  It is worth considering the context in which these women were writing and what it suggests about their feminist methodology in the history of philosophy. Though anachronistic, it seems appropriate to characterize at least some of these women, along with some of the their male contemporaries, as engaged in a feminist project. Many of these thinkers were self-consciously countering a recognized misogyny in philosophy but, insofar as they deployed philosophical methods, they would seem to reject the view that the problem was intrinsic to the discipline of philosophy itself. While the so-called querelle des femmes had been going on for centuries, the seventeenth century marked a turning point in the debate over the status of women as better or worse than men in virtue of their form or soul. (See Kelly 1988.) Both women and men thinkers of the period advanced egalitarian arguments. So, for instance, Marie De Gournay, in her “On the Equality of Men and Women,”(1622) deployed a skeptical method to argue for the equality of men and women (De Gournay 2002); Anna Maria van Schurman deployed syllogistic argumentation to argue for women's education both by demonstration and as evidence in her Dissertatio Logica (1638) (van Schurman 1998); in her Serious Proposal to the Ladies for the Advancement of their True and Greatest Interest (1694) Mary Astell applied Descartes's sex-neutral account of the mind (insofar as mind is really distinct from body, rationality is not tied to sex) to argue for women's education (Astell 2002); François Poulain de la Barre in On the Equality of the Two Sexes (1673) also drew on Cartesian principles to argue for the social equality of men and women (Poulain de la Barre 2002) . (Clarke 2013 collects de Gournay, van Schurman and Poulain de la Barre together.) While the methods deployed by these thinkers are different, they all appropriate philosophical methods – skepticism, basic rules of inference, a new metaphysics – different from what was then the dominant Aristotelian paradigm to counter misogynist claims.