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The Philosophical Origins of Patriarchy

Plato, Hippocrates, and Aristotle laid the foundations on which centuries of sexism were built.

By Christia Mercer

JULY 1, 2019

Why are Republican men so eager to subjugate women’s bodies?

Among the 25 Alabama state senators who voted on May 14 to pass the country’s most
repressive restriction on women’s health care, every single one was a man, many of them joyous
in protecting the sanctity of motherhood and saving women from themselves. One of the
sponsors of the bill, Senator Clyde Chambliss, defended the “purity” of the law, which denies
abortion to survivors of rape or incest, explaining, “When God creates the miracle of life inside a
woman’s womb, it is not our place as human beings to extinguish that life.” Whatever else we
might say about Chambliss’s argument, it has an ancient pedigree and impeccable logic: It is the
duty of those men able to discern the divine goodness in the world to protect women’s
procreative powers.

The audacity of Chambliss’s pronouncements can be traced back through hundreds of

generations of powerful men to the earliest writings on women’s bodies. If patriarchy is the
system by means of which men control women and, in the recent words of Kate Manne, sexism
is “the branch of patriarchal ideology that justifies and rationalizes a patriarchal social order,”
then misogyny is “the system that polices and enforces” patriarchy’s “governing norms and
expectations.”
Ancient intellectual greats like Plato, Hippocrates, and Aristotle laid the foundations on which
centuries of sexism were built. Although these Greek authors did not invent sexism, their
writings contained ideas and arguments that were used to rationalize a particularly virulent form
of misogyny. Once these ancient trend-setters devised arguments for female subjugation in the
name of a divine good, it became self-confirming in the sense that women were taken to be
naturally inferior to men, treated differently from birth, and trained to subjugate themselves,

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which itself further supported views about female imperfection and the disempowerment that
entailed.

To be sure, at every stage of Western thought, there were women who were resourceful and
rebellious within the restrictions forced upon them. In almost every era, there were moments
when the tide might have turned away from ardent sexism. But it never did. The proponents of
female inferiority were always victorious. The ancient Greek arguments for sexism both
reflected and supported patriarchy, and gave powerful men what they considered to be excellent
reasons to control women’s bodies in the name of the good. However resilient women were,
misogynistic enforcement of divine order always won out.

The notion of teleology—and its relation to female procreative powers—helps to cast the history
of misogyny into sharp focus. The simplest version of teleology is that some things happen, or
exist, for the sake of other things. If I read The Nation for the sake of political and social insight,
then the latter can be identified as the end or goal of the former. From Plato and Aristotle to
Chambliss and Mike Pence, powerful men have believed in a divinely created natural order in
which human beings should act for the sake of the good. For many such thinkers, women’s
procreative powers were their only means to contribute to the good, from which it followed that
those powers must be properly controlled by men with insight into divine intentions.
Plato’s account of the health of the soul and the steps required to achieve the good set the stage
for millennia of discrimination against women. In the Phaedo, Socrates argues that a soul will
not attain “the true moral ideal” unless it purges itself of bodily concerns and“abides in reason.”
The Platonic soul appears to be genderless, from which it would seem to follow that women’s
souls are identical in power and capacities to men’s. And yet women are virtually absent as
interlocutors in the dialogues, even as the sacrificial victims of the Socratic method.

How might someone who endorses Plato’s views about soul, body, and the good explain the
paucity of female interlocutors in the dialogues? Might there be something about a woman’s
body that makes it harder for her soul to “purge” itself of bodily associations so as “to
concentrate itself by itself”? A Platonist could consistently believe both that all souls are equal in
capacities and that female bodies are more difficult for the genderless soul to escape. Plato

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suggests something like this in the Timaeus, his mythic account of how the world might have
been created. There, the narrator spins a tale according to which the gods first created men and
then punished those “who lived lives of cowardice or injustice” by turning them into women in
their next lives. That is, the Timaeus suggests that women are a degraded state of humanity, a
kind of punishment that follows from unwise behavior. What about women’s bodies might make
them so degraded?
The earliest period for which we have detailed written accounts of women’s bodies is classical
Greece of the fifth and fourth centuries BCE, the period when various texts, long associated with
Hippocrates, were written. These multi-authored medical writings, roughly a quarter of which
concern the health and diseases of women, contain the first clear differentiation of female and
male bodies and were foundational in the Western medical tradition.

