b. 1946
Diana Tietjens Meyers is a contemporary feminist philosopher whose work centers on personal autonomy, selfhood, and the social conditions that shape moral agency. She is best known for reconceiving autonomy not as a unitary property but as a set of acquired competencies, and for examining how gender, culture, and social structures constrain women's self-determination. Her scholarship bridges analytic philosophy, feminist theory, and psychoanalytic thought.
Developed the 'autonomy competency' model, reframing autonomy as a learnable set of skills rather than an innate property
Authored Self, Society, and Personal Choice (1989), a foundational text in feminist autonomy theory
Wrote Subjection and Subjectivity (1994), integrating psychoanalytic feminism with moral philosophy
Analyzed how cultural imagery and gender norms constrain women's agency in Gender in the Mirror (2002)
Argued that standard philosophical accounts of agency and selfhood systematically exclude women's lived experience