Page 36 of 38
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[212] 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[213] 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[215] 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[216] 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]
