Women in Western Political Thought

Women in Western Political Thought

Women in Western Political Thought

Susan Moller Okin

With a new introduction by Debra Satz

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

PRINCETON AND OXFORD

Copyright © 1979 by Princeton University Press

Published by Princeton University Press, 41 William Street, Princeton, New Jersey 08540

In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press, 6 Oxford Street, Woodstock, Oxfordshire OX20 1TW

press.princeton.edu

All Rights Reserved

First printing, 1979

Seventh printing, with a new afterword, 1992

Paperback reissue, with a new introduction by Debra Satz, 2013

Library of Congress Control Number 2012956133

ISBN 978-0-691-15834-1

British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available

This book has been composed in Linotron Baskerville

Printed on acid-free paper. ∞

Printed in the United States of America

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FOR

Bob and Laura

Contents

Introduction to the 2013 Edition Debra Satz

                   In every country of the world, women fare worse than men on a number of important indices: income and wealth, political participation, vulnerability to sexual assault, and degree of access to the most prestigious social positions. In many developing countries the inequalities based on gender are especially stark: girls are less likely to be educated, receive health care, or even to be fed than their male siblings. In India, for example, girls are 40 percent more likely to die before the age of five than boys.¹ Despite our globalizing and democratizing twenty-first century, women continue to receive the short end of the stick. Why is this?

Susan Moller Okin (1946–2004) was a political theorist whose work issues a sharp challenge to the long-standing, deeply rooted, and continuing subordination of women in contemporary societies. Okin sought to identify and understand the complex sources of this subordination. She directed particular attention to the views of those political philosophers who either justified the subordination of women or complacently neglected to call it out. The great tradition of western political philosophy, she pointed out, consists of writings by men, for men and about men.² While these thinkers appear to be talking about individuals, they are in fact talking about men. Women are only minor characters in their magisterial works, playing merely supporting roles that tend to occur off-stage. Okin compared the place of women in Western political theory to that of the peripheral Rosencrantz and Guildenstern in Hamlet: if, as in Tom Stoppard’s play Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, they are transformed into principals, everything looks completely different.³

Okin argued that even contemporary theories of justice are in need of major reform. While she believed that liberal theories of justice had the potential to be tools in the fight against women’s oppression, she argued that liberalism’s philosophical proponents betrayed their own principles through their failure to explicitly question the traditional division of labor in which the majority of childrearing and housework falls to women, and by failing to regard the family as itself a schoolhouse for citizenship.

Women in Western Political Thought is based on Okin’s doctoral dissertation. Although an advisor admonished her that women are not a topic, it is our good fortune that she proceeded to work on this topic anyway. The result was a groundbreaking manuscript that systematically examines and critically dissects what canonical political theorists have said about women and their role in a just society. This is a book that should be read by anyone interested in the history of political philosophy in the Western world.

More than thirty years have passed since this book’s first publication in 1979, and some of its main insights are now incorporated into the discipline of political philosophy, in theory if not always in practice. Consider Okin’s claim that no plausible theory of justice can simply constrict women’s role to the family. Few contemporary thinkers would dissent from that conclusion. Or consider her claim that women are largely and wrongly missing from the discussion of earlier political theorists. As soon as this is pointed out, the omission seems glaring. In fact, a recurrent feature of Okin’s work is that many of her ideas and arguments seem "ex post facto obvious."⁴ As soon as she makes them, they seem absolutely apparent, even though just before reading her writings, these insights were invisible to us.

Many theorists now explicitly work on the issues of justice and gender that their predecessors ignored. But if political philosophy is different today, this is in no small part due to works like Women in Western Political Thought. Okin was part of a pioneering generation of feminist scholars who helped rework the traditional intellectual landscape by insisting that the condition of women, along with the family that so profoundly shapes that condition, is a central concern of justice. Her work changed the field.

Okin’s work had larger ambitions than criticizing such obviously unsupportable assumptions as Aristotle’s assertion that women are by nature unsuited to the public political realm. She wanted Women in Western Political Thought to accomplish a complete rethinking of political philosophy. In particular, she aimed to establish three theses:

1. While most of the tradition of political philosophy has either ignored or justified the subordination of women, we cannot simply add women as full moral and political equals into these earlier theories without demolishing them;

2. The linchpin of women’s inequality is the family, and without altering the family women will never be the full moral and political equals of men; and that accordingly:

3. The view of the family as part of a personal realm outside of, and wholly separate from, the political realm cannot be sustained.

