for it is more like an emotion than a moral state: at least
it may be defined as a kind of fear of ignominy, and in its
effects it is analogous to the fear of dangers, for people
blush when they are ashamed and turn pale when they are afraid
of death. It is clear, then, that both affections are in a
sense corporeal, and this seems to be the mark of an emotion
rather than a moral state.[3]
Other slighter defects in the female character, as conceived by
Aristotle, are hinted at in the remark: ‘It is only exceedingly slavish
people who eat and drink beyond the point of surfeit’; and in the
well-known description of the ‘Magnanimous Man,’ Aristotle’s ideal, who,
unlike the shrill-voiced woman,
will have a deep voice and a sedate manner of speaking and be
slow in his movements: he will not be in a hurry or emphatic
in speech, for there are not many things he cares for, nor
does he regard anything as very important, and these are the
causes which make people speak in shrill tones and use rapid
movements.[4]
These are some of the deficiencies in women: we have to go to the
_Rhetoric_ to get Aristotle’s idea of their merits. The passage is
significant:
θηλειῶν δὲ ἀρετή σώματος μὲν κάλλος καὶ μέγεθος, ψύχης δὲ
σωφροσύνη καὶ φιλεργία ἄνευ ἀνελευθερίας.[5]
The excellence of females is (_a_) physical, a large and beautiful body;
(_b_) mental, virtuous moderation and a love—but not a sordid love—of
work.
First, it will be seen, comes physical attractiveness. The excellent
woman must be good-looking, and by ‘good-looking’ we mean tall and stout,
for ethereal grace does not suit the harem-master’s taste. Secondly,
she will be temperate in her desires: the word ‘Sophrosyne,’ ‘virtuous
moderation,’ is the chief virtue in a woman: it is the faculty of ‘doing
without’—love, food, pleasure, consideration, etc.—and the Greeks,
unlike the Romans, really did admire this passive merit even in men.
Thirdly comes industry, with the restriction that a woman must not be
a slave to work: she has other even more important duties—her master’s
pleasure, for example—and work must not be allowed to interfere unduly.
In his conception of female virtue Aristotle has advanced somewhat from
Pericles’ negative ideal, but he has not got very far.
The most instructive passages, however, in the _Ethics_ are in the Eighth
Book, where friendship is considered.
There is another kind of friendship or love depending upon
superiority, the friendship or love of a father for a son, of a
husband for a wife, of a ruler for a subject. These friendships
are of different sorts: the love of a husband for a wife is not
the same as that of wife for a husband. There is a different
virtue in each, a different function, and different motives.
It follows that the services rendered by each party to the
other are not the same, nor is it right to expect they should
be. In all such friendships as depend upon the principle of
superiority, the affection should be proportionate to the
superiority; _i.e._, the better or the more useful party, or
whoever may be the superior, should receive more affection than
he gives.
This may sound to us humorous, but Aristotle is quite serious: it is part
of his great doctrine of ‘proportional equality’; and his only doubt is
as to which adjective is most appropriate to man, ‘better,’ or ‘more
useful,’ or simply ‘superior.’[6] Friendship leads to a discussion of
domestic associations, and while the _rule_ of a slave-master seems a
_right_ form of despotism, the association of husband and wife is judged
to be ‘aristocratical,’ for the husband’s rule depends upon merit and is
confined to its proper sphere. He assigns to the wife all that suitably
belongs to her. If the husband is lord of _everything_, he changes the
association to an ‘oligarchy’; for then he acts unfairly and not in
virtue of his superior merit. ‘Sometimes the wife rules as being an
heiress, but such rule is not based upon merit.’[7]
Last comes the question of children; and here, at least, we need make no
criticisms:
It is evident why mothers love their children more than
fathers. The procreation of children is the universal function
of animals. In the case of other animals, this is the limit
of their association; but men and women unite not only for
the procreation of children but for the purposes of life. As
soon as they unite, a distribution of functions takes place.
