Before the 20th century, it was nearly impossible for a philosophically gifted woman to gain recognition. How that situation began to change is part of the story told in “The Women Are Up to Something”
Its other two subjects are Iris Murdoch and Mary Midgley, who, like Anscombe, had been well-educated, middle-class girls. As Benjamin Lipscomb, an American philosopher, explains, Foot was much posher. Her grandfather, Grover Cleveland, was twice America’s president. Her earlier education was overseen by nannies and consisted mainly of riding and parties.
Much of Midgley’s philosophical work was not written for academics. Her first book appeared when she was almost 60 and was followed by 15 more, many taking aim at what she saw as oversimplifications by biologists, psychologists and other scientists. She had a spat with Richard Dawkins over whether it is helpful to call genes “selfish”. Midgley paused her career for over a decade to care for three children.
Anscombe argued along similar lines in a seminal paper published in 1958: Hume, Kant, Bentham, Mill and others all came in for a drubbing. Moral philosophers, she insisted, needed to rethink many of their beliefs about human nature and psychology. Two years earlier, she had made headlines in the wider world by objecting to the award of an Oxford degree to Harry Truman. In her eyes, the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki made him a mass-murderer.
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