America's First Women Philosophers: Transplanting Hegel, 1860-1925 (Bloomsbury Studies in American Philosophy)
Dorothy G. Rogers
Language: English
Pages: 192
ISBN: 0826440258
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
The American idealist movement started in St. Louis, Missouri in 1858, becoming more influential as women joined and influenced its development. Susan Elizabeth Blow was well known as an educator and pedagogical theorist who founded the first public kindergarten program in America (1873-1884). Anna C. Brackett was a feminist and pedagogical theorist and the first female principal of a secondary school (St. Louis Normal School, 1863-72). Grace C. Bibb was a feminist literary critic and the first female dean at the University of Missouri, Columbia (1878-84). American idealism took on a new form in the 1880s with the founding of the Concord School of Philosophy in Massachusetts. Ellen M. Mitchell participated in the movement in both St. Louis and Concord. She was one of the first women to teach philosophy at a co-educational college (University of Denver, 1890-92). Lucia Ames Mead, Marietta Kies, and Eliza Sunderland joined the movement in Concord. Lucia Ames Mead became a chief pacifist theorist in the early twentieth century. Kies and Sunderland were among the first women to earn the Ph.D. in philosophy (University of Michigan, 1891, 1892). Kies wrote on political altruism and shared with Mitchell the distinction of teaching at a coeducational institution (Butler College, 1896-99). These were the first American women as a group to plunge into philosophy proper, bridging those years between the amateur, paraprofessional and professional academic philosopher. Dorothy Rogers's new book at last gives them the attention they deserve.
America's First Women Philosophers is indexed in H.W. Wilson's Essay and General Literature Index.
144,153,155 and Christian Socialist movement 21 and Ednah Dow Cheney 141 and Eliza Sunderland 38, 119, 122 and Ellen Mitchell 117n and feminism 6,12-13,155-158 and George Holmes Howison 15-17, 30,41n 141 and George Sylvester Morris 20, 33, 39 and Henry Carter Adams 139 and John Dewey 39,139 and Lucia Ames Mead 134, 135 and St. Louis idealist movement 15-16,39,128, 138, 144 and Susan Blow 144,153 and Susan Tolman Mills 159n and William Torrey Harris 20, 33, 39,115, 129, 138-139, 144 at Butler
Snider believed that Harris's decision to publish JSP was premature. The group would have done better, he thought, to let its ideas mature so that it could produce a better product. Although he found Harris "a little heady" in founding JSP at this early date, Snider conceded that it was "indeed the most famous and striking philosophical product of our movement, thanks to the tireless activity and daring of its editor." The women of the St. Louis movement Women were not officially recognized as
to read Goethe and Schiller together. Fuller developed a deep interest in Goethe's work, but it is unclear whether she and Clarke read German philosophy along with the literature that they had discovered. See Margaret Fuller: From Transcendentalism to Revolution, by Paula Blanchard (Boston: Addison-Wesley, 1987), 66-70. The well-documented effort of the St. Louis group to translate Hegel's Science of Logic is chronicled in Herbert Spiegelberg's transcription of Harris's Record Book for the
evolution. Charles began to correspond with Harris in St. Louis, and the two became good friends over time. Lucia was only a child when Charles first discovered St. Louis idealism, but as she grew into her teens and twenties, her brother introduced her, not only to Harris's ideas but to the man himself. Harris served as a teacher and mentor to Lucia, much as he did to Marietta Kies. Ames Mead attended the Concord School of Philosophy regularly, listening to Harris's lectures, among others. She
Hopkins, the University of Chicago, Yale, and as mentioned, Harvard, none of which granted graduate degrees to women until after Kies had completed her doctoral work at Michigan. So when decision-makers chose Howe or Ames over Kies for more prestigious posts, there was a ready-made explanation: these gentlemen had a more impressive educational record. But equal higher education for women was hard to come by when Kies entered the academic world, which means that she had no access to the very