Okin seeks to defend these three claims by examining the place of women in the theories of Plato, Aristotle, Rousseau, and Mill. With the exception of Plato, to whom I will return, each of these thinkers’ theories is distorted in important respects by their views of the family and the division of labor within it. Women were assumed to have the primary responsibility for raising children and managing the household; while men were assumed to be free individuals who were ends in themselves, women were more or less defined by their functions. None of these theories, she argued, would be able to consistently sustain the inclusion of women as the moral equals of men without challenging basic and age-old assumptions about the family, its traditional sex roles, and its relation to the wider world of political society.⁵

Consider Aristotle. Aristotle held that women have a natural function: their purpose is reproduction and childrearing, so that men can be left free to pursue politics. If he denied the natural inferiority of women, then his argument for the natural inferiority of slaves would also be in jeopardy. Pull on this one thread, and Aristotle’s case for natural hierarchy is unraveled.

Likewise, Okin claims, with Rousseau. Rousseau’s participatory democracy requires the existence of citizens who can devote considerable time to meetings and civic matters. If all the adults of both sexes were to be as much preoccupied with civic activity as citizenship in a direct democracy requires, who would maintain the private sphere of life which Rousseau perceives as crucially important?⁶ Since children cannot raise themselves, something has to give way: direct, participatory democracy or women’s equality. In each of these cases, other aspects of these thinker’s theories require the assumption that the family is a natural sphere where women perform most of the work.

Even Mill’s work cannot sustain, according to Okin, the full equality of women. While Mill writes a major work of feminist theory, The Subjection of Women, nonetheless he cannot imagine that married women would not assume their traditional responsibility for the unpaid labor of the family. He thus condoned, despite his liberal egalitarian aims, the continuation of differences in power and opportunity between men and women with children.

Okin amplifies her thesis with a brilliant discussion of Plato’s political thought. In Plato’s Republic, she argues, we find the only example in the entire canon of Western political philosophy where women are regarded as the equals of men. Plato allows that women as well as men can be members of the ruling group of guardians. But in order to arrive at this conclusion, Plato had first to abolish the family. Plato advocates the abolition of private property and the family among the guardians to secure their undivided loyalty to the city-state, and Okin argues that the equality of women follows from their no longer having a functionally defined role. By contrast, when the family is reintroduced in the Laws, women’s role in public life winds up being curtailed, despite Plato’s explicit intention in that work to treat men and women as equal citizens.

The conclusion of Okin’s examination of the great tradition is that in order for a theory of justice to include women on equal terms with men, the so-called natural family, with its traditional division of labor that assigns the work of childrearing and housekeeping to women, has to be dismantled. The family cannot be seen to lie beyond the scope of justice, but must be included within it.

To be sure, Women in Western Political Thought does not fully develop Okin’s thesis that the assumption of the natural family necessarily leads to the subjection of women, nor does it establish that the inequality produced in the family cannot be counteracted by social policies outside of it. She deepens and extends this argument in Justice, Gender, and the Family (1989), where she explains the mechanism by which the family comes to influence women’s overall position in society.

In that work, Okin argues that there is a pervasive cycle of vulnerability that is established by the traditional, gendered family. She defines gender as the deeply entrenched institutionalization of sexual difference, and she argues that the traditional family has a gender structure.⁷ Women who assume the primary responsibilities of parenting and housework are systematically disadvantaged within the home and outside it. This disadvantage is present whether or not women choose to enter the paid workforce. On the one hand, women who do not work outside the home perform unpaid labor and are completely dependent on their husbands for income and become thereby asymmetrically vulnerable in the event of divorce. The fact that divorce can be financially devastating for many women makes it harder for them to leave marriages and also influences their bargaining position within marriage.⁸ On the other hand, women who do manage to combine work outside the home with a second shift within it typically have less time to devote to their paid work.⁹ At the same time, continued discrimination and stereotyping still mean that women earn less than men, even in cases where their jobs are relevantly equivalent. In the United States, women earn about eighty cents for every dollar earned by a man. There is, in addition, a body of evidence that suggests that many occupations are devalued when women are in the majority.¹⁰ Given women’s lower wages, if someone has to take time off to raise the kids, then economic rationality dictates that women and not men should make this move. The system of gender inequality in the family thus reinforces and is reinforced by inequalities in the economic realm.

