Philosophy and Gender Statistics

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...I was just thinking about all the philosophers I've ever read about.

In my many years of education, I don't recall learning of a female philosopher.

An extreme sadness...Proof of a male dominant civilization, evidence of the hardships a women must face back in the day.  How many female philosophers were as Galileo?

We as a civilization could learn so much from a few philosophical ideas from a woman's standpoint.

Their ideas with male ideas are the keys to unity, without one you have an incomplete key and thus an incomplete idea of the whole.

Does anyone know of any female philosophers off the top of their heads?

I think Helen Keler (sp?) (the blind, deaf, and mute girl who was born the same day as me years before me, June 27th) was known for her deep understandings but I don't know if she also was spoken in philosophy.

...My cousin Alyssa, my favorite cousin hah, has a degree in Philosophy and specifically enjoys metaphysics.  She's a teacher of inner city kids who deal with violence and gang activity over in New Jersey.  I have to say, I wish there were more people like her in the world.

Socrates, considered one of the greatest philosophers and orators in western civilization, was taught Rhetoric by a woman named Aspasia. Aspasia was forbidden to study philosophy because she was a woman, so she opened her own school. She taught many Athenians and was considered an intellectual giant in her time. She was also a lover of the great Athenian statesman Pericles and it's believed she wrote all his great speeches.

Pythagoras, one of our greatest metaphysicians and mathematicians, claimed he learned everything he know from a woman named Themistoclea.

The last of the line of great Greek philosophers was a woman named Hypatia of Alexandria. She was considered by her contemporaries to be the greatest thinker of her time. She was raped, brutalized and had he flesh torn to pieces by Christians in the Serapeum (The temple of Serapis which ajoined the Library of Alexandria).

There were other woman philosophers in the ancient world despite the sexism they faced back then but a lot of the time their writings do not survive because later populations valued the works of men more, especially in the middle ages and renaissance.

Something else to keep in mind is that often women were not credited for their work. As the author Virginia Woolf noted "Anonymous is a woman."

There are modern female philosophers, but the entire field has been a men's club for centuries . . . or millenia. Some names I can think of off the top of my head: Angela Davies, Simone de Beauvoir, Rosa Luxembourg,