting various aspects of racism in feminist theories, hooks developed a more active approach to solving the problem, as can be seen in her 1995 book Killing Rage: Ending Racism, in which she suggests that rage is a source of love and strength that can lead to positive change. In 2004, at 52, hooks returned to Kentucky to serve as Distinguished Professor in Residence in Appalachian Studies at Berea College. There, she established the bell hooks Institute in 2014 and the bell hooks Center in 2021. Over the years, hooks published more than 40 books, poem collections, scholarly articles, and five children’s books. In her work, she addressed racism, sexism, patriarchy, sexuality, and geographic influences. In her innovative approach, hooks changed common perceptions of the subjects she explored and redefined feminist theories and Women’s Studies. She died of kidney failure at the age of 69. Read more...

Born Johanna Arendt to a Jewish family in Hanover, Prussia (today Germany) and was raised in Königsberg. Though her family was secular, she received religious guidance and attended a Reform synagogue. Growing up, she independently learned philosophy and ancient Greek and read all Goethe scriptures. At 15, after leading a boycott on a teacher, she got expelled from school and moved by herself to Berlin, where she took audited courses at the University of Berlin. At 18, she began her formal higher education at The University of Marburg, studying German literature, theology, and philosophy. She developed a romantic relationship with her 35 years old professor, the philosopher Martin Heidegger, with whom she was involved for the rest of her life, even though he supported the Nazi Party. In 1925, when she was only 19 years old, Arendt wrote The Shadows, her first autobiographical piece, in which she explored her insecurities regarding her Jewishness and femininity. In the following year, she transferred to the University of Heidelberg, completing her thesis on the concept of love in the writings of Saint Augustine in 1929. In that same year, she began a relationship with philosopher Günther Stern, and the couple married within a few months. They moved from one place to another, trying to find Stern an academic position while writing and publishing together numerous articles. In 1931, after returning to Berlin, Arendt began working as a newspaper writer while researching the writer and socialite Rahel Varnhagen. She became more involved in politics, studying political theories, especially intrigued by Jewish politics, which inspired her to write The Enlightenment and the Jewish Question. Following Adolf Hitler’s rise to power in Germany in 1933, Arendt, as a Jew, suffered discrimination and was prevented from making a living. Her husband was prosecuted for being a Communist, fled to France. She stayed in Berlin and became an activist. After she got arrested for researching and gathering evidence of anti-Semitic propaganda at the Prussian State Library, she also left the county, first to Switzerland and then to reunite with her husband in Paris. She decided to commit herself to “the Jewish cause” and worked for several Jewish refugee organizations. In 1936, at the age of 30, Arendt and her husband divorced, and soon after, she met and married poet Heinrich Blücher. In 1940, they escaped Nazi-occupied France and immigrated to the US. Settling in NYC, Arendt began publishing a weekly column at a Jewish-German newspaper, in which she wrote about refugees, anti-Semitism, and different aspects of Zionism. After the war, she worked as an editor at Schocken Books and as a research director of the Conference on Jewish Relations. In 1951, at 45, Arendt published her first significant work, The Origins of Totalitarianism, in which she argued that Fascism and Communism share historical and intellectual origins. In her next book, The Human Condition, she examined the vita active (active life), defending the classical social ideals of work, citizenship, and political involvement, and opposing the obsession with basic welfare. In 1963, Arendt published her most recognized, controversial, and criticized work – Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, based on a series of essays that she wrote when covering the trial of the Nazi, Adolf Eichmann in Israel in 1961. In the book, Arendt argued that Eichmann, who was responsible for the transportation of many Jews to concentration camps during the holocaust, is not a monster nor a sadist, but an ambitious bureaucrat that his actions derived from his devotion and dedication to the Nazi movement. He was, in her words, “terrifyingly normal.” She was grappling with the question, ‘Can one do evil without being evil?’ Her critics did not accept her thesis that one could have a key role in the Nazi genocide yet have no evil motives. In all of her writings, Arendt challenged traditional conceptions, provoking new ways of thinking, even if debatable. She wrote not as a historian or philosopher but as a theorist that relied on facts to examine human political tendencies when given freedom and power. During the 1960s and the 1970s, Arendt held teaching positions in various institutes, including the University of Chicago, the New School for Social Research, the University of California, Berkeley, and Princeton. Throughout her life, she published more than 20 books and hundreds of articles and essays. She died of a heart attack in 1975, at the age of 69. Read more...

