Aristotle's views on women
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
|
Related e |
|
Featured: |
Aristotle's views on women is an important topic in women's history, largely because of the Greek philosopher's influence on later Western thinkers, who quoted him as an authority until the end of the Middle Ages.
Contents |
Female biology
Women held to be colder than men
Aristotle believed that women are colder than men and thus less perfect.Template:Citation needed. This would mean also that they are more spirited, according to Aristotle's understanding of the effects of heat and cold on the soul as seen in Bk VII of The Politics and elsewhere. Also perfection has nothing to do with it. "Hotter" peoples were considered more intelligent, but succumb easily to tyranny. "Colder" peoples, on the other hand, were considered less intelligent but possessing a greater sense of enjoyment and liberty.
Women are like infertile men
Aristotle thought that woman's inability to produce semen is her deficiency. A woman, Aristotle declares, is as it were an infertile male. A male is male in virtue of a particular ability, and a female in virtue of a particular inability.
Women more emotional than men
According to Aristotle, woman is more compassionate than man, more easily moved to tears, while at the same time being more jealous, more querulous, more apt to scold and to strike. She is more prone to despondency and less hopeful than the man, more void of shame or self-respect, more false of speech, more deceptive, and of more retentive memory.
Female role in society
Women belong in the home
After having declared that women are physically inferior to men, he goes on to claim that their proper place is in the home, controlled by their husbands, because this corresponds to Greek constitutional law.
Ruling relation of male and female, of husband and wife
According to Aristotle's own statements, the female is by nature distinct from the slave, and the treatment of women as slaves is characteristic of barbarians. Yet the relation of the male to the female is by nature one of superior to inferior, and of ruler to ruled. But according to Aristotle, there are different "ways" or modes (tropoi) of rule, including despotic, royal, and political rule. "Political rule" is of those who are free and equal, who tend in their nature to be on equal terms and to differ in nothing. And Aristotle asserts that the mode of rule that belongs to a husband in relation to his wife is political rule, the rule suitable to those who are free and equal.
As for the differences between husband and wife, Aristotle says that these "always" consist in external appearances, in speeches, and in honors. By nature, but not always, the male is "more apt at leading" than the female; or, both the male and the female have the deliberative capacity of the soul, but in the female it lacks authority. Aristotle rounds this ambiguous view off by quoting a poetic verse wherein a wife's sensible questions were (tragically) dismissed by her husband with the frequented phrase, "to a woman silence brings ornament".
Support for monogamy
Aristotle wrote that a virtuous wife is best honored when she sees that her husband is faithful to her, and has no preference for another woman; but before all others loves and trusts her and holds her as his own. And so much the more will the woman seek to be what he accounts her.
Status of Spartan women
Aristotle wrote that in Sparta, the legislator wanted to make the whole city (or country) hardy and temperate, and he has carried out his intention in the case of the men, but he has neglected the women, who live in every sort of intemperance and luxury. He adds that in those regimes in which the condition of the women is bad, half the city may be regarded as having no laws.
Equal weight to female and male happiness
Aristotle gave equal weight to women's happiness as he did to men's, and commented in his Rhetoric that a society cannot be happy unless women are happy too. In places such as Sparta, where the lot of women is unhappy, there can only be half-happiness in society.
Legacy
Galen
Aristotle's assumptions on female coldness influenced Galen and others for almost two thousand years until the sixteenth century.
Church Fathers
In the classical age, which shaped patristic views, male sexuality and power were closely associated, and female sexuality was associated with passivity. Joyce E. Salisbury argues that the Church Fathers, influenced by Aristotle's opinions, opposed the practice of independent female ascetism because it threatened to emancipate women from men. To take one's pleasure was to be virile, to accept it, servile.<ref>Church Fathers, Independent Virgins, Joyce E. Salisbury, 1992</ref>
Otto Weininger
In his Sex and Character, written in 1903, Otto Weininger argues that all people are composed of a mixture of the male and the female substance, and that these views are supported scientifically.
Modern feminists
Aristotle is considered by some contemporary feminist critics to have been a misogynist because of his views on women's abilities, temperament, and role in society.
