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Connell, Sophia M.
2021.
Aristotle on Women.
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ARISTOTLE ON THE POLITICS OF MARRIAGE: ‘MARITAL RULE’ IN THE POLITICS*
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 April 2015
Extract
In the Politics, Aristotle maintains, contrary to his predecessors, that there is a distinctive mode of authority that husbands should exercise over their wives. He even coins a word for it: γαμιϰή, ‘the marital art’ or ‘marital rule’ (Pol. 1.3, 1253b8–10; 1.12, 1259a37–9). Marital rule is supposed to differ from the authority that fathers have over their children and from the kind of rule that citizens exercise over one another. Yet it is not clear whether there is any conceptual space between political and paternal rule for marital rule to occupy. Where fathers rule and children are ruled, citizens take turns ruling and being ruled. Husbands, however, either share their rule with their wives, or they do not. If they do not, then marital rule seems indistinct from paternal rule; if they do, then it seems indistinct from political rule. To add to the confusion, Aristotle says that husbands properly rule their wives politically, but without alternating in positions of ruling and being ruled. On its face, this idea seems flatly contradictory. Political rule just is shared, reciprocal rule, and so if the husband rules permanently and his wife is merely ruled, then his rule cannot be political. So Aristotle's own description of marital rule appears inconsistent, and in any case it is difficult to see how marital rule could have the distinctive character that he insists it does.
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Footnotes
*
Earlier versions of this essay were delivered at Dartmouth College, Transylvania University and the 2012 meeting of the Classical Association of the Middle West and South. In addition to the audiences present on those occasions, I am grateful to Eugene Garver, Margaret Graver, Donald Morrison, Stephen White and an anonymous referee for Classical Quarterly for comments and discussion.
References
1 Plato and Xenophon argue in different ways that all forms of rule are identical in kind and that women can possess virtues that qualify them to rule over men: e.g. Pl. Plt. 258e–59d; Resp. 453b2–456c2, Xen. Mem. 3.4; Oec. 7–10. For a concise but informative account of their views, see Pomeroy, S.B., Xenophon, Oeconomicus: A Social and Historical Commentary (Oxford, 1994), 41–50Google Scholar.
2 All translations are my own except otherwise noted.
3 Out of a large literature: Horowitz, M.C., ‘Aristotle and woman’, Journal of the History of Biology 9 (1976), 182–213CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Okin, S.M., Women in Western Political Thought (Cambridge, 1979)Google Scholar; Elshtain, J.B., Public Man, Private Woman (Princeton, 1981)Google Scholar; Clark, S.R.L., ‘Aristotle's woman’, History of Political Thought 3 (1982), 177–91Google Scholar; Spelman, E.V., ‘Aristotle and the politicization of the soul’, in Discovering Reality: Feminist Perspectives on Epistemology, Metaphysics, Methodology, and Philosophy of Science, ed. Harding, S. and Hintikka, M.B. (Kluwer, 1983)Google Scholar; and now Parker, H.N., ‘Aristotle's unanswered questions: women and slaves in Politics 1252a–1260b’, Eugesta 2 (2012), 71–122Google Scholar. Even Schofield, M., ‘Ideology and philosophy in Aristotle's theory of slavery’, in Saving the City: Philosopher-Kings and Other Classical Paradigms (London, 1999), 101–23Google Scholar, which aims to acquit Aristotle's theory of natural slavery of the charge of being ‘ideological,’ dismisses the claims about women as ‘a classic instance of false consciousness’ (p. 108).
