User:Tom Morris/Atherton

Margaret Atherton is an American feminist philosopher and historian. She is Distinguished Professor in the philosophy department at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee. Her work on women such as Mary Astell, Anne Conway and Damaris Cudworth Masham has revived the study of female thinkers in Modern philosophy.

In the 1994 collection that Atherton edited Women Philosophers in the Early Modern Period, she argues that the work of René Descartes formed the philosophical basis for early proto-feminist writers like Astell and Masham to present a case for women's equality.