ABSTRACT
This chapter addresses the various forms taken by feminist enquiry into the relationship between women and the history of philosophy. Michele Le Doeuff made an early and influential contribution to the task of dismantling destructive philosophical conceptions of women. Her pioneering interpretation of the relationship between women and philosophy centered on the proposition that philosophical thought deploys an extensive repertoire of metaphors and images, including images of irrational, emotional, and objectified women. Women in the past experienced not only exclusion from institutions of learning, illiteracy, domestic confinement, and so on, but they also experienced a discursive or symbolic dissonance between the practice of philosophy and their lived womanhood. In "Women and Philosophy" Le Doeuff introduced the idea of the "Heloise complex" in order to explain why even those few privileged women in the past who managed to gain access to philosophical thought were nevertheless prevented from becoming philosophers.