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5 Misunderstanding and misreading have been especially common in discussions of Aristotle's biology, on which see Matthews, G.B., ‘Gender and essence in Aristotle’, Australasian Journal of Philosophy 64 (1986), 16–25CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Mayhew, R., The Female in Aristotle's Biology (Chicago, 2004)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Kosman, A., ‘Male and female in Aristotle's Generation of Animals’, in Lennox, J.G. and Bolton, R. (edd.), Being, Nature, and Life in Aristotle: Essays in Honor of Alan Gotthelf (Cambridge, 2010), 147–67CrossRefGoogle Scholar. I concentrate here on interpretations of the Politics and Nicomachean Ethics, which have tended to cluster around one or the other of what Mulgan, R., ‘Aristotle and the political role of women’, History of Political Thought 15 (1994), 179–202Google Scholar labels ‘Aristotle the ideologue of sexism’ and ‘Aristotle the female sympathizer and crypto-feminist’. I share Mulgan's judgement that both sorts of view are misguided, though my understanding of the texts differs from his in ways that I detail below.
6 On the Politics and Ethics, esp. Fortenbaugh, W.W., ‘Aristotle on slaves and women’, in Barnes, J., Schofield, M. and Sorabji, R. (edd.), Articles on Aristotle, vol. 2 (Duckworth, 1977), 135–9Google Scholar; Smith, N.D., ‘Plato and Aristotle on the nature of women’, Journal of the History of Philosophy 21 (1983), 467–78CrossRefGoogle Scholar, Modrak, D.K., ‘Aristotle: women, deliberation, and nature’, in On, B.-A. Bar (ed.), Engendering Origins: Critical Feminist Readings in Plato and Aristotle (Albany, 1994), 207–22Google Scholar; Mulgan (n. 5); Deslauriers, M., ‘The virtues of slaves and women’, Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy 25 (2003), 212–31Google Scholar; Lockwood, T.C., ‘Justice in Aristotle's household and city’, Polis 20 (2003), 1–21Google Scholar; Karbowski, J., ‘Slaves, women, and natural teleology’, Ancient Philosophy 32 (2012), 323–49CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
7 Cf. Eth. Nic. 8.11, 1161a32–b5; Eth. Eud. 7.9, 1241b17–24. It is sometimes thought – as e.g. by Schofield (n. 3) – that the accounts of slavery in the Politics, Eth. Nic. and Eth. Eud. are inconsistent with one another. I follow Lockwood, T.C., ‘Is natural slavery beneficial?’, Journal of the History of Philosophy 45 (2007), 207–21CrossRefGoogle Scholar in seeing them as consistent in substance, if not in every point of terminology, and I am indebted to his analysis of natural slavery.
8 I follow Lord, C., Aristotle's Politics (Chicago, 2013)Google Scholar, Saunders, T.J., Aristotle: Politics, Books 1 and 2 (Oxford, 1995)Google Scholar and Reeve, C.D.C., Aristotle: Politics (Indianapolis, 1998)Google Scholar in translating βούλεται here as ‘tend’, a not infrequent usage of the word in Aristotle (see LSJ s.v. βούλομαι, III and the examples cited there: Pol. 1261b12, 1255b3, 1293b40; Gen. an. 778a4; Sens. 441a3). In favour of this translation and against that of Simpson, P.L.P, The Politics of Aristotle (Chapel Hill, 1997)Google Scholar – ‘they wish by their nature to stand on equal ground and to differ in nothing’ – are the following points: (i) for ‘by [their] nature’ we would expect a dative ϕύσει or the phrase ϰατὰ ϕύσιν, and not the accusative; (ii) reading βούλεται as ‘wish’ with the accusative would more naturally suggest that ruler and ruled wish to be equal in respect to their nature or that they wish their nature to be equal, neither of which seems relevant in this context and both of which seem doubtful; (iii) the idea that citizens properly alternate in ruling and being ruled because they tend to be equal in nature and not to differ in any relevant way is a central doctrine of the Politics (2.2, 1261a37–b6; 3.17, 1287b41–88a6; 7.3, 1325a34–b10), and seems to be just what Aristotle should say in this context. Stauffer (n. 4), 936–7 supplies an example of the unnecessary problems generated by the translation ‘wish’.