The argument from the cycle of vulnerability provides a response to those who argue that women’s inequality is simply the result of women’s choices to forgo high-paying and high-prestige jobs in order to spend time with their children. Okin shows how women’s choices with respect to family and children interact with unjust social structures outside the family, including not only unequal pay but also the lack of quality affordable day care, and job structures with little flexibility. We can add to that the widespread cultural expectation that women will be primary caretakers of children.

This argument also supports Okin’s second thesis, that the family is the central piece of an institutionalized system of gender subordination. As long as the gendered family continues to exist, women will remain in a second-class status, despite the fact that men and women have equal rights in the public sphere. To change the status quo we must change the gendered family—and if we pull this thread then we will have to reimagine the nature of the workplace, currently still organized on the assumption that workers do not have primary responsibility for care of their children. Our ideas about the institutions and practices of a just society will have to change. Indeed, Okin aspired to a world where gender itself plays no role, where a person’s sex would be no more relevant for social practices and institutions than one’s eye color or the length of one’s toes.¹¹

This leads to the third thesis taken up in Women in Western Political Thought: the family cannot be viewed as a purely private realm, but is a part of the political realm to which the principles of justice apply. This feminist idea, that the personal is also political, figures prominently in Okin’s corpus. It remains an important subject of discussion and debate.

Okin was both an egalitarian and a liberal. She was committed to the premise of the full equality of men and women and aimed to show that following out that simple premise has radical conclusions. She was also a liberal, committed to wide-ranging individual freedoms. But she never fully defined her liberalism. This leads to a certain ambiguity in interpreting her thesis that the family is a political institution. On the one hand, some of the inequalities generated by the family seem to be created through individual choices and decisions, which liberals generally respect. On the other hand, leaving those choices intact is compatible with the gendered family and the resulting subordination of women.

How we reconcile the potential conflict between these will depend on whether we treat choices in the supposedly private realm of the family as entirely on par with choices in other public institutions, such as the market. If we think that the concept of privacy and the existence of a personal sphere of life in which the state’s authority is very limited is essential,¹² then we will give people the right to form the kinds of families they want, so long as children’s interests are protected. This will include not only traditionally gendered families, but also nontraditional groupings, including gay families, single-parent families, and perhaps polygamy and contractual relationships, including surrogacy.

If we are less persuaded of the sanctity of a wholly private sphere, then perhaps Plato’s mandated abolition of the existence of separate families and advocacy of the raising of children in common will seem attractive, or at the very least, we might wish to regulate families to ensure that tasks are truly shared among men and women. Okin, of course, would have rejected Plato’s solution and measures such as an invasive government oversight of household chores—but the reasons for this rejection suggest that the family has a somewhat different character than other many public institutions.¹³

In this respect, it is unfortunate that Okin never returned to her original plan to examine the treatment of the family by socialist writers such as Marx, Engels, Bebel, Zetkin, and Fourier.¹⁴ Writers in the socialist tradition did not hesitate to criticize the natural family along with private property. Indeed, they postulated a link between the privatization of the family—where women were the property of their husbands—and the privatization of the economy. Examining the writings of those in the socialist tradition might have helped Okin to clarify the nature and extent of a personal sphere of life in which the state’s authority is very limited, which she insisted was valuable. It would have forced her to confront a group of thinkers whose egalitarianism was stronger than their commitment to liberalism.

Women in Western Political Thought laid down the agenda for Okin’s subsequent work. In later writings, she not only deepened its central claims, but also showed how political theories continued to do a disservice to women and thereby to the project of a humanist justice. Her last writings extended her criticisms of the great tradition of Western thought to contemporary theories that, despite their acceptance of the equality of men and women in the political sphere and their rejection of natural gender roles, continued to assume the existence of the gendered family;¹⁵ to multicultural theories that either gave a free pass to cultures that oppress women or remained oblivious to the tensions between respecting cultural diversity and respecting women’s equality;¹⁶ and to the literature on economic globalization and development that continued to marginalize women.¹⁷

