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A vivid account of the powerful ideas and remarkable lives of eleven women philosophers across two centuries.

When you think of modern philosophers, who comes to mind? Likely, they are popular figures such as Kant, Hegel, Marx, and Nietzsche. But what if the history of philosophy we know is missing some of its most vital voices?

As Kristin Gjesdal shows us in Unruly Women, there is an abundance of important thinkers who were famous in their time, helped shape philosophy as we know it, and yet have been pushed into oblivion. She introduces eleven iconic women philosophers, from Germaine de Staël in Paris during the French Revolution to Angela Davis during the Black freedom movement in the US, whose ideas challenged and revolutionized the intellectual orthodoxies of their time. Moving across centuries, traditions, and political contexts, Unruly Women illustrates how the work of these philosophers engaged with questions that remain urgent now: What does freedom imply? How are power and inequality produced and sustained? What roles do gender, race, and class play in shaping our lives? And who gets to define what counts as knowledge, reason, and philosophy?

More than just an act of historical recovery, this book places these forgotten thinkers in conversation with one another, revealing a new history of philosophy—one shaped not only by abstract systems and canonical texts, but also by struggles over justice, emancipation, and political change. The result is a vibrant and accessible account of philosophy as something lived, contested, and deeply connected to the world around us—with unruly ideas that still matter today.