9 It seems clear that, in this context, Aristotle is using ‘political’ in its broad and inclusive sense that contrasts with despotism, paternalism and marital rule rather than in the narrow and exclusive sense in which it names one specific kind of political arrangement – the specific ‘constitution’ or ‘regime’ (πολιτεία) often translated as ‘polity’. Not only is Book 1 preoccupied with this distinction, but the specific kinds of political arrangement do not receive attention until Book 3, where Aristotle flags the narrower use of the term πολιτεία as though he does not expect his audience to assume that he uses the term in this way (which he in fact does not in the Eth. Nic.). Hence, contra Mulgan (n. 5), 188 and others, this passage is not in tension with Eth. Nic. 8.10, 1160b32–61a1 and 8.11, 1161a22–5 (on which see Section 3 below).
10 The story is reported by Hdt. 2.172.
11 This reference to Amasis has inspired scholars inclined toward ‘esoteric’ readings – most recently Stauffer (n. 4) – to find in it a tacit admission on Aristotle's part that marital rule arbitrarily excludes women from rule, since Amasis rules permanently despite his underlying equality with his subjects. But Aristotle introduces the Amasis story to illustrate a point about political rule, not marriage, and there is in any case no good reason to find a complex and subtle allusion to Herodotus' story here, let alone one that supposedly contradicts the explicit message of the text. Mulgan (n. 5) provides a persuasive critique of this sort of ‘crypto-feminist’ reading.
12 Unless, as Aristotle puts it, things turn out somehow contrary to nature. This parenthetical remark shows that Aristotle acknowledges cases in which particular women are more suited to rule than particular men. He does not consider what should be done in such cases, but, as my account below shows, there is reason to doubt that he would regard female rule as a satisfactory solution.
13 Most scholars agree that the passage denies alternation in rule between husband and wife: Clark (n. 3); Smith (n. 6); Levy (n. 4); Salkever (n. 4); Modrak (n. 6); Mulgan (n. 5); Saunders (n. 8); Dobbs (n. 4); Simpson, P.L.P., A Philosophical Commentary on the Politics of Aristotle (Chapel Hill, 1998)Google Scholar; Deslauriers (n. 6); Stauffer (n. 4). Disagreements cluster around the reasons for and implications of non-alternation. Schollmeier (n. 4), 29, however, argues that the Amasis example suggests that the husband and wife do rule by turns, since ‘Amasis was someone who was once ruled but now rules’. But, while this point is often missed (e.g. Mulgan [n. 5], 188; Dobbs [n. 4]; 79; Simpson [n. 13], 63), the Amasis example is set in contrast to the case of husband and wife. Hence even if it is supposed to illustrate the propriety of alternation, it does not suggest that alternation is appropriate for husbands and wives.
14 Saunders (n. 8), 97.
15 Simpson (n. 13), 63.
16 Alternation will, no doubt, affect the deliberation of a fully rational agent not subject to temporal bias; if you know that tomorrow I will have arbitrary and unchecked authority over you, you will likely be less inclined to exercise your arbitrary and unchecked authority over me today in ways that will make me hostile to you. But this is a difference in strategy, not in the relationship of arbitrary and unchecked authority that we take turns holding over one another. Aristotle does not deny that quantitative differences can affect how rulers decide to rule, but only that they do not alter the nature of the rule that they decide to exercise.
17 For the theory of natural slavery, see especially Smith, N.D., ‘Aristotle's theory of natural slavery’, in Keyt, D. and Miller, F.D. Jr. (edd.), A Companion to Aristotle's Politics (Oxford, 1991), 145–55Google Scholar; Kraut, R., Aristotle: Political Philosophy (Oxford, 2002)Google Scholar; and Lockwood (n. 7).
18 On children in the Aristotelian household, see Belfiore, E., ‘Family friendship in Aristotle's ethics’, Ancient Philosophy 21 (2001), 113–32CrossRefGoogle Scholar and Lockwood (n. 6).
