Regan Penaluna > Quotes

“the male glance.” Not to be confused with the male gaze, which objectifies women’s bodies, the male glance does the opposite to women’s creative work: it barely gives it a second look.”
― Regan Penaluna, How to Think Like a Woman: Four Women Philosophers Who Taught Me How to Love the Life of the Mind

“Years later I cam across an article by the critic Lili Loofbourow introducing an expression that I thought uncannily captured some of my graduate school experience: "the male glance." Not ot be confused with the male gaze, which objectifies women's bodies, the male glance does the opposite to women's creative work: it barely gives it a second look. Those under its spell decide after cursory examination that the work in question isn't of much value. The male glance "looks, assumes, and moves on. It is, above all else, quick. Under its influence, we rejoice in our distant diagnostic speed . . . it feeds an inchoate, almost erotic hunger to know without attending--to omnisciently not-attend, to reject without taking the trouble of analytical labor." It turns away without care.”
― Regan Penaluna, How to Think Like a Woman: Four Women Philosophers Who Taught Me How to Love the Life of the Mind

“She was hard on women because she [Mary Astell] believed them worth more than a life devoted to beauty practices. "To imagine that our Souls were given us only for the service of our Bodies, and that the best improvement we can make of these, is to attract the eyes of men. We value *them* too much, and our *selves* too little, if we place any part of our worth in their Opinion.”
― Regan Penaluna, How to Think Like a Woman: Four Women Philosophers Who Taught Me How to Love the Life of the Mind

“all life is suffering and that the trick is to find the suffering that’s worth longing for.”
― Regan Penaluna, How to Think Like a Woman: Four Women Philosophers Who Taught Me How to Love the Life of the Mind

“Women continued to be criticized for wondering about the wrong sorts of things, and were still considered unfit for the new method of inquiry. And the curious women whose smarts men couldn't deny faced the disturbing likelihood that they would become scientific curiousities themselves. Medical doctors at the time were persuaded by Galen's theory that women were colder than men and had slower thoughts. Women who had quick thoughts must not be female but rather hybrids they termed freaks of nature. When Astell wrote that learned women were "star'd upon as Monsters, Censur'd, Envy'd, and every way Discourag'd," she was being literal.”
― Regan Penaluna, How to Think Like a Woman: Four Women Philosophers Who Taught Me How to Love the Life of the Mind

“intelligence could also be accumulative, a function of effort and curiosity, a construct dependent upon a community and its norms.”
― Regan Penaluna, How to Think Like a Woman: Four Women Philosophers Who Taught Me How to Love the Life of the Mind

“I longed to connect to something greater than myself, to ponder reality and my place in it. I wasn’t looking for a personal god. I was after truth, which didn’t promise to yield a universe that I would like but rather one that was real.”
― Regan Penaluna, How to Think Like a Woman: Four Women Philosophers Who Taught Me How to Love the Life of the Mind

“For too long we have ignored the dissenting voices that complicate the canon. The men of the Enlightenment were brave thinkers challenging traditional modes of thought, but the women of the Enlightenment were also brave, highlighting the ways in which men’s thinking fell short of their own ideals.”
― Regan Penaluna, How to Think Like a Woman: Four Women Philosophers Who Taught Me How to Love the Life of the Mind

“There is nothing challenging about being good or doing what’s right when you have no passion for life, let alone the wish to sin.”
― Regan Penaluna, How to Think Like a Woman: Four Women Philosophers Who Taught Me How to Love the Life of the Mind

“It's not surprising that the philosopher who introduced the idea of radical doubt was a woman, since women learn to question themselves from a young age. Contemporary philosopher and artist Adrian Piper noticed this too. She says that women are especially adept at philosophical doubt because "their judgement, credibility and authority start to come under attack during puberty, as part of the process of gender socialization. They are made to feel uncertain about themselves, their place in society and their right to their own opinions.”
― Regan Penaluna, How to Think Like a Woman: Four Women Philosophers Who Taught Me How to Love the Life of the Mind

“the brief time we are here matters, that it is meaningful and contains beauty. We’ve learned to talk to ourselves in this expansive and dark vacuum to keep ourselves company, so that we can transcend our finite, perplexing condition—if not in fact, then in our imaginations. We’ve learned to free ourselves—if only for the duration of a poem, an equation, a book, a prayer—from our despair.”
― Regan Penaluna, How to Think Like a Woman: Four Women Philosophers Who Taught Me How to Love the Life of the Mind

“It’s not surprising that the philosopher who introduced the idea of radical doubt was a woman, since women learn to question themselves from a young age.”
― Regan Penaluna, How to Think Like a Woman: Four Women Philosophers Who Taught Me How to Love the Life of the Mind

“Household Affaires are the Opium of the Soul.”
― Regan Penaluna, How to Think Like a Woman: Four Women Philosophers Who Taught Me How to Love the Life of the Mind

“In an exchange between a beguine and a French church master, the beguine asserted her superiority: “You glow, we take fire. / You assume, we know.”572”
― Regan Penaluna, How to Think Like a Woman: Four Women Philosophers Who Taught Me How to Love the Life of the Mind

“the epistemic state of many a thinking woman is one of self-doubt.”
― Regan Penaluna, How to Think Like a Woman: Four Women Philosophers Who Taught Me How to Love the Life of the Mind

“mothers emerge from her philosophical vision in a vital role: the transmitters of love who set us on the path of inquisitive engagement with the world. Mothers help make philosophy possible.”
― Regan Penaluna, How to Think Like a Woman: Four Women Philosophers Who Taught Me How to Love the Life of the Mind

“transcendence through interdependence. The love of others is a treacherous but necessary path and the only one available to us, because we are not gods.”
― Regan Penaluna, How to Think Like a Woman: Four Women Philosophers Who Taught Me How to Love the Life of the Mind