Susan Okin died young, with the potential for many years of productive scholarly work still ahead of her. I would have loved to hear (what I can only imagine would be) her caustic but carefully reasoned response to the recent claims that we live in a postfeminist world where women can choose to have it all. Fortunately, she left us with an extensive body of work through which her voice—with its uncompromising opposition to the continuation of gender as a caste system—still speaks to us: presses us to imagine new ways of organizing the domestic division of labor and the workplace; insists that women and men must have equal opportunities to flourish in our world; and provides reasons that should embolden us to act to achieve this.¹⁸

NOTES

1. See UNICEF report on The State of the World’s Children (2007): http://www.unicef.org/sowc07/docs/sowc07_rosa.pdf.

2. Women in Western Political Thought, p. 5.

3. WWPT, p. 12.

4. Rob Reich, in his comments on Nancy Rosenblum’s paper at a 2005 conference at Stanford University assessing Okin’s work. The papers for that conference were published in Satz and Reich, eds., Toward a Humanist Justice: The Political Philosophy of Susan Moller Okin (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009).

5. WWPT, p. 286.

6. WWPT, p. 279.

7. Justice, Gender, and the Family (New York: Basic Books, 1989), p. 8.

8. JGF, p. 152.

9. See Arlie Hochschild, The Second Shift (New York: Viking, 1989).

10. See, for example, Paula England, Lori Reid, and Barbara Stanek Kilbourne, The Effect of the Sex Composition of Jobs on Starting Wages in an Organization: Findings from the NLSY. Demography 33(4): 511–521, 1996.

11. JGF, 171. See Mary Lynn Shanley’s paper, ‘No More Relevance than One’s Eye Color’: Justice and A Society Without Gender, in Satz and Reich, op. cit., for discussion of Okin’s views on the possibility of eliminating gender as a basis of social differentiation.

12. JGF, p. 128.

13. See the paper by Joshua Cohen, A Matter of Demolition? Susan Okin on Justice and Gender, in Satz and Reich, op. cit., for further discussion of these issues.

14. WWPT, pp. 7–9.

15. JGF.

16. Is Multiculturalism Bad for Women? In Joshua Cohen, Matthew Howard, and Martha Nussbaum, eds., Is Multiculturalism Bad for Women? (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1999).

17. Poverty, Well Being and Gender: What Counts? Who’s Heard? Philosophy and Public Affairs 32(3): 280–316, 2003.

18. Thanks to Donald Barr, Margo Horn, and Rob Reich for their editorial comments on this introduction.

Acknowledgments

                   I have benefited from the assistance of several institutions and many persons while writing this book. I am grateful to the American Association of University Women for supporting me and to the Dartmouth College Library for sheltering me and allowing me to use its resources. For their skill and patience in the typing of the manuscript, I thank Charlene Adams, Kirsti Gamage, Lisa Robinson and Gerilyn Spaulding. My warm thanks are due to Marlene Gerber Fried and Joan Smith, and to Judith N. Shklar and Dennis F. Thompson, for their long-standing support, criticism and intellectual inspiration. I have also benefited from the comments and criticisms of Jeffrey Abramson, Amy Gutmann, Virginia Held, Stanley Hoffmann, Victor Menza, Gordon Schochet, John Schrecker, Sanford Thatcher, and Christian and Holly Wolff.

Finally, I would like to express my deep gratitude to Michael Walzer, without whose initial encouragement and continual criticism and advice the idea from which this study grew may never have developed into a doctoral dissertation, and thence into a book.

Articles based on sections of Parts I, III and IV of this book have appeared in Philosophy and Public Affairs (1977), The Journal of Politics (1979), and The New Zealand Journal of History (1973).

Women in Western Political Thought

Introduction

                   The current feminist movement has inspired a considerable amount of scholarship in areas previously unexplored. The recent focus on women in the fields of history, legal studies, anthropology, sociology, and literary criticism has resulted in a number of innovative and important works, such that it is no exaggeration to say that these fields will never look the same again. No one, however, has yet examined systematically the treatment of women in the classic works of political philosophy—those works in which great thinkers throughout history have revealed to us their thoughts about the political and social life of the human race. This book is an attempt to reduce the consequent gap in our knowledge.

