Plato's Republic V: Women as rulers- A feminist proposal

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[...] In this paper, I have attempted to argue the point that Plato's argument that women should be rulers should not be considered a pro-feminist argument. He fails to reconcile the gaps in his argument between his aim of utilitarianism, his assessment of women's abilities as inferior to men, and placing them in jobs equal to men. His proposals do not consider women's actual wants and needs, and are not aimed at improving the quality of their life and achieving equality between the sexes for its own sake, and are therefore counter to modern feminist sentiment. [...]

[...] Statements such as this preclude the notion that Plato was a feminist in the modern sense—clearly, he believed that women are not equal to men in most ways; rather, women are inferior to men—although they are able to do what men do, they generally do not do anything as well as men because they are comparatively lacking in strength and ability. The inherent equality of men and women's respective capacities and abilities is the cornerstone of the modern feminist position; and so, although Plato acknowledges that men and women both have the potential to be educated in the same fashion and to rule, he fails to truly attribute this to women actually being equal to men. [...]

[...] However, the sexes are distinguished only by their reproductive functions. As reproduction has no bearing on one's nature, ruling is not unique to men, and therefore, women can rule as well. Although Plato advocates the equal education of women for the purposes of ruling, it is inaccurate to conclude that he was advocating the modern notion of equality between the sexes. A section of Republic V (455b-457b) incorporates a discussion of the shortcomings of women and their inferiority to men. [...]

[...] Although the feminist idea that one's gender is irrelevant to one's qualifications for education bears up better than the idea that gender is also irrelevant to one's qualifications for employment, as Plato does say that men and women both possess the qualities that qualify one for education, it too is seriously weakened and made somewhat contradictory by his claim that men possess those qualities to a greater degree--since that claim, as explained above, also implies that men are best suited for civic occupations and since the purpose of providing men and women with a common education is to prepare them for the same occupation, it would be inefficient and wasteful to educate women for an occupation they are not best suited for. [...]

[...] Yet, Plato does discuss the capacities of men and women in a way that would seem to refute this, and he provides material for someone objecting from a feminist perspective to the idea that there are specific occupations to which men are best suited and others to which women are, as Annas points out (Annas 5). From a modern feminist perspective, the latter claim is the more relevant one, because it perpetuates the ideology that feminists have been fighting to dispel and bars women from those professions available to men that bring wealth, status, respect, and independence--such as doctors, lawyers, and politicians--and relegates them to the inglorious occupations that men do not want, which were the only ones that women were thought capable of in Plato's Athens (Annas 5). [...]