Some are proper to the husband and others to the wife; hence
they supply one another’s needs, each contributing to the
common stock. Utility and pleasure seem alike to be found
in the marriage relationship, but its basis will be virtue,
too. Children are a bond of union, and such marriages as are
childless are dissolved with comparatively little difficulty.[8]
The _Politics_ begin with a discussion of slavery, and, by an association
of ideas natural in Greek society, for Aristotle never attempts to rise
above the conditions of life about him, slaves and women are treated
together:
He who can foresee with his mind is by nature intended to
be lord and master; and he who can work with his body is a
subject, and by nature a slave: hence, master and slave have
the same interest. Nature, however, has distinguished between
the female and the slave. For she is not niggardly; she makes
each thing for a single use, and every instrument is best
made when intended for one and not for many uses. But among
barbarians no distinction is made between women and slaves.
It should be noticed here that the essential quality of the master is not
physical strength, but mental capacity; it is the mind and not the body
that makes the ‘natural’ slave, the ‘live tool,’ as Aristotle defines
him. Man and woman, master and slave, these are the foundations of the
family. As Hesiod says: ‘First a house, then a woman, and then an ox for
the plough’; and Aristotle has no difficulty in finding the arrangement
right. He puts the question:
Is there any one intended by nature to be a slave, so that
for him the condition of slavery is expedient and right; or,
rather, is not all slavery a violation of nature?
And gives the immediate reply:
There is no difficulty in answering this question on grounds
both of reason and of fact. For that some should rule and
others be ruled is a thing not only necessary but expedient;
from the hour of their birth some are marked out for
subjection, others for rule.
The law, he thinks, holds through all nature:
Tame animals have a better nature than wild, and all tame
animals are better off when they are ruled by men, for then
they are preserved. The male is by nature superior, and the
female inferior; and the one rules and the other is ruled; this
principle of necessity extends to all mankind. Nature would
like to distinguish between the bodies of freemen and slaves;
but this does not hold universally.
So the string of assertions goes on, and the discussion closes:
It is clear, _therefore_, that some men are by nature free
and others slaves, and that for these latter slavery is both
expedient and right.
Having thus justified slavery to his own satisfaction, Aristotle proceeds
to deal with household management, which he subdivides into three parts:
the rule of a master over slaves, of a father, and of a husband:
A husband and a father rules over wife and children, both free,
but the rule differs: over his children it is a royal, over
his wife a constitutional rule. For, although there may be
exceptions to the order of nature, the male is by nature fitter
for command than the female, just as the elder and full-grown
is superior to the younger and more immature.
To illustrate his point, Aristotle quotes the saying of Amasis and his
foot-pan, a good story, although it does not exactly strengthen the
philosopher’s position. Amasis was a commoner, who became King of Egypt;
to prove to his subjects the essential equality of all matter, he had
his metal bath melted down and re-cast as a statue, to which all the
people made humble obeisance, although they had treated the foot-pan with
contempt. Then Amasis drew his moral: the substance of both bath and
statue is the same; there is merely a difference in outward form. ‘Of
this kind,’ says Aristotle, ‘is the relation between male and female; but
there _the inequality is permanent_.’
It is the business of household management to ensure excellence, and we
are faced at once by a difficulty: can a slave possess virtue? If he has
virtue, in what will he differ from a freeman? A similar question may be
raised about women and children: ought a woman to be called temperate,
brave, and just? Aristotle solves the difficulty thus:
Women and slaves have a sort of virtue, the virtue of the
irrational part of the soul. The slave has no deliberate
faculty at all; the woman has it, but with her it is
inconclusive. The ruler must have moral virtue in perfection;
the subject requires only that measure of virtue which is
proper to him. Virtue will be common to man and woman, but it
will not be the same virtue: _e.g._, the courage of a man is
shown in commanding, of a woman in obeying.