The Hippocratic authors agree that the bones or infrastructure of a human body are covered with
flesh, which is constituted of different kinds of fluids, which themselves are more or less hot or
cold and moist or dry. Before the advent of dissection, an account of the body based on fluids
must have seemed eminently plausible: A human body is full of blood, guts, bile, and stuff to be
vomited; and such fluids do seem fungible in that, say, food becomes other sorts of fluids which
have a range of qualities. If we endorse the idea that human flesh is fundamentally a collection of
fluids in various forms of “concoction,” then it is reasonable to see human health as depending
on their proper balance. In the words of one Hippocratic author, a human being “enjoys the
greatest health, when these [fluids] are in balance to each other in terms of mixture, power, and
quantity.”

Two features of the female body convinced the Hippocratic authors of a crucial difference
between female and male bodies: Women have menses and a womb (or uterus). The need for
women to bleed regularly was taken to prove female flesh to be moist, porous, spongy, and cold,
in contradistinction to men’s dry, firm, hard, and warm flesh. Because of their cold sponginess,
women’s bodies absorb more fluids, must shed blood regularly, and so are naturally imbalanced.
Because the heat and dryness of men’s bodies absorbs excess liquid, they do not need to
menstruate and semen is the only excess fluid they emit. Women’s health, then, is more tenuous
than men’s, in that it depends on their bodies’ powers either to use up or expel excess fluids.

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The Hippocratic texts seem to imagine a woman’s anatomy as a central tube with mouths at
either end. Both mouths have a neck (cervix) and lips (labia), which are connected by a
subsystem of tubes and containers. When the tubes and pathways are working properly, there is a
clear passageway between the two mouths. A neat experiment to detect if a woman is fertile
involves putting garlic in her vagina at night and then examining her breath the next morning. If
her breath smells of garlic, her tubes are clear and she is open for business, that is to say, for
conception. But when the pathways are not working properly and the fluids are out of balance,
she will not be fertile, and illness will occur: “Now when, in a woman who has not given birth,
the menses fail to appear and cannot find their way out, a disease arises.” An imbalance in fluids
can have a tragic impact on mental health. For example, sometimes at the onset of puberty, a girl
will be bleeding “copiously,” but the blood will “have no means of egress” so that it “leaps
up…to the diaphragm.” The results of this are symptoms that include aggression and the
tendency for girls “to leap around, to fall down into wells and to hang themselves,” and to “take
on a desire for death, as if it were a good thing.”

The second distinguishing mark of women’s bodies, the womb, is critical to her health. The
infamous “wandering womb” theory is rooted in the idea that the womb is kept in place only
when a woman’s fluids are properly balanced. When they become imbalanced, the womb is more
likely to “turn aside” from its proper position, often in search of hydration. Doctors must keep
close tabs on this most important of female parts because “when the uterus moves out of its
natural position, wherever it comes to rest it provokes violent pains” and illness. Cures involve
rebalancing of fluids, especially the kind resulting from heterosexual sex. The remedy for many
health problems requires the woman to “have intercourse with her husband.” One author offers a
simple way to cure inappropriate behavior in adolescent girls: “My advice to young girls…is to
have sexual intercourse with a man as soon as possible.” Even better is for the girl to become
pregnant, so that her excess blood can be wholly emitted. That is, a woman is more likely to be
healthy when she is married and has lots of sex with her husband so that her fluids are fully
employed and thereby properly balanced.