Simone Lucie Ernestine Marie Bertrand de Beauvoir was born in Paris, France, into a bourgeois family. She was raised Catholic and received her education at convent schools, wishing to be a nun. After WW1, her family lost much of their fortune, so her dowery was at risk, meaning that her marriage options were limited, and de Beauvoir saw that as an opportunity to become independent and earn her own living. In 1926, at 18, she attended the Sorbonne as a non-official student for preparations for the philosophy agrégation – a competitive national postgraduate examination. At 21, she passed the exam with the second-highest record, becoming the youngest person ever to pass the exam. At the time, she met the philosopher-to-be Jean-Paul Sartre. After de Beauvoir rejected his marriage proposal early on in their relationship, they formed a lifelong “soul partnership” that was sexual (but not inclusive) and professional. After receiving her degree in 1929, and for the next 15 years, de Beauvoir taught philosophy and literature in various high education institutes in France, including the Lycée Montgrand in Marseille and the Lycée Molière in Paris. During WW2, the Vichy government had dismissed her from her teaching position, which led de Beauvoir to launch her literary career, and she began writing plays, philosophical essays, and novels. In 1943, 35 years old de Beauvoir published her first book – She Came to Stay, exploring her real-life love triangle with Sartre and a young student named Olga Kosakiewicz, examining the complexity of relationships and the conscience to the other through existential lenses. The following year, she published a philosophical essay titled Pyrrhus and Cineas and a novel, The Blood of Others, questioning existentialist ethics. In 1949, at the age of 41, de Beauvoir published her most known work, The Second Sex – a 1,000-page analysis of the patriarchy and women’s oppression throughout history. In this groundbreaking book, she claimed that “One is not born but becomes a woman,” making the distinction between biological sex and the social construction of gender and ultimately defining the foundational of contemporary feminism. de Beauvoir published more than 80 books in different genres over the next four decades. Including novels, travel books, autobiographies, and philosophical essays. Among them were: The Mandarins, for which she won the Prix Goncourt, and a four-volume autobiography titled Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter; The Prime of Life; Force of Circumstance. In her later works, she discussed the philosophy of aging and death. In her 1964 novella, A Very Easy Death, she detailed her mother’s passing, as well as in her 1970 book, The Coming of Age, which provided reflected bitterly on society’s perception of elders. Throughout the years, de Beauvoir used both her pen and voice to advocate for various political and social causes, such as the struggle of Hungary for independence, the student movement in France in the 1960s, and against American foreign policy during the Vietnam War. In the 1970s, de Beauvoir became involved with the women’s liberation movement in France. She wrote essays, gave lectures, and participated in women’s equality demonstrations. In her work and her actions, de Beauvoir influenced many worldwide feminists in her time and paved the way for all feminists to follow. She died of pneumonia at the age of 78. Read more...

Judith Butler grew up in a Jewish family in Cleveland Ohio. At the age of 13, when she was asked what would be her dream job, she gave two options: a philosopher or a clown. She was reprimanded by the Rabbi for asking too many questions at the synagogue as a teenager. She went on making a career from asking questions, studying until she received her Ph.D. in Philosophy from Yale University in 1984. At the age of 33, she gained the status of “Superstar Professor” after publishing the book “Gender Trouble” (1990), which since was reprinted in more than 120 editions. Her work has made complex notions of gender identity more accessible and left an impact on mainstream culture. Despite being considered “hard to read”, she has since published more than 20 books, and contributed to many more publications, addressing a range of topics, from state vigilance to mourning, sexuality, international relations, and literature. Since 1993, Butler works at Berkley, University of California, currently serving as a Professor of Comparative Literature. In addition, she is active in several human rights organizations, such as the Center for Constitutional Rights in New York, Jewish Voice for Peace, and International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission board. Read more...

While raising seven children, Elizabeth Cady Stanton became a leader of the Suffrage Movement, serving as the theorist of women’s rights in the late 19th century. She described herself as a “caged lioness”, but refused to believe that women had to choose between motherhood and public activism. Stanton had a good start in life, born to a well-to-do family, enjoying the privilege of access to formal education in the days when girls were largely excluded from the lecture halls. She married abolitionist Henry Stanton, ten years her senior, and traveled with him to London for the World’s Anti-Slavery Convention. When women were not allowed to take seats, she was inspired to work for women’s rights. There she also met Lucretia Mott; later they fought together for women’s rights.   Eight years later, in 1848, she co-hosted the first Woman’s Rights Convention at Seneca Falls, New York. Stanton wrote and presented there the Declaration of Sentiments, which was an inclusive take on the Declaration of Independence. After meeting Susan B. Anthony, the two became close friends and partners in the movement: Anthony was the strategist, and Cady Stanton was the thinker and writer. She co-founded the National Woman Suffrage Association (NWSA) and edited its journal ‘The Revolution’, addressing a wide range of women’s issues in her lectures and articles, including divorce law and married women’s property rights. Her later years were focused on writing – publishing History of Woman Suffrage and the controversial Woman’s Bible, which questioned the place of women within religion. Stanton died 18 years before women gained the right to vote in the ratification of the 19th Amendment to the American Constitution in 1920. Her daughter Harriot Stanton Blatch did practice her right to vote and continued her mother’s legacy as a feminist activist. Read more...