A. Aristotle (4th century B.C.) on the nature of women from Politics,
I:5, 12, 13, trans. B. Jowett (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1885), 8, 22-23,
24-25.
Once Aristotle's works were rediscovered by medieval Europe in the
12th century, his ideas caused a significant impact. He reduced the role
of women in procreation to that of ‘prime matter' awaiting the ‘forming'
or ‘moving' agency of the man's semen. He defined ‘female' as the inability
to emulate the ideal ‘male' functions. His ideas tended to confirm
existing equations of women with ‘matter' and ‘body', and of men with ‘spirit'
or ‘soul'.
First then we may observe in living creatures both a despotical and a constitutional rule; for the soul rules the body with a despotical rule, whereas the intellect rules the appetites with a constitutional and a royal rule. And it is clear that the rule of the soul over the body, and of the mind and the rational element over the passionate is natural and expedient; whereas the equality of the two or the rule of the inferior is always hurtful. The same holds good of animals as well as of men; for tame animals have a better nature than wild, and all tame animals are better off when they are ruled by man; for then they are preserved. Again, the male is by nature superior, and the female inferior; and the one rules, and the other is ruled; this principle, of necessity extends to all mankind.
Of household management we have seen that there are three parts - one
is that rule of a master over slaves, which has been discussed already,
another of a father, and the third of a husband. A husband and father
rules over wife and children, both free, but the rule differs, the rule
over his children being a royal, over his wife a constitutional rule.
For although there may be exceptions to the order of nature, the male is
by nature fitter for command than the female, just as the elder and full-grown
is superior to the younger and more immature. But in most constitutional
states the citizens rule and are ruled by turns, for the idea of a constitutional
state implies that the natures of the citizens are equal, and do not differ
at all. Nevertheless, when one rules and the other is ruled we endeavor
to create a difference of outward forms and names and titles of respect
...
The relation of the male to the female is of this kind, but there
the inequality is permanent. The rule of a father over his children
is royal, for he receives both love and the respect due to age, exercising
a kind of royal power. And therefore Homer has appropriately called
Zeus ‘father of the Gods and men,' because he is the king of them all.
For a king is the natural superior of his subjects, but he should be of
the same kin or kind with them, and such is the relation of elder and younger,
of father and son.
Now is obvious that the same principle applies generally, and therefore
almost all things rule and are ruled according to nature. But the
kind of rule differs - the freeman rules over the slave after another manner
from that in which the male rules over the female, or the man over the
child; although the parts of the soul are present in all of them, they
are present in different degrees. For the slave has no deliberative
faculty at all; the woman has, but it is without authority, and the child
has, but it is immature. So it must necessarily be with the moral
virtues also; all may be supposed to partake of them, but only in such
manner and degree as is required by each for the fulfillment of his duty.
Hence the ruler ought to have moral virtue in perfection, for his duty
is entirely that of a master artificer, and the master artificer is reason;
the subjects, on the other hand, require only that measure of virtue which
is proper to each of them. Clearly then, moral virtue belongs to
all of them; but the temperance of a man and of a woman, or the courage
and justice of a man and of a woman, are not, as Socrates maintained, the
same; the courage of a man is shown in commanding, of a woman in obeying.
And this holds of all other virtues, as will be more clearly seen if we
look at them in detail, for those who say generally that virtue consists
in a good disposition of the soul, or in doing rightly, or the like, only
deceive themselves. Far better than such definitions is their mode
of speaking, who, like Gorgias, enumerate their virtues. All classes
must be deemed to have their special attributes, as the poet says of women,
"Silence is a woman's glory," but this is not equally the glory of man.
The child is imperfect, and therefore obviously his virtue is not relative
to himself alone, but to the perfect man and to his teacher, and in like
manner the virtue of the slave is relative to a master.
B. Aristotle, from De generatione animalium (On the Generation of Animals)
1. Semen is pretty certainly a residue from that nourishment which is in the form of blood and which, as being the final form of nourishment, is distributed to the various parts of the body. This, of course, is the reason why semen has great potency - the loss of it from the system is as exhausting as the loss of pure healthy blood ....
2. Now (i) the weaker creature too must of necessity produce a residue, greater in amount and less thoroughly concocted; and (ii) this, if such is its character, must of necessity be a volume of bloodlike fluid. (iii) That which by nature has a smaller share of head is weaker; and (iv) the female answers to this description ...
3. Now it is impossible that any creature should produce two seminal secretions at once, and since the secretion in females which answers to semen in males is the menstrual fluid, it obviously follows that the female does not contribute any semen to generation; for if there were semen, there would be no menstrual fluid; but as menstrual fluid is in fact formed, therefore there is no semen ...
4. By now it is plain that the contribution which the female makes to generation [ie., to conception] is the matter used therein, that this is to be found in the substance constituting the menstrual fluid, and finally that the menstrual fluid is a residue ... A woman is as it were an infertile male; the female, in fact, is female on account of inability of a sort, namely it lacks the power to concoct semen out of the final state of nourishment ... because of the coldness of its nature ...