It is important to realize from the outset that the analysis and criticism of the thoughts of political theorists of the past is not an arcane academic pursuit, but an important means of comprehending and laying bare the assumptions behind deeply rooted modes of thought that continue to affect people’s lives in major ways. Women, in the course of the present century, have officially become citizens in virtually every country of the Western world and in much of the rest of the world as well. From being totally relegated to the private sphere of the household, they have become enfranchised members of the political realm. However, women are increasingly recognizing that the limited, formal, political gains of the earlier feminist movement have in no way ensured the attainment of real equalities in the economic and social aspects of their lives. Though women are now citizens, it is undeniable that they have remained second-class citizens. Measured in terms of characteristics traditionally valued in citizens, such as education, economic independence, or occupational status, they are still far behind men. Likewise, measured in terms of political participation—especially at higher levels—and political power, they are nowhere near the equals of men. In the past decade, moreover, women have been demanding these more substantial equalities, and an end to their relegation to second-class citizenship. They have been claiming the right to be members of society and citizens of the state on an equal level with men, and, in principle at least, their claims have been gaining recognition.

The fact that women have gained formal citizenship, but have in no other respect achieved equality with men, has impelled me to turn to the great works of political philosophy, with two major questions in mind. I have asked, first, whether the existing tradition of political philosophy can sustain the inclusion of women in its subject matter, and if not, why not? For if the works which form the basis of our political and philosophical heritage are to continue to be relevant in a world in which the unequal position of women is being radically challenged, we must be able to recognize which of their assumptions and conclusions are inherently connected with the idea that the sexes are, and should be, fundamentally unequal.

Second, and clearly related to the first inquiry, I have aimed to discover whether the philosophers’ arguments about the nature of women and their proper place in the social and political order, viewed in the context of the complete political theories of the philosophers, will help us to understand why the formal, political enfranchisement of women has not led to substantial equality between the sexes. It is not my purpose to argue any causal connection between the arguments and ideas of the great philosophers, on the one hand, and modern ideas or practices, on the other. However, I do argue that modes of thought about women that closely parallel those of some of the philosophers discussed here are still prevalent, in the writings of modern thinkers, and in the ideologies of modern political actors and institutions. This claim is substantiated in Part v, where we turn to analysis of some crucial contemporary views on women—those of influential social scientists and of the highest courts in the U.S.—and discover striking similarities between them and the ideas of the political theorists analyzed in the preceding chapters. By critical study of the arguments about women conceived by some of the finest minds in the history of Western thought, I hope to add to our comprehension of modern arguments which parallel them in important ways, and which constitute a continuing attempt to justify the unequal treatment of women.

It must be recognized at once that the great tradition of political philosophy consists, generally speaking, of writings by men, for men, and about men. While the use of supposedly generic terms like man and mankind, and of the allegedly inclusive pronoun, he, might lead one to think that philosophers have intended to refer to the human race as a whole, we do not need to look far into their writings to realize that such an assumption is unfounded. Rousseau, for example, tells his reader at the beginning of the Discourse on the Origins and Foundation of Inequality among Men that It is of man that I am to speak. It subsequently becomes very clear that it is only the inequality between males that is the subject of his investigation, and the inequality between the sexes is assumed in passing.¹ Past and present feminists, only too aware of such practices, have pointed out the dangerous ambiguity of such linguistic usage in a patriarchal culture.² For it enables philosophers to enunciate principles as if they were universally applicable, and then to proceed to exclude all women from their scope.

Even when philosophers have used words which in their respective languages refer unambiguously to any human being, they have felt in no way deterred from excluding women from the conclusions reached. Aristotle, for example, discusses at length what is the highest good for a human being (anthropos). He then proceeds to characterize all women as not only conventionally deprived of, but constitutionally unfitted for, this highest good. Again, Kant uses the most inclusive terms of all for the subjects of his ethical and political theory; he even says that he is not confining his discussion to humans, but that it is applicable to all rational beings. Subsequently, however, he proceeds to justify a double standard of sexual morality, to the extent that a woman is to be condoned for killing her illegitimate child because of her duty to uphold, at all costs, her sexual honor. He also reaches the conclusion that the only characteristic that permanently disqualifies any person from citizenship in the state, and therefore from the obligation to obey only those laws to which consent has been given, is that of being born female.³ Thus, even words such as person, human, and rational being, apparently, do not necessarily include women.

