Was Plato a Feminist?

The ancient Athenian philosopher Plato is one of the most renowned thinkers of all time. The association of his name with any idea seems to automatically lend that idea credibility. It is therefore little surprise that the claim that Plato was a feminist pops up both on the internet and in scholarly literature. Some authors have even tried to claim that Plato invented feminism. Since these claims seem to be so popular, let’s look into them and see how they stand up to the historical evidence.

For the purposes of this article, I will be using the first definition of the word feminism given in Merriam-Webster, which is: “the theory of the political, economic, and social equality of the sexes.” This is a definition that I think most feminists today would agree is accurate.

Evidence for the view of Plato as a feminist

If you search for the phrase “Plato was a feminist” in Google, the first result that comes up is this blog post from 2015, titled “Plato the Feminist?” which declares:

“Whatever his intention Plato is one of the first men to put this thought of equality among the sexes in writing. And seeing as he is one of the most influential philosophers around – we could argue that he implanted the first feminist thought in western society.”

The author of this blog post isn’t just making stuff up; there really is some evidence to support the view that Plato did challenge some conventional Greek ideas about women and their place in society. In his dialogue Menon, Plato portrays Socrates as arguing that the principle of ἀρετή (aretḗ), meaning “virtue” or “excellence,” is the same for all people, including both men and women.

Similarly, in his Republic, Book V, Plato portrays Socrates as arguing that there is no essential difference between men and women when it comes to running the ideal state and, by extension, no difference when it comes to the practice of virtue. He writes, as translated by Paul Shorey:

“Then there is no pursuit of the administrators of a state that belongs to a woman because she is a woman or to a man because he is a man. But the natural capacities are distributed alike among both creatures, and women naturally share in all pursuits and men in all—yet for all the woman is weaker than the man.”

The third-century AD Greek biographer Diogenes Laërtios records in his book The Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers that Plato actually admitted two women—Lastheneia of Mantineia and Axiothea of Phleious—into his school at the Akademia. This would have been seen as extremely radical at the time.

It certainly makes sense that many women philosophers of later periods belonged to the Platonic tradition, including Hypatia of Alexandria (whom I discuss at length in this article from August 2018), as well as Aidesia of Alexandria, Asklepigenia of Athens, and Theodora of Emesa.

ABOVE: Mosaic of Plato’s Akademia from the Villa of T. Siminius Stephanus in the Roman city of Pompeii. According to Diogenes Laërtios, Plato’s Akademia included at least two women.

Plato—not the founder of feminism

That being said, however, the author of the blog post’s view that Plato “implanted the first feminist thought in western society” is certainly wrong and frankly rather sexist, since it essentially credits the invention of the idea that women are equal to men to a man.

If you’re going to argue that Plato was a feminist, then there were certainly many other feminists before him. Indeed, perhaps the oldest ancient writer whose name has survived to the present day is the Sumerian priestess Enheduanna, who lived in around the twenty-third century BC and whose poems have been interpreted by many modern authors as feminist.

Plato wasn’t even the first famous Greek male writer to express views that some people today have argued might be considered feminist. As I discuss in this article from July 2020, the Athenian playwright Euripides (lived c. 480 – c. 406 BC), who wrote about a generation before than Plato, includes characters in his plays who criticize the treatment of women in Greek society. In his tragedy Medeia, the protagonist delivers the following monologue, as translated by Rachel Kitzinger:

“Of all creatures that live and understand,
we women suffer the most. In the first place
we must, for a vast sum, buy a husband;
what’s worse, with him our bodies get a master.
And here’s what’s most at sake: Did we get
a man who’s good or bad? For women have
no seemly escape; we can’t deny our husbands.
We’ve come to a household with new habits, new rules,
and must divine how best to manage our bedmates
using skills we never learned at home.
If we do it right, our husband lives with us
and doesn’t fight the yoke. Then life
is enviable. If we don’t, it’s better to die.
A man, when he is vexed by those at home,
goes out to ease the disquiet in in his heart.
But we have only one person to look to.
And they say of us that we’re never at risk,
sheltered at home, while they fight with spears.
How wrong they are: I’d rather three times over
stand behind a shield than give birth once.”

Personally, I don’t think this passage necessarily makes Euripides a feminist, since he did write it to be spoken by a character in a play who ultimately ends up murdering her own children, but I think it does show that ideas we might consider feminist existed in ancient Greek society before Plato.

ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of the “Disk of Enheduanna,” a bas-relief carving bearing a representation of Enheduanna, the Sumerian priestess and poet whom some modern authors have labelled a feminist

Evidence against the view of Plato as a feminist

Now that we’ve established that Plato is certainly not the founder of feminism, let’s address the question of whether he can rightly be considered a feminist in any sense at all. On account of the evidence I presented in the first section of this article, I think you could make a strong argument that Plato was more enlightened in his views towards women than many other Greek men at the time. Unfortunately, there is strong evidence that he was far from anything that we today might consider a feminist.