It’s easy for modern readers to respond to Hippocratic theories with ridicule. But to brush them
aside as bad science is to miss a crucial point about Western medicine, its construction of

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gendered bodies, and persistent sexism. These first gynecologists, who seem genuinely
concerned about their patients’ well-being, took the flourishing of every single woman to be
bound up with her reproductive organs and related fluids, so that her health and the good of her
society depended on her subjugation to procreation.Mothers, fathers, husbands, and of course
young women themselves were led to believe that female health demanded regular sexual
intercourse and pregnancy.

When the Hippocratic authors placed women in bondage to their procreative powers and to their
husbands, they initiated a long-standing strategy in Western thought of reducing women’s health
to their reproductive capacity and making men their wardens.

To return to the question provoked by the Phaedo, might there be something about women’s
bodies that makes it harder for them to purge their souls of bodily associations? The answer in
the Hippocratic corpus is compelling: Women’s physical and mental health requires them to
engage regularly in heterosexual sex and to procreate. Were a woman to be moved by the
rightness of Plato’s account of the good and its demand to reject bodily concerns, she would
have to choose between the health of her soul and that of her body. And were she to choose the
health of her soul, then the Hippocratic corpus suggests that her body would likely suffer illness,
which would in turn diminish her mental capacities.
Robust teleology is the animating impulse of Aristotle’s philosophy. All living things seek the
good, which for humans is “rational activity in accordance with virtue.” Although Aristotle’s
ethical writings suggest that women might attain virtue, his biological works tell a different
story. When women produce “another creature of the same kind as the former,” they contribute
to the good, though that is their only significant contribution. They cannot attain full virtue and
happiness, since their cold and “heavy” blood renders them less spirited and more inclined to
vice. We can begin to understand what led Western philosophy’s first systematic biologist to
proclaim, “the female is…a mutilated male” and must be treated accordingly. “As regards the
sexes,” writes Aristotle in the Politics, “the male is by nature superior and the female inferior,
the male the ruler and the female the subject.” Aristotle’s works exemplify how easy it was for
ancient thinkers to see all the parts of nature as fundamentally good and all human beings as
actively contributing to the good, while comfortably accommodating female inferiority and
subjugation as a part of the world’s order.

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It is almost impossible to exaggerate the influence these ancient ideas had on the history of
Western thought.

Plato’s views about the soul and its need to “dwell in itself” grounded early Christian
commitments to spiritual purification and celibacy, supporting centuries of misogyny. As Paul
insists in the New Testament, “A woman must quietly receive instruction with entire
submissiveness,” for “I do not allow a woman to teach or exercise authority over a man, but to
remain quiet” (Timothy 2:12).

Aristotle’s philosophical and biological proposals were mixed with Hippocratic ideas, found
their way into medieval Christian, Jewish, and Islamic thought, and became the centerpiece of
Europe’s first universities. Whether young men studied philosophy, theology, law, or medicine,
they absorbed the causes and extent of female inferiority. Medical doctors through the 19th
century continued to rely on Aristotelian and Hippocratic medical ideas. One prominent
Victorian doctor, referring explicitly to these ancient sources, describes the attitude physicians
take toward their female patients, “We are the stronger, and they the weaker. They are obliged to
believe all that we tell them. They are not in a position to dispute anything we say to them, and
we, therefore, may be said to have them at our mercy.” We see the same smug pride in the
pronouncements of Chambliss and his ilk: These men are the wise wardens of women’s bodies.

It’s unsettling to witness the ease with which a few men writing over two millennia ago laid the
groundwork for centuries of sexism. It’s crushing to realize that so many of our contemporaries
embrace the logic of those ancient arguments and happily subjugate women’s bodies in the name
of the good. But I find some comfort in understanding how these sexist attitudes arose, how they
maintained themselves, and how utterly contingent they are. If knowledge is power, then
understanding the ancient sources of current misogyny might aid us in the ferocious fight we
now face to wrench our health and our bodies out of the hands of conservative men and their
false sense of the good.