Aristotle's views on women

Aristotle's views on women influenced later Western thinkers, who quoted him as an authority until the end of the Middle Ages, influencing women's history and misogyny.

In his Politics, Aristotle saw women as subject to men, but as higher than slaves, and lacking authority; he believed the husband should exert political rule over the wife. Among women's differences from men were that they were, in his view, more impulsive, more compassionate, more complaining, and more deceptive. He gave the same weight to women's happiness as to men's, and in his Rhetoric stated that society could not be happy unless women were happy too. Whereas Plato was open to the potential equality of men and women, stating both that women were not equal to men in terms of strength and virtue, but were equal to men in terms of rational and occupational capacity, and hence in the ideal Republic should be educated and allowed to work alongside men without differentiation, Aristotle appears to have disagreed.

In his theory of inheritance, Aristotle considered the mother to provide a passive material element to the child, while the father provided an active, ensouling element with the form of the human species.

Differences between males and females

Aristotle believed women were inferior to men. For example, in his work Politics (1254b13–14), Aristotle states "as regards the sexes, the male is by nature superior and the female inferior, the male ruler and the female subject".^[1] In Politics 1.13 he wrote, "The slave is wholly lacking the deliberative element; the female has it but it lacks authority; the child has it but it is incomplete".^[2] Cynthia Freeland wrote: "Aristotle says that the courage of a man lies in commanding, a woman's lies in obeying; that 'matter yearns for form, as the female for the male and the ugly for the beautiful'; that women have fewer teeth than men; that a female is an incomplete male or 'as it were, a deformity'."^[3] Aristotle believed that men and women naturally differed both physically and mentally. He claimed that women are "more mischievous, less simple, more impulsive ... more compassionate ... more easily moved to tears ... more jealous, more querulous, more apt to scold and to strike ... more prone to despondency and less hopeful ... more void of shame or self-respect, more false of speech, more deceptive, of more retentive memory [and] ... also more wakeful; more shrinking [and] more difficult to rouse to action" than men.^[4]

Aristotle thinks that the female body being well-suited to reproduction entails that it has a different body temperature than the male body's.^[5] This is related to his views concerning reproduction. In the Generation of Animals, for instance, he identifies two major differences between men and women.^[6] The first is that the male is able to fully concoct and to emit semen outside his body, whereas the female only partially concocts the semen and retains it within her body. The second is that the male has the principle of the form, which determines the shape and the functions of the offspring, and, by implication, the female does not have this principle.^[7] Commentators have taken this to have very far-reaching implications for how Aristotle views women. For instance, Nancy Tuana argued that the female body's incapacity to concoct the blood into form-bestowing semen is responsible for “her brain being smaller and less developed, and her inferior brain size in turn accounts for much of her defective nature. Women’s less concocted brain renders her deliberative faculty too ineffective to rule over her emotions.”^[8]

According to Aristotle, there should be "political rule" of the husband over the wife.^[9][10] Aristotle explains how and why the association between man and woman takes on a hierarchical character by commenting on male rule over 'barbarians', or non-Greeks. "By nature the female has been distinguished from the slave. For nature makes nothing in the manner that the coppersmiths make the Delphic knife – that is, frugally – but, rather, it makes each thing for one purpose. For each thing would do its work most nobly if it had one task rather than many. Among the barbarians the female and the slave have the same status. This is because there are no natural rulers among them but, rather, the association among them is between male and female slave. On account of this, the poets say that 'it is fitting that Greeks rule barbarians', as the barbarian and the slave are by nature the same."^[11] While Aristotle reduced women's roles in society, and promoted the idea that women should receive less food and nourishment than males, he also criticised the results: a woman, he thought, was then more compassionate, more opinionated, more apt to scold and to strike. He stated that women are more prone to despondency, more void of shame or self-respect, more false of speech, more deceptive, and of having a better memory.^[12]

Women's role in inheritance

Further information: Aristotle's biology and Telegony (pregnancy)

 

Inheritance: model of transmission of movements from parents to child, and of form from the father. The model is not fully symmetric.^[13]