This phenomenon, made possible by the ambiguity of our language, is not confined to political philosophy. The grand statements of our political culture, too, such as the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, are phrased in universal terms, but, as the chapter on women and the law will make clear, they have frequently been interpreted in such a way as to exclude women. Thus when the Founding Fathers declared it to be a self-evident truth that all men are created equal, not only did they intend the substantial slave population to be excluded from the scope of their statement, but they would have been amused and skeptical (as indeed John Adams was to his wife’s appeal that they not forget the ladies) at the suggestion that women were, and should be considered, equal too.⁴ Similarly, though the Constitution is phrased in terms of persons, there was clearly no idea in its framers’ minds that this word might be interpreted so as to include women on the same terms as men.⁵

Human nature, we realize, as described and discovered by philosophers such as Aristotle, Aquinas, Machiavelli, Locke, Rousseau, Hegel, and many others, is intended to refer only to male human nature. Consequently, all the rights and needs that they have considered humanness to entail have not been perceived as applicable to the female half of the human race. Thus there has been, and continues to be, within the traditions of political philosophy and political culture, a pervasive tendency to make allegedly general statements as if the human race were not divided into two sexes, and then either to ignore the female sex altogether, or to proceed to discuss it in terms not at all consistent with the assertions that have been made about man and humanity.

In spite of this general neglect of women, however, several of the most important and most interesting of political philosophers have had a considerable amount to say about them. The first four parts of this book comprise an analysis of the arguments of Plato, Aristotle, Rousseau and Mill, on the subject of women, their nature, their socialization and education, and their proper role and station in society. It would be fruitless, if not impossible, to treat such a subject in a vacuum. What I have done, therefore, is to analyze these philosophers’ ideas about women in the context of their entire theories of politics and society, and with particular reference to each philosopher’s conception of the role of the family. Throughout the study, I have examined the various ideas about women and the argument which sustain them, with a concern both for their internal logic and for their consistency with each philosopher’s argument and conclusions about men, and about politics and society as a whole.

Clearly, in choosing four philosophers, I do not pretend to have covered the treatment of women within the entire tradition of political philosophy. Apart from the omission of the socialists, which requires explanation, however, I have chosen those four who of all political theorists have made the most substantial, most interesting, and most thought-provoking contributions on the subject.

The problem regarding Marx, the Marxists, and other socialists, is that, taken together, they had so much to say, and such insight to offer, on the subject of women in society, that their ideas warrant a separate study. It was the utopian, Charles Fourier, who first both used the status of women in a society as the fundamental measuring stick of its advancement, and considered the progress of women toward liberty to be a fundamental cause of general social progress. Other events influence these political changes; he asserts, but there is no cause which produces social progress or decline as rapidly as a change in the condition of women…. The extension of the privileges of women is the fundamental cause of all social progress.⁶ Fourier’s initiatives were not ignored by subsequent feminists and/or socialists, including Flora Tristan, Marx and John Stuart Mill. Marx developed the idea of the relationship between the equality of women and general social progress, in the 1844 Manuscripts:

The relation of man to woman is the most natural relation of human being to human being. It indicates, therefore, how far man’s natural behaviour has become human, and how far his human essence has become a natural essence for him, how far his human nature has become nature for him…. From this relationship man’s whole level of development can be assessed.⁷

Though Marx himself did not develop this as a major theme in his works, Engels, Bebel, and the critical theorists of the Frankfurt School have developed further the socialist criticism of woman’s position in society, and of the traditional family.

Socialist writings on women require separate study because of two features which are characteristic of, though not unique to, socialist modes of thought. First, socialist theorists have been far less inclined than most other political theorists to regard the family as a necessary and fixed human institution, and have been very much aware of the relationship between various forms of family organization and different forms of economic structure, particularly property relations. This has meant that most, though not all, socialists who have written about women have taken a critical and questioning view of woman’s role within the family, rather than accepting it as a given. Second, socialist thought is noticeably lacking in the tendency to idealize nature and the natural, and is inclined to replace these criteria for social excellence by the specifically human and cultural. It is largely because of the importance of both these modes of thought for the subject of women, that the contribution of the socialists to the subject is so considerable. The study of that contribution is a task I hope to undertake, and for which the present work constitutes an essential foundation.

From my analysis of the arguments and conclusions of Plato, Aristotle, Rousseau and Mill, concerning women and their proper social and political role, two interconnected themes emerge. First, the most important factor influencing the philosophers’ conceptions of, and arguments about, women has been the view that each of them held concerning the family. Those who have regarded the family as a natural and necessary institution have defined women by their sexual, procreative, and child-rearing functions within it. This has lead to the prescription of a code of morality and conception of rights for women distinctly different from those that have been prescribed for men. The assumption of the necessity of the family leads the theorists to then regard the biological differences between the sexes as entailing all the other, conventional and institutional differences in sex role which the family, especially in its most patriarchal forms, has required.

