Status of Women In Society

Women have enjoyed significant improvements to their individual rights and their status in general, particularly during the current century. However, although the progress that has been achieved is relatively recent, the problem of women's proper place in society has been a topic of great debate throughout history. Many great thinkers, philosophers, and more recently, sociologists have explored this topic. The question being posed is, should women be naturally subordinate to men within the family and in society in general? Over the years, attempts at answering this question have resulted in a multitude of ideas and theories on women. In order to comprehend these ideas and theories, and their evolution, we must begin by exploring their foundations. Three aspects in particular demand to be examined. First of all, what is probably the most influential writing on the nature of women, the account of man's downfall in the Judaic Bible. Also important in shaping ideas about women are the debates of philosophers such as Plato and Aristotle. Finally, the most radical theories on women, men, and patriarchy surfaced in the Enlightenment era, with the work of Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and Mary Wollstonecraft.
During the influential account of man's downfall in the Judaic Bible, Eve, the woman is told by God, "thy desire shall be to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee." The Bible was, and is still being used as a tool to justify women's traditionally inferior role in society. During biblical times a Jewish wife, often sharing her husband with many other wives, was virtually a slave to him. Confined to hard domestic labor, with little rest, the woman was considered spiritually unclean, religiously taboo, and was not recognized before the law. She could be put away at the wish of her husband, and stoned if she was found to be adulterous. In the male-oriented society of the Jews, and later of the Christians, women were considered justifiably subordinate to men, existing only to relieve man's loneliness and to serve him. Over time, these views became entrenched in almost every human society, remaining unshakeable well into the twentieth century. They were, however refuted, defended, and debated time and time again.
One of the first philosophers to raise the issue of women's equality and liberation was Plato. His native Athens was a patriarchal city-state, which practiced slavery during the fourth and fifth centuries BC. Plato observed that the status of the women in his society was barely better than that of the slaves. In the Republic, his proposal for the best possible state, Plato expressed revolutionary and unconventional views on women. He believed that the "original nature" of men and women is the same. According to Plato, both sexes initially had the same potential to contribute to society. It was through education that men were taught to be wise, fruitful citizens, and women were rendered dull, servile and uninteresting. Furthermore, he wrote that the status of women at the time was a perversion of nature and a waste of the resources available to society from half of its population. He also thought that in the ideal society, both men and women would be encouraged to act out all of the necessary social functions of a citizen, including assuming positions of power. Plato's prototype of the Philosopher King is an example of a completely unbiased ruler, one whose power is legitimized not through force, wealth, or heredity, but by virtue of his or her wisdom alone. Plato's views on women were shocking 2500 years ago, and continued to be radical to the present day. It was not long until such views were rebutted.
The rebuttal to Plato's Republic came almost immediately from Plato's own student, Aristotle. Although Aristotle was devoted to his teacher in every other way, he could not accept Plato's views on women. In his biological writings, such as The Generation of Animals, and his political work, Politics, written between 347 and 322 B. C., he investigates, and discusses women's status in society. Aristotle saw women as mutilated or incomplete men, inferior to men in every possible way. This line of thought has enjoyed a long history, finally advocated by Freud and his followers throughout the twentieth century. Aristotle based his arguments on the pre-Socratic notion that women have lower body temperatures than men. At the time, body temperature, or "vital heat" was equated with life or soul, therefore Aristotle concluded that women must have less soul than men have. He believed that it was women's deficiency of soul, or the "sentient and rational male principle", which affected her intellectual, physical and social status negatively. For this reason, women were physically weak, and incapable of sustained rational thought. Given women's inferior abilities, Aristotle maintained that the only appropriate role for women in society is one in which they are subordinate to the rule of strong, rational men. He agreed with Plato and Socrates that both sexes represented an important contribution to society, but stressed that the value of this contribution is very different for each sex, the difference being that "the moral virtue of a man is shown in commanding, of a woman in obeying."
The writings of philosophers such as Plato and Aristotle fueled a continuing debate about the status of women in society. Eventually more and more people began to question patriarchal authority. It was suspected that the existing institutions in society, including patriarchy, were perhaps not entirely natural, as had been previously assumed. The sentiment that paternalism was incompatible with freedom and dignity had slowly gained credence, signifying an important shift in the general attitude towarRAB authority. Even the divine right of kings was being challenged. These changes in the popular mentality called for a new explanation of patriarchal power. If men were not born with a natural right to rule over the women, why did they rule at all? This new explanation was the social contract theory of government, which was developed during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The fundamental idea behind the social contract is that all social relations are consensual. The social contract theory of government states that society, and its various forms of authority, could not exist were it not for the consent of the people being governed.
Thomas Hobbes was on the forefront of the rejection of paternalism and the development of social contract theory. In Philosophical Rudiments Concerning Government and Society, originally published as De Cive (1614), he systematically rejected the notion that it is possible to make any case at all for a natural patriarchal right in the family or the state. First of all, Hobbes claimed that, by nature, dominion in the family, or natural right to govern, can only be maternal. He supported this argument with two facts - only the identity of a child's mother is certain, and initially absolute power over the child is in the hanRAB of the mother, whose role is to nourish it and train it. Therefore, fatherhood does not, logically or naturally, give the man dominion to rule within the family. Rather, paternalism must be the result of either brute force, or a contract or agreement of some sort. The possibility of men acquiring a natural right to rule through the use of brute force was rejected by Hobbes. He insisted that by nature each human being is granted an equal ability to overpower and defeat another, if not by superior physical strength, then by wit or cunning. His conclusion was that men were granted dominion to rule in the family through the consent of the women. At the root of patriarchy, Hobbes claimed, is an arbitrary agreement between a man and a woman; a social contract. Formal marriage is the institutionalized form of these agreements.