If you look at all Plato’s dialogues, there is not a single dialogue in which a woman speaker ever actually appears. The views of individual women are rarely ever presented in Plato’s dialogues and, when they are presented, they are always presented by a man. In The Symposion, the views of a woman, Diotima, are presented by Socrates, a man. In Menexenos, the views of a woman, Aspasia, are presented by Socrates, a man.

If Plato were truly a feminist, you would think he surely would have included at least one woman in one of his dialogues as a speaker among the several dozen different male speakers who appear in his dialogues. Instead, no woman ever appears. This suggests that, at the very best, Plato was not fully committed to the idea of breaking down barriers for women.

ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of a marble herma of Aspasia of Miletos, one of the very few women whose views are nominally presented in Plato’s dialogues

Some ancient Greek writers, such as Hesiodos of Askre or Semonides of Amorgos (both whom I discuss in this article I wrote back in June 2019 about misogyny in ancient Greece), just spew blatant misogyny all over the place. Both Hesiodos and Semonides wrote lengthy tirades (in verse!) about how (in their opinion) women are the sole cause of all evil in the world and how (in their opinion) all the world’s problems would be solved if men just got rid of women altogether. Plato is definitely not one of those writers. In fact, he barely talks about women.

When Plato does talk about women, he is rarely ever outright hateful towards them, but he is very often condescending. For instance, here is a passage from Plato’s Republic, Book X, 605d-e, as translated by Paul Shorey, in which Plato has Socrates say that men are calm and rational; whereas women are emotional and irrational:

“But when in our own lives some affliction comes to us, you are also aware that we plume ourselves upon the opposite, on our ability to remain calm and endure, in the belief that this is the conduct of a man, and what we were praising in the theatre that of a woman.”

Obviously, Plato does not pose this idea in his own voice, but Socrates’s interlocutor agrees that it is correct, Socrates goes on to make an argument based on this premise, and Plato gives no indication that he thinks the premise is false.

Here is another passage from Plato’s Timaios 90e-91a, as translated by W.R.M. Lamb, in which Plato argues that men who have lived cowardly or wicked lives will be reincarnated as women as a result of their iniquities, since women are naturally more inclined towards cowardice and wickedness:

“According to the probable account, all those creatures generated as men who proved themselves cowardly and spent their lives in wrong-doing were transformed, at their second incarnation, into women. And it was for this reason that the gods at that time contrived the love of sexual intercourse by constructing an animate creature of one kind in us men, and of another kind in women; and they made these severally in the following fashion.”

Here is another passage from just a few lines later in Timaios 91c-d, in which Plato espouses the strange doctrine of the “wandering womb,” which was believed by many of the best ancient Greek medical writers:

“And in women again, owing to the same causes, whenever the matrix or womb, as it is called,—which is an indwelling creature desirous of child-bearing,—remains without fruit long beyond the due season, it is vexed and takes it ill; and by straying all ways through the body and blocking up the passages of the breath and preventing respiration it casts the body into the uttermost distress, and causes, moreover, all kinds of maladies; until the desire and love of the two sexes unite them. Then, culling as it were the fruit from trees, they sow upon the womb, as upon ploughed soil, animalcules that are invisible for smallness and unshapen; and these, again, they mold into shape and nourish to a great size within the body; after which they bring them forth into the light and thus complete the generation of the living creature.”

Even in The Republic, Book V, Plato makes it very clear that he thinks that men are generally superior to women in every possible way. Here is the quote I presented at the beginning of this article in its full context:

“‘Do you know, then, of anything practised by mankind in which the masculine sex does not surpass the female on all these points? Must we make a long story of it by alleging weaving and the watching of pancakes and the boiling pot, whereon the sex plumes itself and wherein its defeat will expose it to most laughter?’”

“‘You are right,’ he said, ‘that the one sex is far surpassed by the other in everything, one may say. Many women, it is true, are better than many men in many things, but broadly speaking, it is as you say.’”

“‘Then there is no pursuit of the administrators of a state that belongs to a woman because she is a woman or to a man because he is a man. But the natural capacities are distributed alike among both creatures, and women naturally share in all pursuits and men in all—yet for all the woman is weaker than the man.’”

“‘Assuredly.’”

In other words, according to Plato, women are capable of doing all the things men are capable of doing, but men are generally better at all things than women. This is not a feminist viewpoint.

Plato is not being an outright misogynist in any of these passages; he isn’t explicitly calling women the root of all evil or saying that things would be better if women just didn’t exist. Nonetheless, he is espousing explicitly sexist views that a feminist certainly would not agree with.

I do not think Plato was a misogynist, but he did hold sexist views. The difference between sexism and misogyny, in my opinion, is that a misogynist actively hates women. Hesiodos and Semonides were misogynists. A person who holds sexist views, on the other hand, does not necessarily actively hate women, but nonetheless passively holds condescending views towards women. I think that Plato held sexist views.

ABOVE: Drawing of Plato’s Akademeia, based on a painting by the Swedish painter Carl Johan Wahlbom