Wow. I think ignorance has gone above and beyond at Trumansburg. So a good friend of mine stated on Facebook that he couldn't think of any women intellectuals, because there wasn't any. He then proceeded to name Nikola Tesla, Thomas Edison, and Albert Einstein as only a few of many more male intellectuals.
To that I say Nikola was an intellectual but he was also a very strange strange man. He developed a hatred of jewelry and round objects, could not bear to touch hair, did not like to shake hands, and became obsessed with the number three—he often felt compelled to walk around a block three times before entering a building, and demanded 18 napkins (a number divisible by three) to polish his silver and glasses and plates until they were impeccable whenever he went dining. If he read one of an author's books, he had to read all of his books.
Tesla, like many of his era, became a proponent of an imposed selective breeding version of eugenics. His opinion stemmed from the belief that humans' "pity" had interfered with the natural "ruthless workings of nature," rather than from conceptions of a "master race" or inherent superiority of one person over another. His advocacy of it was, however, to push it further. In a 1937 interview, he stated:
... man's new sense of pity began to interfere with the ruthless workings of nature. The only method compatible with our notions of civilization and the race is to prevent the breeding of the unfit by sterilization and the deliberate guidance of the mating instinct .... The trend of opinion among eugenists is that we must make marriage more difficult. Certainly no one who is not a desirable parent should be permitted to produce progeny. A century from now it will no more occur to a normal person to mate with a person eugenically unfit than to marry a habitual criminal.
Anyway the point of this post was to name multiple women intellectuals so I guess I should get on with it.
Margaret Atwood (1939– ), an iconic Canadian feminist novelist, expresses both the “goddess” and “activist” modes of the mid-twentieth century movement, via a confrontational style that gained converts by avoiding both violence and eccentricity.
Aung San Suu Kyi (1945– ), a Nobel Peace Prize laureate and scholar living under house arrest and many other restrictions imposed by her native Burma’s (Myanmar’s) military rulers, leads a popular political movement and party whose non-violence and civil disobedience offer hope for eventual democratic government.
Karen Armstrong (1944– ), formerly a Roman Catholic nun in her native Britain and widely considered a force for ecumenism, now considers herself a “creative monotheist,” whose many books offer iconoclasm regarding major monotheist religions.
Susan Blackmore (1951– ), a British evolutionary psychologist, developed Richard Dawkins’s concept of the “meme” (a theoretical Darwinian unit of thought that she believes responsible for human behavior) through her many books, articles, and lectures.
Mary Daly (1928– ), an American Catholic theologian who felt that Vatican II did not go nearly far enough, achieved wide recognition for rejecting Christian and what she sees as other “patriarchal” thinking patterns in favor of a spirituality of women’s liberation.
Midge Decter (1927– ), an American editor and writer, was a leftist in her youth but, drawn to observant Judaism and a conservative political approach, has become a leading figure at the flagship magazine Commentary.
Barbara Ehrenreich (1941– ), an American journalist, wrote many books from a socialist perspective, but is best known for her bestselling Nickeled and Dimed (2002), for which she took low wage service jobs to investigate the workers’ lives.
Susan Faludi (1959– ), a Pulitzer Prize-winning American journalist and author, is best known for advocating “power” feminism rather than “victim” feminism, attacking irrelevant “deconstruction” theory, and warning of a coming backlash against feminism.
Susan Greenfield (1950– ), a British pharmacologist and student of consciousness, has held a number of distinguished science posts despite colleagues’ criticism of her controversial theories on the dangers to children of computers and social networking.
Germaine Greer (1939– ), an Australian scholar and journalist whose best known work is the major 1970s feminist text The Female Eunuch (1970), originally advocated sexual liberation but, more recently, has lauded celibacy.
Gertrude Himmelfarb (1922– ), an American scholar drawn to examining the roots of social progress and decay, is best known for her sympathetic portrayals of Victorian society, dealing with similar social problems to those faced today.
Mary Midgley (1919– ), a British philosopher of science, has received much criticism for opposing the growing religion of science and arguing that pre-Darwinian ideas of human nature tell us more than the latest pop-science evolutionary psychology best-seller.
Peggy Noonan (1950– ), an American political historian and journalist, is best known for her emphasis on the character of political and religious figures, rather than their glamour, as her biographies of John Paul II and Ronald Reagan attest.
Melanie Phillips (1951– ), a British journalist and author, has targeted the growing climate of censorship and political and social irrationality in Western countries, for which she has received both livid denunciation as a “conservative” and the Orwell Prize for political journalism (1996).
Naomi Wolf (1962– ), an American author, editor, and essayist, is best known for The Beauty Myth (2002), which portrayed successful women as haunted by the need to look like movie stars
Just to name a few.
