"So he thinks that should follow for people as well."Īt this point, the Republic might look vaguely like a proto-feminist text, or at least one that could be useful in advancing feminist arguments about divisions of labour in the workplace.īut there's another side to Plato's equal-opportunity idyll. "Plato says: 'We don't separate them and say that male guard dogs should do all the guarding, while female guard dogs should sit around the doghouse and clean the dishes.' ( Unsplash: Caspian Dahlstrom)ĭr Hulme Kozey says Plato noticed that in Athenian society, people didn't divide guard dog labour into jobs for male and female animals. Plato thought guard dogs had the ideal temperament - friendly towards family, fearsome to enemies. "Plato strongly identifies individuals with their soul - or what we might think of as their mind," says Dr Hulme Kozey. So Plato's recommendation that women should participate in public life is less revolutionary than it might seem at first glance.īut his vision of women in political life is certainly radical - and it has its roots in a key element of Platonic philosophy. "They were participating in the marketplace, they were involved in the production and maintenance of textiles, working as midwives - and as doctors in some cases - as well as painters, bronze workers." Women in Ancient Greece were doing "all kinds of jobs", according to Emily Hulme Kozey, a reader in ancient history and philosophy at the University of Melbourne. Women's absence from political life doesn't mean they were strictly relegated to the private sphere.Īncient Greek literature often depicts women as cloistered within the home, and for a long time historians took their cue from this literary representation.īut more recent scholarship uncovers a different picture. The idea of women being admitted to the guardian class would have come as something of a shock to Athenian society at the time.īut we shouldn't infer from this that women had no public presence at all. They're warriors, they're political administrators - and they're philosophers. The guardians are drawn from the elite of society, and they play a complex role. From digging in the dirt to 'decolonising archaeology'.Freud thought philosophers were deluded.The modern philosophical canon is 'pretty whitewashed'.More stories from the Philosopher's Zone: In the Republic, the upper echelon of the state is constituted by what Plato calls "guardians". What's surprising, given its cultural context, is the role that Plato envisions for women in the ideal state.įar from being a disenfranchised underclass, women in the Republic could occupy the highest stratum of public life alongside men. In the Republic, Plato presents his vision of an ideal society.Ī cornerstone of Western philosophy, the Republic explores such questions as the nature of the perfect community, the role of the individual within that community, as well as issues concerning justice, politics and knowledge.
Women's lives in ancient Athens were more complex than previously thought.
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