19 For this point and its implications, see Deslauriers (n. 6) and Karbowski (n. 6). Smith (n. 17) gives reasons to doubt that Aristotle is altogether consistent on this point.
20 Modrak (n. 6) and Deslauriers (n. 6) rightly make this point central to their interpretations of this passage.
21 Scholars given to esoteric hermeneutics often read this alleged contradiction as part of Aristotle's tacit critique of slavery: Ambler, W., ‘Aristotle on nature and politics: the case of slavery’, Political Theory 15 (1987), 390–410CrossRefGoogle Scholar is perhaps the best representative of this point of view.
22 Kraut (n. 17), Chapter 8.
23 Eth. Nic. 3.2, 1111b10–12; Eth. Eud. 2.7, 1123a26–7; 2.10, 1225b24; De an. 2.3, 414b2; 3.9, 432b5–6; 3.10, 433a22–6; Pol. 7.15, 1334b17–25; Rh. 1.10, 1369a1–14. The Eth. Nic. does not clearly formulate these distinctions as the Eth. Eud., De an. and other texts do, but they are plainly assumed throughout. My account follows, in rough outline, Cooper, J., ‘Some remarks on Aristotle's moral psychology’, in Reason and Emotion (Princeton 1999), 237–52Google Scholar, who adds De motu an. 6, 700b19 and [Mag. mor.] 1.2, 1187b37 to the texts cited above. For a more detailed treatment, see Pearson, G., Aristotle on Desire (Cambridge, 2012)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. On the relationship between Aristotle's views and Plato's, see Lorenz, H., The Brute Within: Appetitive Desire in Plato and Aristotle (Oxford, 2006)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
24 Hist. an. 8(9).1, 588a15–b4 describes the similarities in intelligence between humans and non-rational animals as a similarity of ‘analogy’ between different traits, in contrast to differences of degree in the possession of the same traits; this helps to explain how Hist. an. 1.1, 488b15–26 can claim that some animals are intelligent (ϕϱόνιμα) and devious (ἐπίβουλα) while also claiming that humans alone are capable of deliberation (βουλευτικόν).
25 Hence it could be misleading to describe Aristotle as denying that non-human animals can think about the means to their ends, since he takes them to be capable of imagining prospective behaviours that would enable them to fulfil their desires and of behaving accordingly as a result. The cognitively rich interaction of imagination, memory and perception in non-rational animal behaviour would pass as ‘thought’ on many non-technical and even some technical conceptions of thought. Hence it is important to emphasize that what Aristotle denies to non-human animals is rational thought conceived in an especially robust and substantive way. For a fantastic discussion of these issues, see Lorenz (n. 23), especially Chapter 12.
26 Eth. Eud. 2.10, 1226b20–30 is more explicit than Eth. Nic. 6.9, 1142a31–b33 that deliberation involves an understanding of causal relations: ‘for the deliberative part of the soul is the part that contemplates a certain kind of cause’. The Eth. Nic. passage, however, gives a prominent role to thought (διάνοια) and calculation (λογισμός), and hence implies the ability not only to find means to one's ends, but to represent possible means to oneself in terms of their abstract explanatory relations to those ends, and consequently to reflect critically on them.
27 Kraut (n. 17), 289 takes a similar view of the technical abilities of ‘natural slaves’.
28 I take the distinction between these two kinds of rational capacity to be coherent; it is an empirical question whether they can in fact come apart. That question is not the same as asking whether there are or could be any ‘natural slaves’, since the chief defect of Aristotle's theory of slavery is ethical and not empirical.
29 Fortenbaugh (n. 6); Clark (n. 3); Smith (n. 6); Spelman (n. 3); Modrak (n. 6); Saunders (n. 8); Simpson (n. 13); Schollmeier (n. 4); Karbowski (n. 6). This was the view of Newman, W.L., The Politics of Aristotle, 4 vols. (Oxford, 1887–1902)Google Scholar, 2.218.
