teenth centuries certain collections of letters written by women were
popular simply because of the voyeuristic thrill of reading someone
else's private correspondence. Some novels and poetry may seem un-
comfortably personal to those of us used to dealing with the abstract and
impersonal arguments of the type of modern moral philosophy that is in-
fluenced by such philosophers as Kant and Mill. Indeed, it may even
seem that these forms of writing are more appropriate to describe the
particular, concrete nature of human emotions and daily life, rather than
to give an account of the abstract, universal truths we are supposed to
aim for in philosophy.

From the standpoint of this tradition of moral philosophy then, it ap-
pears that the work of women philosophers which takes the form of nov-
els, letters, or poetry can have little philosophical significance for us; per-
haps it can never be more than a curiosity. Specifically, they can never be
forms of the philosophical genre; and I shall use the term "form"
throughout as a "catch-all" term for the types of work I am discussing.
Yet surely we would like to have at least the opportunity of including the
work of some of our philosophical foremothers in our future explorations
of feminist ethics. I realized that if we are to work towards including the
work of these philosophers properly, then one thing we must do is to
look further into the reasons for the assignment of non-philosophical sta-
tus to certain forms. Something that is all the more pressing in the light
of the fact that the employment of these forms seems to be prevalent in
the work of women philosophers from the history of philosophy. And
while I do not intend to argue that male philosophers did not use these
forms, I suspect that the issue of the non-philosophical status of these
forms may be a more pressing concern for work of women philosophers,
for it seems possible that the sex of an author can get played into the way
a work is initially perceived and categorized.

It is unlikely that the exclusion of women from the realm of philosophy
in one way or another is anything novel. Even though it is historically ir-
responsible to make blanket statements about the sorts of social pres-
sures that may have restricted the ability of the women philosophers I
study or their contemporaries to write philosophy, there can be little
doubt that they would have been limited in their access to educational or
publishing opportunities. They could also have expected to encounter
hostile public reception of their work (as Mary Wollstonecraft did), and
restrictions in the arenas--both disciplinary and actual--within which
they could express their opinions. These social pressures may well have
(directly or indirectly) informed the choice of form by these philoso-

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