Where Are All the Women Philosophers?

I started this one with a single question: where are all the women philosophers? Not the two or three names everyone already knows, the rest of them. The ones who should be sitting next to Plato and Aristotle in the syllabus and just aren't.

Hypatia is where I went looking first. Mathematician, astronomer, philosopher, the last head of the school at Alexandria, murdered by a mob in 415 CE for the crime of being too visible, too influential, too much a woman doing serious thinking in public. History likes to treat her like an exception. She wasn't. She's just the one name the record couldn't fully erase.

The Library of Alexandria burned, and nobody fully agrees on how or when. What's less argued about is who mostly got to decide what was worth copying, citing, and preserving in the centuries before and after that fire, and whose thinking got quietly reclassified as something other than philosophy: letters, diaries, gossip, witchcraft, hysteria. The fire didn't start that erasure. It just finished a job that was already underway.

This isn't ancient history I'm reciting for its own sake. It's a live question about who gets called a philosopher and who gets called a woman with opinions, and that question didn't retire in 415 CE. From a Chicana perspective specifically, reclaiming thinkers like Hypatia isn't nostalgia. It's evidence: women were always doing this work, always building frameworks for how to live, and the erasure was never about the quality of the thinking.

That's the actual argument of Chicana Hippie, if you want it in one line: rebuild the library from a perspective it was never written for, and stop waiting for permission to call it philosophy.