These are hard sayings, and they bring Aristotle into direct conflict
with Plato, who, in the _Meno_, discusses the question whether the
virtue of a man and a woman is the same or different, and comes to
the conclusion that it is the same. But Aristotle never hesitates to
criticise his former teacher, and it is a curious point how far his low
estimate of women is not the result of the pupil’s unconscious reaction
against a master’s enthusiasm. A great part of the _Politics_ is, in
fact, a criticism of the _Republic_, and the discussion on slavery, which
occupies most of the first book, is followed by a close consideration
of Plato’s communistic State. The objections raised are of a severely
practical nature, _e.g._:
If the women are shared in common, and private property is
retained, the men will see to the fields; but who will see to
the house?
And again:
Two virtues are destroyed in the communistic State; first,
temperance towards women (for it is an honourable action
to abstain from another man’s wife for temperance’ sake);
secondly, liberality in the matter of property. The legislation
of such a State may have a specious appearance of benevolence,
but such evils as there are in property are due to a cause that
laws cannot eradicate: the wickedness of human nature. Indeed,
we see that there is much more quarrelling among those who have
all things in common, though there are not many of them, than
there is among the vast majority of men who keep to private
property.
The criticism, however, although acute on points of detail, does not
touch the essentials of feminism, and, in the _Politics_, Aristotle often
reveals himself unconsciously as Plato’s former disciple. His remarks on
education are based very largely, although he makes no acknowledgment, on
his master’s teaching and scarcely harmonise with his own views on women.
The concluding sentences of the first book, for example, are distinctly
Platonic in their tone:
The relations of husband and wife, parent and child, their
several virtues, what in their intercourse with one another
is good and what is evil, and how we may pursue the good and
escape the evil, will have to be discussed when we speak of the
different forms of government. For inasmuch as every family is
a part of a State, and these relationships are the parts of a
family, the virtue of the part must have regard to the virtue
of the whole. And therefore women and children must be trained
by education with an eye to the State, if the virtues of either
of them are supposed to make any difference in the virtues of
the State. And they must make a difference; for the children
grow up to be citizens, and half the free persons in a State
are women.
So in discussing the Spartan constitution he says:
A husband and a wife being each a part of every family, the
State may be considered as about equally divided into men and
women: and, therefore, in those States where the condition of
the women is bad, half the city may be regarded as having no
laws[9]—
a sentiment taken, with a slight difference of application, directly from
Plato himself, and the Platonic influence is plainly seen in all the
chapters which treat of marriage and education:
Since the legislator should begin by considering how the frames
of the children whom he is rearing may be as good as possible,
his first care will be about marriage, at what age should his
citizens marry, and who are fit to marry.
So the discussion starts reasonably enough, but the conclusion hardly
agrees with modern ideas of eugenics:
Women should marry when they are about eighteen years of age,
and men at seven-and-thirty; then they are in the prime of
life, and the decline in the powers of both will coincide.
Furthermore, the children, if their birth takes place at the
time that may reasonably be expected, will succeed in their
prime, when the fathers are already in the decline of life and
have nearly reached their term of three-scores years and ten.
Aristotle here seems to be following not any ideal system, but the actual
practice of his time, a practice which Euripides (fr. 319) had already
condemned. The gap in age between husband and wife is far too great
for any real physical or moral companionship. The husband, moreover,
remaining unmarried until the age of thirty-seven, can hardly be supposed
to have escaped from the illicit connections which were allowed and
encouraged by Athenian custom: to say that such an one is in his prime
is surely to mis-state the case. The art of being a grandfather also
under this system tends to disappear, for a man could hardly hope to see
grandchildren of his own, if neither he nor his sons married till they
were thirty-seven: his daughters, of course, as Euripides again tells
us (fr. 320), on marriage passed altogether out of their father’s life.
