Page 54 - DPOL201_WESTERN_POLITICAL_THOUGHT_ENGLISH

Western Political Thought

Notes For Aristotle, women and the family belonged to the private realm, which was really the world of
the particular rather than the universal. The male being superior, stronger and better, ruled over
the female—a defective, incomplete male. He described a “woman as an infertile male”, “a male
is male in virtue of a particular ability and a female in virtue of a particular inability”. The male
was the active partner and the female passive, required primarily for sexual reproduction. Had it
not been for this, remarked Aristotle, this particular deformity in nature would not have existed.
In marriage, the husband by his superior virtue was the more useful, and hence the dominant
partner. Though the husband-wife was interdependent, they were not equal.

Like Plato, he regarded the world as hierarchically structured, where the better ruled
over the inferior, the strong over the weak, and the soul over the body.

A well-ordered family was one that took into account differences between its individual members,
and ensured that each worked in a manner so as to contribute to the common good. Accepting this
differentiation made it easy to distribute tasks and authority that were naturally ordained and
readily accepted.
A husband-wife relationship differed from the one between a governor and the governed, which
kept changing. In a political community, the position of the ruler and the ruled interchanged
depending on circumstances and the dictates of justice. But in a husband-wife relationship, the
former was endowed with a natural gift for command, and the latter for obedience. It was
constitutional, with adequate space for constant negotiation, debate and arbitration, as in the case
of normal politics. It was not despotic, like the one between a master and his slave. The husband-
wife relationship was exercised in the interests of the members of the household to enable the
husband to emerge a winner, reinforcing his dominance as the “head” within the household,
while the master-slave relationship was conducted solely for the benefit of the master. A slave had
no rational capacity and acquired some intelligence by serving his master. He was not like a child
who had potentiality of a deliberative faculty, but would remain dependent on his father as long
as his faculty was immature, undeveloped and incomplete. A girl’s deliberative faculty, however,
remained undeveloped even after she became a woman, which explained her subordination to a
man. A son had to be trained to become a free man, a citizen. A daughter’s training would be
appropriate enough to make her subordinate to her father and then to her husband. The relationship
between the father and child was similar to that of a king and his subjects.
Aristotle pointed out that a ruler must possess full and perfect moral virtues. Though moral
goodness may be found in all persons, temperance, fortitude and justice were not to the same
degree in women as they were in men. He agreed with Sophocles (496—406 BC), reiterating his
statement that “a modest silence is a woman’s crown” and regarded quietness and modesty as a
special form of their goodness. Aristotle was critical of Euripides for assuming that women could
be clever and manly, dismissing these as inappropriate. While a man’s goodness was goodness in
the absolute sense, a woman’s goodness remained relative. However, the woman was not a slave.
She was a free being, a complement to the man. Though women constituted half of the free
population, they were confined to the private sphere of the household since personal family ties
were natural.
A woman’s rightful place was her house because of her special abilities as a wife, mother and
householder. While a man acquired, a woman’s function was to “keep and store”. In that sense,
her role was similar to that of a statesman within the city—preserving what had been acquired
and ensuring stability. The family was a sphere of inequality, with differentiation in power and
authority arising from sex, age and ability. Interestingly, Aristotle considered the family to be the

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