30 Saxonhouse (n. 4); Levy (n. 4); Salkever (n. 4); Nichols (n. 4); Swanson (n. 4); Dobbs (n. 4); Deslauriers (n. 6); Lockwood (n. 6); Stauffer (n. 4). Defenders of an interpersonal reading sometimes take the term to be deliberately ambiguous; e.g. Saxonhouse (n. 4), 74; Stauffer (n. 4), 937. Others, such as Smith (n. 6), have interpreted the term as simultaneously intrapersonal and interpersonal.
31 Dobbs (n. 4) and Deslauriers (n. 6); Deslauriers classifies her view as conventionalist, but supplies a purportedly natural explanation of the relationship. Dobbs is more straightforwardly naturalistic. I discuss these very different views in more detail below.
32 As it is by Nagle (n. 4), 169.
33 See especially Hist. an. 8(9).1, 608a21–b18 and Mayhew (n. 5), Chapter 6. Dobbs (n. 4), 85 rejects this reading of the Hist. an. passage on the grounds that women are there said to be ‘less spirited’ (ἀθυμότεϱα) than men, but this objection depends on drawing too close a connection between θυμός and emotion more generally. It is perhaps worth noting that Aristotle seems not to think that males are typically unemotional, since he believes that many (most?) men in fact follow their appetites and emotions (Eth. Nic. 1.3, 1095a2–8; 8.3, 1156a31–3; 10.9, 1179b10–16).
34 Since conventionalist readings often take Aristotle's esoteric point to be to suggest that marital rule is not justified – as, for example, Saxonhouse (n. 4) and Stauffer (n. 4) – this point will not count against them directly. There is, however, no reason to prefer an esoteric interpretation when a coherent, straightforward (i.e. non-esoteric) interpretation is available, as I am arguing there is in this case.
35 Dobbs (n. 4) grounds the interpersonal lack of authority in natural psychological features, and hence escapes this objection. I critique his view below.
36 Deslauriers (n. 6), 223–4, citing Rh. 1376b12, b27; Eth. Nic. 1151b15; Gen. an. 772b27, 778a1; De motu an. 698b7; and [Ath. Pol.] 45.3.4, 68.3.4, 68.4.11.
37 Trans. Nussbaum, M.C., Aristotle's De Motu Animalium (Princeton, 1978).Google Scholar
38 It is none the less worth stressing this point, since Deslauriers takes the objection to be a strong one despite citing the very passages that tell against it.
39 For the translation ‘assisting’ and the meaning of this term, see n. 56 below.
40 Deslauriers (n. 6), 223–4, citing Modrak (n. 6). Schollmeier (n. 4), 27 raises the same objection, but Deslauriers nicely explicates the structure of the argument of Pol. 1.13 and helpfully situates it within Aristotle's psychology. Karbowski (n. 6) dismisses the objection on the grounds that Aristotle recognizes different standards for virtue in women and men; but we should still be able to distinguish between virtue and enkrateia, and so the objection must be met rather than brushed aside.
41 Thus Modrak (n. 6). Deslauriers, though preferring a conventionalist reading, agrees that Aristotle regards women and slaves alike as becoming virtuous through their relationships to the adult male head of the household, and her analysis illuminates this idea.
42 Modrak (n. 6), 213 develops a plausible account based on her interpretation of akrasia; on this view, a virtuous husband's authority helps his wife to overcome her constitutional akrasia by helping to make the connection between general principles and concrete circumstances sufficiently vivid to guide her non-rational motives in the right way. Plausible as this interpretation is, it is not necessary to endorse any particular view about how marital rule is supposed to affect the woman's psyche in order to agree that Aristotle is committed to maintaining that it somehow does.
