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Some quick thoughts on one point in yesterday’s Agnes Callard op-ed concerning Aristotle on women 1/
The passage in question is Politics 1.13: "For the slave wholly lacks the deliberative capacity, while the faemale has it, but without authority." 2/
In A's pol thought, deliberation (along w/ judgment) is one of the two activities that define who is a citizen. So if a woman can deliberate, then why is she cast outside the bounds of politics and relegated to the household? 3/
Feminist political theorists of all stripes (Saxonhouse & Okin in particular) & classicists point to authority as the operative part of A's claim. Authority "kurios" referred to status of male Athenian citizen to speak as rep of household before the delib assembly (ekklesia) 4/
Women were therefore only authoritative insofar as their voices were represented by their kurios in any kind of political or legal proceeding: negotiating marriage contracts, property disputes, religious rites. See McClure, Spoken Like A Woman 5/
Campa-Thompson shows in I Do What I Want that only in very few cases could women become kurios in their own right, usually when their male next-of-kin died, leaving no male heirs, and therefore leaving women to hold property. 6/
But Callard seems to attribute a normative claim to Aristotle: that women's *shouldn't* be authoritative decision-makers. This is where things get interesting. 7/
Later in 1.13, Aristotle says that when trying to understanding whether and how women can deliberate but lack authority, they should consider something that Sophocles' said: "Silence is the good order of women" (Anne Carson's translation). 8/
As expected, a man (Ajax) says this to his wife (Tecmessa) to shush her for trying to talk him out of doing Very Bad Things that result in him dying gruesomely. V. Sophoclean. 9/
Saxonhouse, Nichols, and @AdrielTrott have argued that this line shows that Aristotle is saying that when women's voices are not listened to in decision-making, the quality of decision-making in a political community (like Athens) suffers. 10/
I argue that what's interesting here is that A. is not just talking about women, but making a more intersectional claim. The woman in question (Tecmessa) is a woman, yes, but also Ajax's slave whom he captured in a foreign war (the Trojan one). 11/
Tecmessa, as a non-citizen, could therefore not be represented. AND Ajax, by Athens' standards, would have been stripped of his kurios status due to lacking in a sound mind (Athena strikes him with insanity before he shushes T. and does the Very Bad Thing). 12/
Tecmessa stands as this woman, foreigner, and slave--all subjugated classes in A's Athens--w/o any means of becoming politically or legally kurios. Yet she is the one who tries to convince everyone else in the play, who also shush her, to not do More Very Bad Things. 13/
In my diss chapter, I talk about how Tecmessa's status (or lack thereof) offers 1) a more complicated view of A in the passages that Callard cites in her op-ed and...14/
2) prompts us to question how voices like Tecmessa's can become legible as authoritative when they are not listened to in the first place. 15/
Long story short: pace Callard, no one (as far as I know) is suggesting that we cancel A. and A., for me, points us to voices that have been silenced, erased in political theory. 16/