The whole arrangement is obviously wrong, but it suited the conditions
of Athenian domestic life, where a young wife could be more easily kept
in subjection and large families were neither desired nor customary; and
because it existed, therefore to Aristotle it seemed right.
The female, found to be inferior in a moral and political sense, is also
considered by Aristotle to be physically inferior to the male, and in the
treatise _On Generation_ he deals with this question frequently and at
some length:
Male and female differ in their essence by each having a
separate ability or faculty, and anatomically by certain parts;
essentially the male is that which is able to generate in
another, the female is that which is able to generate in itself
and out of which comes into being the offspring previously
existing in the parent.[10]
The distinction of sex is a first principle:
An animal is not male or female in virtue of an isolated part
or an isolated faculty: when that which distinguishes male and
female suffers change many other changes accompany it, as would
be the case if a first principle is changed.[11]
The treatise is concerned chiefly with the phenomena of reproduction:
For the business of most animals is, you may say, nothing else
than to produce young, as the business of a plant is to produce
seed and fruit.[12]
Sex-characteristics accordingly are described mainly in accordance with
their reproductive functions.
As regards the origin of sex and the causes of male and female,
Aristotle is a curious mixture of prejudice and insight. He begins thus:
To suppose that heat and cold are the causes of male and
female, or that the different sexes come from the right and
left, is not altogether unreasonable in itself, for the right
of the body is hotter than the left.
With him it is an unquestioning belief that the right is, in nature,
superior to the left, the upper to the lower, the front to the back; and
nature, when no more important purpose stands in the way, places the more
honourable part in the more honourable position. So it is that the heart,
which is the nobler organ, is in the upper part of the body, while the
stomach is in the lower. As he is equally sure that the male is superior
to the female, the male elements in reproduction will come from the right
or noble part of the body.
But the part taken by the male and female elements in the process of
generation is, according to Aristotle, absolutely different. The child
is not formed from a mixture of both, but the female contributes the
material, the male is the active agent. The analogy used is that of a
bed: the female is the wood, the male the carpenter, who, from the wood,
makes the bed. The female is passive, the male is active:
It is through a certain incapacity that the female is female:
females are weaker and colder in nature than males, and we
must look upon the female character as being a sort of natural
deficiency.[13]
Women, in Aristotle’s view, are rather plants than animals; for the
animal differs from the plant, chiefly in having sense-perception. If the
sensitive soul is not present, the body is no better than a corpse, and
this sensitive soul is supplied only by the male. The female provides the
material, the male fashions it; the body is from the female, the soul
from the male, who can stand outside the body just as the artist stands
outside his creation. It certainly seems that female children progress
more quickly than male, but that is merely a proof of their inferiority;
for all inferior things come sooner to their perfection or end, and as
this is true of works of art so it is true of what is formed by nature.
These quotations will illustrate that curious depreciation of the female
element in nature and especially in man which is one of the weaker points
in the treatise. It is continually recurring; for example, in describing
the hair of animals these are the reasons given for baldness:
The front part of the head goes bald because the brain is there
and man is the only animal to go bald, because his brain is
much the largest and moistest. _Women do not go bald._[14]
So in the discussion of voice we read:
The voice of the female is higher than that of the male in all
animals, and in man this is especially noticeable. A deep note
is _better_ than a high pitched: depth belongs to the nobler
nature, and depth of tone shows a sort of superiority.[15]
Nor is this view of the physical, and consequently the mental,
inferiority of the female confined to the _De Generatione_: it permeates
the _History of Animals_, and finds its clearest expression there in a
passage which perhaps gives the ultimate reason of Aristotle’s error:
In all genera in which the distinction of male and female is
found, Nature makes a similar differentiation in the mental
characteristics of the two sexes. This differentiation is the
most obvious in the case of human-kind and in that of the
larger animals and the viviparous quadrupeds. In the case of
