Introduction

Political philosophy has lately experienced a widespread revival in the critical debates that pervade public discourse on concepts of nation, state, and family. Singularly missing from the recognized sources of authoritative and provocative ideas on these issues have been the political writings of women. Although the growth of scholarly research and education dealing with women and gender has produced large and well-documented bodies of knowledge on the contributions of women to society, literature, science, technology, and the arts, there has been much less attention given to the intellectual work of women in the field of political philosophy. Moreover, it needs to be recognized that the history of women’s political writings is not exclusively a history of feminist thought, but ranges over the entire spectrum of social and political theory. In fact, the wide-ranging traditions of women's political thought do not fit neatly into contemporary ideological frames, and their omission from our writing and teaching of history and the humanities leaves us in ignorance of a very diverse body of significant and challenging works.

The Nation, Family, State: Women’s Political Writings website has been created to fill this void in political history. Our workshop participants and, eventually, the general public, will have this web resource to access available texts, rigorous and expert analysis, critical interpretation, and have a forum for intellectual exchange. The project committee intends to continue the expansion of the web site content based on what we learn from participants and to make the site universal and permanently maintained.