5. The male provides the ‘form' and the ‘principle of the movement', the female provides the body, in other words, the material. Compare the coagulation of milk. Here, the milk is the body, and the fig-juice or the rennet [which ancient peoples used to make milk curdle] contains the principle which causes it to set ...
6. When the semen has entered the uterus it ‘sets' the residue produced by the female and imparts to it the same movement with which it is itself endowed. The female's contribution, of course, is a residue too .. and contains all the parts of the body potentially, though none in actuality; and ‘all' includes those parts which distinguish the two sexes. Just as it sometimes happens that deformed offspring are produced by deformed parents, and sometimes not, so the offspring produced by a female are sometimes female, sometimes not ... The reason is that the female is as it were a deformed male; and the menstrual discharge is semen, though in an impure condition; ie., it lacks one constituent, and one only, the principle of Soul.
7. An animal is a living body, a body with Soul in it. The female always provides the material, the male provides that which fashions the material into shape; this, in our view, is the specific characteristic of each of the sexes: that is what it means to be male or female. Hence, necessity requires that the female should provide the physical part, i.e., a quantity of material, but not that the male should do so, since necessity does not require that the tools should reside in the product being made, nor that the agent which uses them should do so. Thus the physical part, the body, comes from the female, and the Soul from the male, since the Soul is the essence of any particular body.
8. Once birth has taken place everything reaches its perfection sooner in females than in males - e.g., puberty, maturity, old age - because females are colder and weaker in their nature; and we should look upon the female state as being as it were a deformity, though one which occurs in the ordinary course of nature. While it is within the mother, then, it develops slowly on account of its coldness, since development is a sort of concoction, concoction is effected by heat, and if a thing is hotter its concoction is easy; when, however, it is free from the mother, on account of its weakness it quickly approaches its maturity and old age, since inferior things all reach their end more quickly.
C. Galen (131-201 A.D.), from On the Usefulness of the Parts of
the Body
Galen was the court physician to the Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius.
He was widely recognized as the most learned and famous doctor of his age,
and his writings became the standard medical texts in Western Europe for
the next thousand years and more. He differed a bit from Aristotle
(he acknowledged that females contributed ‘seed' to conception, where Aristotle
had denied this; this is because Galen knew of ovaries, where Aristotle
had been ignorant of them), but in most matters he supported Aristotle's
notion of the hierarchical nature of the sexes. He is especially
significant in propounding the theory of the complementarity of generative
organs; that is, that women's genitalia are the exact inverse of men's.
1. Now just as mankind is the most perfect of animals, so within mankind the man is more perfect than the woman, and the reason for his perfection is excess of heat, for heat is Nature's primary instrument. Hence in those animals that have less of it, her workmanship is necessarily more imperfect, and so it is no wonder that the female is less perfect than the male by as much as she is colder than he. In fact, just as the mole has imperfect eyes, ... so too the woman is less perfect than the man in respect to the generative parts [ie., the genitalia]. Fro the parts were formed within her when she was still a fetus, but could not because of the defect of heat emerge and project on the outside, and this, though making the animal itself that was being formed less perfect than one that is complete in all respects, provided no small advantage for the race; for there needs must be a female. Indeed, you ought not to think that our Creator would purposely make half of the whole race imperfect and, as it were, mutilated, unless there was to be some great advantage in such a mutilation.
2. Let me tell what this is. The fetus needs abundant material both when it is first constituted and for the entire period of growth that follows ... Accordingly it was better for the female to be made colder so that she cannot disperse all the nutriment which she concocts and elaborates .. This is the reason why the female was made cold, and the immediate consequences of this is the imperfection of the parts, which cannot emerge on the outside on account of the defect of the heat, another very great advantage for the continuance of the race. For, remaining within, that which would have become the scrotum if it had emerged on the outside was made into the substance of the uterus, an instrument fitted to receive and retain the semen and to nourish and perfect the fetus.
3. Forthwith, of course, the female must have smaller, less perfect testes, and the semen generated in them must be scantier, colder, and wetter (for these things follow of necessity from the deficient heat). Certainly such semen would be incapable of generating an animal ... The testes of the male are as much larger as he is the warmer animal. The semen generated in them, having received the peak of concoction, becomes in effect the efficient principal of the animal [that is, male semen is the active principal; it creates and provides form]. Thus, from one principle devised by the Creator in his wisdom, that principle in accordance with which the female has been made less perfect than the male, have stemmed all these things useful for the generation of the animal: that the parts of the female cannot escape to the outside; that she accumulates an excess of useful nutriment and has imperfect semen and a hollow instrument to receive the perfect semen; that since everything in the male is the opposite [of what it is in the female], the male member has been elongated to be most suitable for coitus and the excretion of semen; and that his semen itself has been made thick, abundant, and warm.
D. For other pagan views, see Amt, 29-35