these latter the female is softer in character, is the sooner
tamed, admits more readily of caressing, and is more apt in
the way of learning. With all animals, except the bear and the
leopard, the female is softer in disposition than the male,
is more mischievous, less simple, more impulsive, and more
attentive to the nurture of the young. The traces of these
differentiated characteristics are more or less visible in
every species, but they are especially visible where character
is the more developed, and most of all in man. The fact is,
the nature of man is the most rounded off and complete, and
consequently in man the qualities above referred to are found
in their perfection. Hence woman is more compassionate
than man, more easily moved to tears, at the same time is
more jealous, more querulous, more apt to scold. She is,
furthermore, 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. She is
also more wakeful, more shrinking, more difficult to rouse to
action, and requires a smaller quantity of nutriment.[16]
The Athenian women of the fourth century were the women that Aristotle
knew best, and, given Aristotle’s character and scientific method, it
is not surprising that he should judge Woman in the abstract to be an
inferior animal. If he had been a little more of a poet and idealist—in
other words, if he had not been Aristotle—he might have taken another
view; but considering the facts of Athenian life in his day, and
Aristotle’s disposition to cling to facts, we need not wonder at his
estimate. The real mischief—and Aristotle’s influence in this matter
has been an enormous hindrance to human progress—was done not by the
philosopher himself, for in his time the position of women could hardly
have been altered for the worse, but by his blind followers in later ages
when his slightest word was regarded almost as inspired truth. Aristotle
himself is never dogmatic (he leaves that to weaker men), and does not
profess to give anything but the somewhat casual expression of his own
personal knowledge and opinions.
It is hardly right to blame him: women in his time undoubtedly were the
inferior sex, and Aristotle is always the prophet of things as they
are. The _protégé_ of the absolute monarchy which had overthrown the
city-states, he has no belief in abstract freedom or in social reform.
For him, what is is right. ‘Women and slaves are inferior,’ he says to
himself, ‘by the conditions of existence as I see them: _therefore_ they
are inferior by the laws of nature,’ and although he knows that this
inferiority was the result of the conditions of their life, his business
is only with facts.
But he generalises from insufficient data: Woman for him means the women
of his time, and although he points out the influence of environment, he
fails to distinguish between innate and accidental characteristics. And
so again, in treating of the female sex in nature, he is too inclined
to confine himself to the higher mammals. He emphasises the case of the
herbivorous animals, those that go in herds, and are polygamous in their
habits: deer, for example, where the male has a distinct advantage in
size and strength; while he says little of the carnivora, who hunt in
pairs and are monogamous, where the female tends to be equal in every
respect to the male. Insects he almost disregards, and the microscope,
in the hands of a naturalist of genius like M. Fabre, has opened up for
us a world from which Aristotle was debarred by the material limitations
of his instruments.
We see now that Nature, at least, has no favoured sex, and that
Euripides’ words are as true in a zoological as they are in a
sociological sense: ‘All that can be said of the male can be said equally
well of the female, and _vice versa_.’ The male that in some species
is the stronger and more active, in others is the weaker and plays a
passive rôle. The female mantis that devours her feeble mate is the
reverse side of Nature’s picture. So again, all the fascinating problems
of parthenogenesis, whereby the female may produce for several births
without the intervention of the male, have received a new light from the
close study of the hive. Aristotle’s chapter on bees suffers materially
from lack of first-hand knowledge, and, as Professor Platt says, although
it is greatly to his credit for hard thinking, it reveals the fact that
he knew next to nothing about the subject. Of course, the whole method
of bee-generation is totally at variance with Aristotle’s theory of male
superiority, and if he had possessed our knowledge his theory might have
been modified. In the world of insects, at least, feminism reigns; the
male is weak and subservient, the female is the ruler. Often the male
is an accident; the female would have sufficed. So true is this that
a modern essayist, M. Remy de Gourmont, writing under the influence
of Fabre’s discoveries, can vary Aristotle’s analogy and compare the
female to the clock and the male to the necessary key that winds up the
mechanism.