Like Thomas Hobbes, John Locke was a social contract theorist. He, too, rejected the patriarchal concept of authority that had been used, historically, to support the right of men to rule over women. In particular, he rejected the Biblical justification of the status of women in society. He did not believe that God had granted Adam a divine right to rule, and argued that, even if God had granted him such authority, there was no reason to believe that it was passed down to only his male heirs. Like Hobbes before him, Locke examined the family to account for the origin of paternal authority, and like Hobbes, he rejected the idea that the man possesses a natural right to rule his family. However, he rejected Hobbes' conclusion that the mother has, by nature, all power over her children, while the father has none. In writing the Second Treatise of Civil Government (1690), Locke asserted his position that power within the family is vested equally in the mother and the father, not centered in one or the other. This position, he claimed, was clearly supported by both reason and Scripture. In Scripture it is written that children owe obedience to both their mother and father, while reason and logic reveals that, since a child is physically and intellectually weak, and is unable to give consent, it is temporarily under the jurisdiction of both parents, since both parents have a share in its existence. He strongly believed that in order to preserve and enhance the freedom of the individual, women and men had to be equal and enjoy equal rights in society. Locke is believed to have had a great deal of influence over the development of the English-American political system. However, his ideas on authority and the equal rights of men and women were almost completely ignored by the same people who adopted his other ideas wholeheartedly. One very poignant example of this is found in Thomas Jefferson's Declaration of Independence, which has sometimes been criticized as having been plagiarized from Locke's Second Treatise of Civil Government. When Jefferson borrowed the phrase, "all men are created equal" from Locke, he did not mean what Locke had meant by it - that all men, male and female, were created equal.
The work of Jean Jacques Rousseau had a great deal of influence on the development of social contract theory. Although it was conceived by Hobbes and Locke as an agreement, requiring the consent of all involved, and based on the belief that all are by nature equal in their individual human rights, in the hanRAB of Rousseau social contract theory took an unfortunate turn for women. Essentially, Rousseau reduced the "all" to "men". One of the consistent themes of this life and works was that women are inferior and subordinate beings who should be raised and nurtured for the sole purpose of serving and pleasing men. In Emile, the influential work in which he advocated what he believed to be the proper way of educating male and female children, Rousseau wrote that the inequality between men and women, "is not of man's making, or at any rate, it is not the result of mere prejudice, but of reason." He insisted that "the man should be strong and active; the woman should be weak and passive," and preached that women in general should be restricted to domestic chores and excluded from liberal education. In A Discourse on Political Economy (1755), he states his belief that the primary function of the family should be to "preserve and increase the patrimony of the family" so that it may be properly passed on to his male heirs. While he insisted that the patriarchal structure of the family is natural, Rousseau denied the possibility of any analogy between the family and the state. According to him, men were meant to govern women, but not other men. In what was probably his most famous work, Social Contract, the topic of women is entirely excluded. Perhaps Rousseau realized that he could not mention women without exposing a sharp contradiction between the radically egalitarian ideals he advocated, and his ideas about women. Nevertheless, his strict appointment of sex roles became a model for relations between men and women, particularly after the French Revolution. The leaders of the Revolution adopted not only his radical egalitarianism, if only in principle, but also his uncompromising pronouncements on women.
Toward the end of the eighteenth century, while Europe was still in the throes of revolution, a book was published that was destined to become the manifesto of the feminist movement in England and America throughout the next century. This book was A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), written by Mary Wollstonecraft as a rebuttal to Rousseau's program for training, rather than educating women proposed in his Emile. One of the first women ever to write under her own name as opposed to using a male pen name, Wollstonecraft initially admired Rousseau for his idealistic egalitarianism. However, she criticized and rejected his assumption that man's nature and virtues differ from women's nature and virtues. She realized that this assumption was not based on logic, the doctrine of the enlightenment, rather it was an extrapolation and perpetuation of the ancient notion that women are somehow deficient in reason. She argued that, since reason is the fundamental human characteristic, to say that women lack reason is to say that they are less than human. Furthermore, if women did lack reason, and since reason is required for the development of all moral virtues, the "female virtues" attributed to women by Rousseau - passivity, gentleness, and sensitivity - can not be considered true virtues, because they are not attained through reason. Contrary to the popular belief, Wollstonecraft insisted that traditional schooling for girls produced empty-headed, frivolous, selfish, and mean "ladies", rather than good, intelligent, and noble "women". She warned that, eventually, such beliefs and practices would not only damage women themselves, but the family and society as a whole. It must be noted that, although she was concerned with equal rights for women, Wollstonecraft mainly addressed herself to the problems of middle-class women, virtually ignoring the plight of lower- and upper- class women. Nevertheless, her belief that women are not rendered inferior or subordinate by anything inherent in their nature, but by the lifelong social pressure to conform to existing roles was and continues to be enthusiastically supported by feminists.
The current status of women in society is a result of the evolution of ideas on women, which occurred slowly, over hundreRAB of years. It is important not to overlook that, although much of the change in the status of women has occurred only recently, it would have been impossible without the development of the theories which have their foundations in the Judaic Bible, in the philosophies of Plato and Aristotle, and most of all in the work of the revolutionary thinkers of the Enlightenment Era.

Bibliography:

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Russell, Bertrand, 1972, A History of Western Philosophy. New York: Simon & Schuster

Sanderson, Stephen K., 1995, Macrosociology: An Introduction to Human Sciences. 3rd ed. New York: Harper Collins College Publishers

Henslin, James M., 1995, Down to Earth Sociology: Introductory Readings. 8th ed. New York: The Free Press