43 For these and other conventional claims about women, see Pomeroy (n. 1), 41–50.
44 This point is perhaps reinforced by Aristotle's focus on virtues of character in Pol. 1.13. One reason for this focus is that children and slaves cannot have intellectual virtues; but while women can possess intellectual virtues, Aristotle's question in 1.13 is the same for women as for slaves and children: how can they come to possess settled dispositions of character that reliably motivate them to act correctly? The answers are different in each case because the obstacles are different.
45 I take my inspiration for these examples from Pl. Lys. 207d–209a.
46 When Socrates points out to Lysis that his parents let a slave rule him, Lysis responds ‘So what? He's ours.’ Pl. Lys. 208c3–4.
47 Clark (n. 3), Swanson (n. 4), Dobbs (n. 4), Deslauriers (n. 6), Lockwood (n. 6), Schollmeier (n. 4), Nagle (n. 4) and Karbowski (n. 6) all give a prominent place to the gendered division of spheres.
48 Xenophon thus takes the division of tasks between those that belong inside the house and those that belong outside it as fundamental, in contrast to Aristotle's emphasis on the tasks of acquisition and preservation. Xenophon's example of defence does not fit comfortably into either side of Aristotle's division.
49 The central passage often discussed in this connection is Hist. an. 8(9).1, 608a21–b18. Deslauriers, M., ‘Sexual difference in Aristotle's Politics and his biology’, CW 102.3 (2009), 215–31Google Scholar denies any dependence of Aristotle's political discussion of women on his biological discussion of females, though she bases her argument on a somewhat peculiar interpretation of the priority of formal to material causation, and largely ignores the Hist. an., where biology and psychology most clearly intersect. Mayhew (n. 5), 96–104, drawing on Lennox, J.G., ‘Aristotle on the biological roots of virtue: the natural history of natural virtue’, in Maienschein, J. and Ruse, M. (edd.), Biology and the Foundations of Ethics (Cambridge, 1999), 10–31CrossRefGoogle Scholar presents a persuasive account of the connection between biological and moral psychology as Aristotle practises them.
50 As e.g. Pomeroy (n. 1).
51 Deslauriers (n. 6), 228.
52 Schollmeier (n. 4), 29 n. 7 makes much the same point against the similar view of Smith (n. 6). Schollmeier, however, concludes that Aristotle would approve of giving women a role in political deliberation; Section 2 above shows why that conclusion does not follow. In defence of Deslauriers' claim (endorsed and elaborated by Karbowski (n. 6)), one might think that the same principles that purportedly explain the gendered division of labour make the restriction of women's deliberative capacities to some specific domain appear rather plausible after all. But the idea of domain-specific deliberative capacities clashes with Aristotle's conception of psychic capacities and his claim that there is a single capacity for rational deliberation: capacities are distinguished by their objects (Eth. Nic. 6.1, 1139a3–15, cf. De an. 2.4, 415a13–22), not by some sub-set of those objects encountered in some narrow domain. Aristotle of course recognizes domain-specific deliberative competencies (e.g. Eth. Nic. 6.5, 1140a24–31) – this is, in part, what a craft (τέχνη) is – but these evidently depend on a single underlying capacity for deliberation, just as the domain-specific theoretical competencies of zoology and meteorology depend on a single underlying scientific or contemplative capacity (Eth. Nic. 6.2, 1139a3–15).
53 Dobbs (n. 4) argues, drawing on the Hist. an., that women, as Aristotle sees them, are less suited for rule because they are less ‘spirited’ than men; men require ‘a more authoritative and lordly ordering operation of deliberation’ (85) because their appetites are more unsettled than women's. Quite apart from questions about the defensibility of Dobbs' reading of the Hist. an., his application of it to the Politics fails to provide anything that Aristotle would recognize as a justification for male rule. The closest we come is a claim that the male's more spirited nature enables him to ‘overrule’ his wife (86), but it is hard to see what this could mean if not that males are more prone to make threats of violence in circumstances of disagreement, and Aristotle rejects the view that superiority in force gives anyone a just claim to rule (e.g. Pol. 1.6, 1255a12–40).
