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Gender, Education, and Enlightened Politics in Plato’s Laws

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  19 June 2020

LINDA R. RABIEH Open the ORCID record for LINDA R. RABIEH [Opens in a new window]
LINDA R. RABIEH*
Affiliation:
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
*
Linda R. Rabieh, Lecturer, Department of Political Science and Concourse Program, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, [email protected].
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Abstract

Plato’s treatments of women are perplexing because they seem to justify both gender equality and female subordination. Faced with evidence of both, scholars typically ask whether Plato promotes gender equality or patriarchy rather than what a particular treatment of women means in the dialogue to which it belongs. This article seeks to clarify Plato’s treatment of women by focusing on women’s education in the Laws and analyzing it in the context of his Athenian Stranger’s attempt at rational political reform. It argues that in exploring the differences between men and women, Plato shows them to be ones of degree rather than kind and identifies a common human weakness shared by both genders that is the greatest obstacle to his reform. This approach reveals a profound examination of a human problem and an instructive account of the challenges that accompany the quest for gender equality.

Type
Research Article
Information
American Political Science Review , Volume 114 , Issue 3 , August 2020 , pp. 911 - 922
Copyright
© American Political Science Association 2020

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Footnotes

I am indebted first of all to Thomas L. Pangle for introducing me many years ago to the rich labyrinth of the Laws and for his probing questions ever since as I have tried to make sense of it. I am also deeply grateful to Robert C. Bartlett, Anna Schmidt Mansfield, and Amy Bonnette Nendza for their incisive comments and generous suggestions on various drafts as well as for the many conversations I have had with them and other friends on the topics discussed here. I would also like to thank the students in my Fall 2018 seminar on the Laws at MIT, especially Sasha Rickard and Christopher Sanfilippo, who offered numerous helpful comments on the version of this paper that emerged from that seminar. Finally, I would like to thank Dr. Leigh Jenco and the three anonymous reviewers who read the essay with extraordinary care and whose numerous and exceedingly thoughtful questions and suggestions led me to improve it in many ways.

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