Second, as a consequence of the above, the constricted role in which woman has been placed has been regarded as dictated by her very nature. Thus, where philosophers have explicitly discussed women, they have frequently not extended to them their various conceptions of human nature. They have not only assigned women a distinct role, but have defined them separately, and often contrastingly, to men. They have sought for the nature of women not, as for the nature of men, by attempting to separate out nature from the effects of nurture, and to discover what innate potential exists beneath the overlay which results from socialization and other environmental factors. The nature of women, instead, has been seen to be dictated by whatever social and economic structure the philosophers favor and to be defined as whatever best suits her prescribed functions in that society. Philosophers who, in laying the foundation for their political theories, have asked What are men like? What is man’s potential? have frequently, in turning to the female sex, asked What are women for? There is, then, an undeniable connection between assigned female nature and social structure, and a functionalist attitude to women pervades the history of political thought.

The conclusions drawn here are, first, that women cannot simply be added to the subject matter of existing political theory, for the works of our philosophical heritage are to a very great extent built on the assumption of the inequality of the sexes. In the case of theorists for whom equality, in some form or other, is an important value, the unequal treatment of women tends to be concealed by the adoption of the male-headed family, rather than the individual adult, as the primary unit of political analysis. Indeed, the thoroughly equal treatment of women, involving far more than the right to vote, requires the rethinking of some of the most basic assumptions of political philosophy—having to do with the family and woman’s traditionally dependent and subordinate role within it.

Second, as we examine some twentieth-century perceptions of women and analyze legal discrimination against women, it becomes clear that these findings should be of interest not only to historians or students of political theory. The functionalist treatment of women—the prescriptive view of woman’s nature and proper mode of life based on her role and functions in a patriarchal family structure—is still alive and influential today. Giant figures in modern sociology and psychology present arguments about women that parallel those of Aristotle and Rousseau. Moreover, when we examine the opinions handed down by the highest courts of the land in cases involving sex discrimination, we find, here too, that judges have used functionalist reasoning of a strikingly Aristotelian character in order to justify their treatment of women as a class apart. Thus, there is no doubt that a thorough understanding of this mode of argument can help us to see why women, in spite of their political enfranchisement, are still second-class citizens.

The chapters that follow require one more word of explanation. Obviously, there are many types of inequality both in the real world and in political theory. Only one type of inequality is dealt with here—the unequal treatment of women. As will become evident, the positions taken by political theorists about other types of equality and inequality are by no means necessarily parallel to, or even consistent with, their views about the equal or unequal treatment of the sexes. Those who have argued that there should be complete or virtual equality between the sexes have sometimes been distinctly inegalitarian in other respects; on the other hand, some philosophers who have made strong arguments for equality amongst men have been just as strongly opposed to equality for women. I have not undertaken to discuss this except insofar as a philosopher’s more general egalitarianism or inegalitarianism affects his arguments about distinctions between the sexes, or clarifies the presentation of these arguments. This is not because I consider other types of inequality unimportant. It is, rather, because the unequal treatment of women has remained for too long shamefully neglected by students of political thought. Other types of inequality—class inequality in particular, but also inequalities based on race, religion, caste, or ethnicity, have not been so consistently ignored.

In one sense, this book might be compared with the play Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead. In that play, building on the foundation of Hamlet, Tom Stoppard emphasizes this originally elusive pair, and makes them, instead of the traditional hero, into the principal focus of the drama. As a result, the play, all its characters, and their relations to each other take on an entirely new perspective. Similarly, when women, who have always been minor characters in the social and political theory of a patriarchal world, are transformed into major ones, the entire cast and the play in which it is acting look very different.

PART I

PLATO

1

Plato and the Greek Tradition of Misogyny

                   Plato’s ideas on the subject of women appear at first to present an unresolvable enigma. One might well ask how the same, generally consistent philosopher can on the one hand assert that the female sex was created from the souls of the most wicked and irrational men, and on the other hand make a far more radical proposal for the equal education and social role of the two sexes than was to be made by a major philosopher for more than two thousand years? How can