54 Dobbs (n. 4), 79 anticipates this objection and dismisses it on the grounds that the husband does not delegate his own authority to his wife, but recognizes her authority over what is naturally hers. Semantic quibbles aside, whether the authority is delegated seems not to be a matter of whether the husband could rightly fail to allow his wife to exercise it, but whether the sphere of her authority is wholly subordinated to his or whether her exercise of authority is wholly subordinate to his. If the husband alone rules the entire household, and the wife rules only a subordinate part, then her authority is delegated in the sense relevant to my argument.
55 It will perhaps strike some readers as doubtful whether Aristotle takes just or correct rule to depend on the recognition by the ruled of the ruler's superior political virtue. I defend this claim at length elsewhere.
56 I translate ὑπηϱετιϰή as ‘assisting’, in line with Simpson (n. 8) (cf. Reeve's [n. 8] ‘of an assistant’) and against Saunders's (n. 8) ‘of a servant’, Lord's (n. 8) ‘serving’, and the ‘obeying’ of Lockwood (n. 6). Saunders and Lord's translations obscure the difference between wives and slaves, since ‘servant’ – despite the cultural associations that have given the word a softer set of connotations – basically means ‘slave’. Lockwood avoids this problem, but wrongly highlights obedience rather than assistance as the distinctive characteristic of female virtue: both Greek usage and the context show that assistance is the core idea here. Though ὑπηϱέται are often slaves and typically subordinates of some kind (e.g. Pol. 1.4, 1253b27–54a8; 3.16, 1287a21; 4.15, 1299a24; Rh. 1.9, 1366b13; [Ath. Pol.] 35.1, 50.2, 63.5), to assist is not inherently to be subordinate: the great-souled man eagerly assists others (Eth. Nic. 4.3, 1124b18), friends assist one another (Eth. Nic. 8.8, 1159b5; 9.2, 1164b25; Eth. Eud. 7.2, 1237b19; 7.10, 1243a21–4; 7.11, 1244a2), and one can assist others either out of kindly benevolence or calculating self-advantage (Rh. 2.7, 1385a32–b7). Aristotle's only other use of the adjective suggests that one craft is ‘assisting’ with respect to another, rather than identical to or a part of it, if it provides either material or instruments for the latter (Pol. 1.8, 1256a5). It is perhaps worth considering whether the wife's deliberative contributions can be understood as material or instruments for the husband's rule, but Aristotle does not draw this connection, and it is unclear whether the model of productive crafts can or should be applied to the husband and wife's practical deliberation. In any case, it should be clear that describing her virtues as ‘assisting’ is consistent with taking her deliberative contributions to be her most important form of assistance.
57 Female deliberative contribution is likewise consistent with Aristotle's approval of the proverb he cites at 1.13, 1260a30, ‘silence brings adornment to a woman’. Though the proverb can of course be put to a variety of uses, Aristotle's use of it surely does not commit him to holding that women should never speak, but that they should speak less than their husbands, as he seems to indicate at 3.4, 1277b23. Perhaps women should only ‘speak when they're spoken to’, but their husbands might none the less speak to them quite frequently. As Simpson (n. 13), 68 rightly argues, there is no need to see the proverb as a complex allusion to Soph. Aj. 293, as readers inclined to esoteric interpretation have (e.g. Stauffer [n. 4]), since the Sophoclean text itself describes the proverb as commonplace, and Tecmessa's rational superiority to Ajax hardly constitutes a counter-example to Aristotle's explicit claims about women.
58 For three otherwise rather different examples of this tendency, cf. Irwin, T.H., ‘The good of political activity’, in Patzig, G. (ed.), Aristotles' ‘Politik’: Akten des XI. Symposium Aristotelicum 1987 (Göttingen, 1990), 73–101Google Scholar; Mulgan, R., ‘Aristotle and the value of political participation’, Political Theory 18 (1990), 192–215CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Nichols (n. 4), 33.
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