Two philosophy graduates are bringing out a book celebrating history’s unsung female philosophers, after realising that most textbooks and guides they found on the subject didn’t include a single woman.

Rebecca Buxton and Lisa Whiting came up with the idea for The Philosopher Queens while searching for a book about history’s greatest female thinkers.

“There were none,” said Buxton. “We did however find a book called The Great Philosophers, where every chapter was about a man, and every chapter was written by a man. This is common, with most public philosophers being men and most classrooms only teaching the ‘greats’ – who all happen to be men. Even very recently, the philosopher AC Grayling published a book on The History of Philosophy, which includes no chapters on any female philosophers and a three-and-a-half-page review of ‘feminist philosophy’ which only mentions one woman by name.”

This is not, stresses Buxton, because there are no female philosophers. She pointed to Hypatia of Alexandria, a mathematician, astronomer, and philosopher who “was hugely famous in her day – politicians used to go to her for advice and she was known as simply ‘The Philosopher’”, and to Mary Astell, the 17th-century early feminist thinker.

“It wasn’t that these women were never taken seriously as rigorous and intelligent individuals by their contemporaries, so why have they been forgotten?” she asked. “The response usually given by people who have not included women in their accounts of the history of philosophy is that none were influential enough or produced high enough quality work to be included. However, once you know a little about the women in the book you can see that some of them were actually very well known in their day.”

There are a few studies of female philosophers, Buxton added, but these are aimed at an academic audience. So after finding “countless women who were worthy of the ‘great philosopher’ title”, Buxton and Whiting decided to bring out a riposte to The Great Philosophers, with every chapter both about a woman philosopher, and written by a female philosopher. Crowdfunding publisher Unbound picked it up, and the title smashed its pre-order target in just 28 days, with sales to international publishers in five different languages.

Moving from Mary Wollstonecraft and Simone de Beauvoir to Ban Zhao, the renowned Chinese historian, and Angela Davis, the political activist, it is intended to highlight for the general public “the ways the history of philosophy has not done women justice”.

According to Buxton, many people have an “entirely skewed” understanding of the history of philosophy. “In order to properly understand the past, we need to pay attention to who has been forgotten,” she said. “These women also had incredibly valuable ideas that still impact the way that we think about the world today. For example, there has never been a better time to read Angela Davis’s Women, Race and Class. Her book tells us so much about our current moment and deserves far more attention.”