Abstract
<jats:title>Abstract</jats:title> <jats:p>This book is about the home, but from the perspective of a selection of women philosophers, from antiquity to the twentieth century, from Japan to South America, and Constantinople to Boston. One aim is to reinstate the home as a philosophical problem, worthy of inquiry. It seems that as things are, the home is absent from mainstream versions of the history of philosophy, and we would be forgiven for thinking that it was a new problem, one brought up perhaps by Simone de Beauvoir in the Second Sex. But bringing up the writings of earlier women will help debunk this myth and show that the home was only absent from (historically recorded) philosophy because the women were, and men did not regard it as a problem (why would they? It is, after all, where the food gets made that allows them to keep working). Furthermore, bringing up the perspective of women philosophers on the problem of the home will enable a study of that problem in all its historical richness and variety. The home has not always featured in our lives in the way it did when Simone de Beauvoir (or Betty Friedan) wrote about it. And although Beauvoir, like many philosophers before her, speculates about what the home was to those that came before her, we are better off in many ways reading the accounts of the women philosophers who lived in those homes.</jats:p>