Women in Political Thought

Women and Political Thought provides an in-depth analysis of women’s role and place in political thought.

Beginning with Greek political thought, Sushila Ramaswamy traces the history of eighteenth-century liberalism, which, she demonstrates, carried the seed of modern feminism.

She discusses the effects the philosophies of Plato, Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau and Hegel had on eighteenth-century feminists. She offers detailed accounts of the main proponents of liberal feminism—for example, Mary Wollstonecraft, Margaret Fuller and Elizabeth Stanton—and the historical contexts that shaped them. She also analyses the works of Jeremy Bentham, James Mill and John Stuart Mill as central to later revised liberal feminism.

Ramaswamy also focuses on women thinkers from other ideological standpoints—the early socialists, the Marxists and the social democrats—that formed parts of the first wave feminism. She concludes by tracking the rise of radical feminism and its core ideas; the second-wave liberal feminism of Betty Friedan; the rise of postmodern feminism and eco-feminism during the third wave.

This is a comprehensive and detailed history of key women political thinkers and various schools of feminist thought.