“to be a self is to be profoundly connected to others, and to be free is to aid in the freedom of others. Perhaps this is all there is to rapture—to free each other to hear our own voices.”
― Regan Penaluna, How to Think Like a Woman: Four Women Philosophers Who Taught Me How to Love the Life of the Mind

“your belief in your own victimhood is blinding you to your own powers”
― Regan Penaluna, How to Think Like a Woman: Four Women Philosophers Who Taught Me How to Love the Life of the Mind

“Art, philosophy, and literature tell us a different story. That the brief time we are here matters, that it is meaningful and contains beauty. We’ve learned to talk to ourselves in this expansive and dark vacuum to keep ourselves company, so that we can transcend our finite, perplexing condition—if not in fact, then in our imaginations. We’ve learned to free ourselves—if only for the duration of a poem, an equation, a book, a prayer—from our despair.”
― Regan Penaluna, How to Think Like a Woman: Four Women Philosophers Who Taught Me How to Love the Life of the Mind

“It’s not surprising that the philosopher who introduced the idea of radical doubt was a woman, since women learn to question themselves from a young age. Contemporary philosopher and artist Adrian Piper noticed this too. She says that women are especially adept at philosophical doubt because “their judgment, credibility and authority start to come under attack during puberty, as part of the process of gender socialization. They are made to feel uncertain about themselves, their place in society and their right to their own opinions.”
― Regan Penaluna, How to Think Like a Woman: Four Women Philosophers Who Taught Me How to Love the Life of the Mind

“She didn’t like how young girls were taught to prioritize it—usually at the expense of their intellectual development. But she was older now and already had established her intellectual life. She shared with a friend that the hard part was finding someone to trust. “I believe I shall end my days as I am. Indeed, I have been always very fearful of putting my happiness entirely in the power of any one.”684”
― Regan Penaluna, How to Think Like a Woman: Four Women Philosophers Who Taught Me How to Love the Life of the Mind

“If we don’t belong to a God, then at the very least, we belong to each other. I’m starting to think this insight is somehow relevant to the good life that the ancients were after; it’s something that Astell, Masham, Cockburn, and Wollstonecraft well understood—that to be a self is to be profoundly connected to others, and to be free is to aid in the freedom of others. Perhaps this is all there is to rapture—to free each other to hear our own voices.”
― Regan Penaluna, How to Think Like a Woman: Four Women Philosophers Who Taught Me How to Love the Life of the Mind

“Most people agreed that to become good mothers, girls needed some learning, but there was disagreement about how demanding their studies should be.425 The latest “evidence” in medical science continued to perpetuate the longstanding view that women were naturally inferior to men. In 1775, a year before the American Declaration of Independence was signed, influential French physician Pierre Roussel said that “the essence of sex . . . is not confined to a single organ but extends, through more or less perceptible nuances, into every part.”426 A widely circulated anatomical drawing of a woman exaggerated features of her anatomy, so that her head resembled a toddler’s and her hips an ostrich’s—an image that lent itself well to the argument that women were destined to obey men and have babies.427”
― Regan Penaluna, How to Think Like a Woman: Four Women Philosophers Who Taught Me How to Love the Life of the Mind

“Masham wrote about what prevents a woman from committing to an intellectual life: the unwritten, automatic, continual message that she isn’t fit for it. Censure, ridicule, and isolation are strong enough forces to make her doubt herself.367 They beat her back like waves against a dinghy.”
― Regan Penaluna, How to Think Like a Woman: Four Women Philosophers Who Taught Me How to Love the Life of the Mind

“One wou’d therefore almost think, that the wise disposer of all things, foreseeing how unjustly Women are denied opportunities of improvement from without, has therefore by way of compensation endow’d them with greater propensions to Vertue and a natural goodness of Temper within, which if duly manag’d, would raise them to the most eminent pitch of heroick Vertue. —Mary Astell”
― Regan Penaluna, How to Think Like a Woman: Four Women Philosophers Who Taught Me How to Love the Life of the Mind

“The male glance “looks, assumes, and moves on. It is, above all else, quick. Under its influence, we rejoice in our distant diagnostic speed . . . it feeds an inchoate, almost erotic hunger to know without attending—to omnisciently not-attend, to reject without taking the trouble of analytical labor.” It turns away without a care.”
― Regan Penaluna, How to Think Like a Woman: Four Women Philosophers Who Taught Me How to Love the Life of the Mind

“I tend to think that if you’re a woman and you care about your freedom, you cannot help but harbor some anger and frustration. Whether it’s expressed in a thought to yourself or in an essay, to think like a woman, to produce and create like a woman, often involves anger. It’s a feature of a woman’s psyche as she comes into her own in a world that (still) does not want her to.”
― Regan Penaluna, How to Think Like a Woman: Four Women Philosophers Who Taught Me How to Love the Life of the Mind

“In the low plain cities of norther Europe in the 1200s emerged strange communities never seen before. Known as beguinages, they were urban collectives for women who wished to escape marriage and devote themselves to a lay religious life. They were self-governed and committed ot their members' education. The members, known as beguines, taught one another useful skills including how to read and write and ponder theological ideas. Unlike nuns in convents, beguines were free to leave and marry if they wished. They earned the respect of their local communities because of their commitment to helping the poor. Their existence might be said to be idyllic, except for the occasional infighting and the threat of rape by local men.”
― Regan Penaluna, How to Think Like a Woman: Four Women Philosophers Who Taught Me How to Love the Life of the Mind

“The tragedies of men, she suggests, are sometimes grandiose fabrications of their own making.”
― Regan Penaluna, How to Think Like a Woman: Four Women Philosophers Who Taught Me How to Love the Life of the Mind