I'm interested in creativity and gender: specifically why the discussion of women writers seems to get extraordinarily fraught when one throws in the idea of motherhood. I have seen young female writers write long manifestos about why they'll never be mothers because motherhood will interfere with their work; I've seen how mostly women who are granted bona fide "genius" status are childless (Austen, Dickinson, Eliot, Wharton, O'Connor, Welty). It is less severe today, but still exists: our only universally recognized feminine "geniuses" seem to be the non-mothers Zadie Smith, Joyce Carol Oates, and, of the six female Nobel laureates in literature in the past twenty years, only one half--Morrison, Lessing, and Gordimer--had children, which can't be representative of either the population of women in toto, or that of women who are writers. Worse, and this may simply be an assumption on my part, but oftentimes women don't get judged as "important" as their male counterparts until they are beyond the age of...

Some thinkers mention the possibility of a "feminine" (not feminist) form of ethical reasoning, and contrast this to prevailing forms of ethical reasoning, which are "masculine". What does it mean for a way of thinking about ethics to be masculine or feminine? What would a "feminine ethic" look like?

How does one approach the question of whether a Western nation should permit women to wear full-body-covering Islamic dress? I'm not asking for the answer to the question, but for guidance in attacking it. How do you balance individual freedom and religious freedoms against other values? Thank you, Mark M.

Does the "ethics of care" have a special relationship with Feminism? It seems that Feminism can be justified under lots of ethical theories. A Utilitarian could argue that since women experience pain and pleasure, their welfare should be factored into our felicific calculus. A Deontologist could argue that women have rights, and it is wrong to violate those rights. So what makes the ethics of care a more Feminist theory than other moral theories, like Utilitarianism and Deontology?

Why does it seem that everything that I read in philosophy always uses "she" or "her" instead of "his" or "he"?

Is it morally defensible that men are allowed to go topless in certain public situations while women are not (e.g., at the beach or pool, park, gym, etc.)? Are the people opposed to women gaining this right prudes, or do they have a legitimate ethical basis for their position?

I have a question concerning the gender of words that exist in many languages, except in English. What does the presence of grammatical gender in a language say about the mentality of its speakers? A different question is whether the features of a language reflect the characteristics of the societies where it's spoken in a largely unconscious and involuntary way. (Modern) Persian, spoken in Iran and Afghanistan, doesn't have the feature of grammatical gender (anymore), just as English. Many say that the languages that do have grammatical genders are sexist, and that they help to perpetuate the conviction that sex is a tremendously important matter in all areas. For Marilyn Frye, this is a key factor in perpetuating male dominance: male dominance requires the belief that men and women are importantly different from each other, so anything that contributes to the impression that sex differences are important is therefore a contributor to male dominance. Societies whose languages do not have...

I am reading some philosophy and psychology about happiness, and much of the work proclaims that we must act in order to be "happy" (Aristotle, William James, as well as more popular writers such as Napoleon Hill, Dale Carnegie and Mihaly Czikszentmihalyi). As you will notice, they are all men. Are there difference in how female philosophers describe and prescribe "happiness" (or subjective well-being or flourishing)? Thank you.

A state legislator recently came to the local high school recently. Naturally, teenage boys and girls tend to be convinced that the world is out to get their gender exclusively. One of the boys asked why it was okay for the insurance company to charge him three times as much as they charged his sister for car insurance. Apparently she’s a reckless driver and he’s a shut-in who hardly uses his car. The legislator said that it was a double standard but that there was no gain in attacking it. Instead of lowering the price for men the insurance company would simply raise the price for women and then nobody would benefit. Is this justification for what the legislator allowed as generalizing, stereotyping, and straight sexism acceptable in a modern society? What about the feminist movement? Is it possible that instead of placing new value in women it’s simply devaluing men? If so is it acceptable? Should we try a new more idealistic approach to equality?

Mary Warnock says we have a right to have children. It's a question I asked myself in the waiting room of a fertility clinic as I was registering for IVF treatment - it's a question I continuing asking myself as I see more and more gay fathers flying off to exotic lands for their offspring through surrogacy. How can we conciliate the right to have children with the exploitation of women? Best regards Pensiero Rome, Italy