Aristotle's inheritance model sought to explain how the parents' characteristics are transmitted to the child, subject to influence from the environment.^[13] The father's semen and the mother's menses encode their parental characteristics.^[13][14] The model is partly asymmetric, as only the father's movements define the form or eidos of the human species, while the movements of both the father's and the mother's fluids define features other than the form, such as the father's eye colour or the mother's nose shape.^[13] The theory has some symmetry, as semen movements carry maleness while the menses carry femaleness. If the semen is hot enough to overpower the cold menses, the child will be a boy; but if it is too cold to do this, the child will be a girl. Inheritance is thus particulate (definitely one trait or another), as in Mendelian genetics, unlike the Hippocratic model which was continuous and blending.^[13] The child's sex can be influenced by factors that affect temperature, including the weather, the wind direction, diet, and the father's age. Features other than sex also depend on whether the semen overpowers the menses, so if a man has strong semen, he will have sons who resemble him, while if the semen is weak, he will have daughters who resemble their mother.^[13]

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 an article titled "Aristotle's Account of the Subjection of Women", Stauffer explains that Aristotle believed that in nature a common good came of the rule of a superior being. But he does not indicate a common good for men being superior to women. Aristotle believed that rational reasoning is what made you superior over lesser beings in nature, yet still used the term meaning stronger, not more rational or intelligent.^[11]

Legacy

Aristotle's assumptions on female coldness influenced Galen and others for almost two thousand years until the sixteenth century.^[15] 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.^[16] In his Sex and Character, Otto Weininger explained that all people are composed of a mixture of the male and the female substance, and that these views are supported scientifically. Weininger cited Aristotle's views in the chapter "Male and Female Psychology" of his book.

References

1. Smith, Nicholas D. (1983). "Plato and Aristotle on the Nature of Women". Journal of the History of Philosophy. 21 (4): 467–478. doi:10.1353/hph.1983.0090. S2CID 170449773.
2. "Aristotle: Politics [Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy] 1260a11". Iep.utm.edu. 27 July 2005. Retrieved 9 October 2013.
3. Witt, Charlotte; Shapiro, Lisa (1 January 2016). Zalta, Edward N. (ed.). Feminist History of Philosophy (Spring 2016 ed.).
4. History of Animals, 608b1–14.
5. Marguerite Deslauriers, "Sexual Difference in Aristotle's Politics and His Biology," Classical World 102 3 (2009): 215-231.
6. Gen. an. 4.1 765b9–15.
7. See Marguerite Deslauriers, "Sexual Difference in Aristotle's Politics and His Biology," Classical World 102 3 (2009): 215-231. This information is found on pages 216-217.
8. Nancy Tuana, “Aristotle and the Politics of Reproduction” in B.-A. Bar On, ed., Engendering Origins: Critical Feminist Readings in Plato and Aristotle (Albany 1994) 189–206. This quotation is from pages 202-203.
9. Politics I, 1259a–b.
10. Korinna Zamfir, Men and Women in the Household of God: A Contextual Approach to Roles and Ministries in the Pastoral Epistle, Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2013, p. 375.
11. Stauffer, Dana (October 2008). "Aristotle's Account of the Subjection of Women". The Journal of Politics. 70 (4): 929–941. doi:10.1017/s0022381608080973. JSTOR 30219476. S2CID 144046166.
12. History of Animals, book IX, part 1.
13. Leroi 2014, pp. 215–221.
14. Taylor 1922, p. 50.
15. Tuana, Nancy (1993). The Less Noble Sex: Scientific, Religious and Philosophical Conceptions of Women's Nature. Indiana University Press. pp. 21, 169. ISBN 978-0-253-36098-4.
16. Joyce E. Salisbury, Church Fathers, Independent Virgins, Verso, 1992.

Sources

• Leroi, Armand Marie (2014). The Lagoon: How Aristotle Invented Science. Bloomsbury. ISBN 978-1-4088-3622-4.
• Taylor, Henry Osborn (1922). "Chapter 3: Aristotle's Biology". . Archived from the original on 27 March 2006.