Women in Western Political Thought by Susan Moller Okin

Author:Susan Moller Okin
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2013-10-28T16:00:00+00:00

PART V

FUNCTIONALISM, FEMINISM AND THE FAMILY

10

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Women and Functionalism, Past and Present

Alfred North Whitehead once said that “the safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists in a series of footnotes to Plato.”1 We have seen that as far as the philosophical treatment of women is concerned, Whitehead’s statement is clearly untenable. The legacy of Aristotelian thought, while repudiated in many other areas, has continued in modern times to pervade discussions of the subject of women, their nature, and their proper position and rights in society. The predominant mode of thought about women has been a functionalist one, based on the assumption of the necessity of the male-headed nuclear family, and of women’s role within it. Now, after reviewing the course of the argument so far, we shall see how the mode of perceiving women that has been so predominant throughout the history of ideas persists in the writings of influential thinkers of our own time.

Socrates and Plato, having broken away from the prevailing Greek multiple standard of values, were predisposed to view women from a different perspective from their predecessors. In the Republic, moreover, Plato’s abolition of the family necessitated his taking a radically new look at the subject of women and their nature. Since they were no longer to be “private wives,” or to be defined by the functions of motherhood and housekeeping, he was obliged, despite his generally deprecating attitude toward the female sex, to consider their potential as individual citizens—as persons without a preordained and all-encompassing function in life. Book V of the Republic contains a more remarkable discussion of the socially and politically relevant differences between the sexes than was to appear for more than two thousand years thereafter. As a consequence of the conclusions he came to, Plato dispensed, in an extremely hierarchical society, with the usual hierarchy of the sexes. He argued for the total equality, in education and role, of the female guardians.

Having once thought about the potential of women, and concluded that societies which confined them all indiscriminately to domestic seclusion were being extremely wasteful of human resources, Plato found himself in a difficult position when, in the Laws, he reinstated the family, together with other forms of private property. Whereas the theoretical argument for the equal potential, and therefore the equal education and employment of the two sexes, was carried further here than in the Republic, when it comes to applying these precepts, Plato backed away. Clearly the reason is that private wives could not be permitted to lead the same kind of public lives as the female guardians and philosophers of the ideal city. Consequently, women are relegated to their traditional domestic functions and status. They are conspicuously absent from the activities of citizenship. Moreover, in spite of having argued in the Republic that men’s and women’s natures are the same apart from their respective roles in procreation, Plato asserted in the Laws that women must be sedate and pure in their natures, whereas their husbands are to be noble and courageous.

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