This book tries to deal with the two issues implicit in the ambiguity of its title: women as objects and as a subject of thought, id est, on the one hand, what the philosophers thought about women and, on the other, what women thought when they had access to the study of philosophy. It also tries to link these two aspects, since women philosophers thought, first, about what philosophers had thought about them. That’s why their first steps into the philosophy were direct and rationally argumented answers to the prejudices and ideologies of their contemporaries. Hence we seek at the same time to deconstruct the conceptualization of the feminine from the texts of some philosophers, but also to reconstruct a feminine genealogy in the history of thought.

Thus, in the first part of each historical division it is outlined a small critique of patriarchal reason, and as its counterpoint it is outlined a quick history of the feminist theory and practice, as well as a brief anthology of philosophers of every period; all this in order to visualize and retrieve a necessary past to illuminate our present identity and to guide our future. Because, as Hannah Arendt says, the lack of memory or tradition indicates, at the same time, the difficulty of preserving and innovating and, hence, the impossibility to create new meanings for the world. Each new fragment that we recover from a tradition that deliberately forgot the thought of women will compel necessarily to re-think ourselves, to produce sense, to reinterpret the world and, consequently, to transform it.