Women and the Ideal Society: Plato's "Republic" and Modern Myths of Gender (review)

Book Reviews Natalie Harris Bluestone. Women and the Ideal Society: Plato's "Republic" and Modern Myths of Gender. Amherst: The University of Massachusetts Press, 1987. Pp. x + 238. Cloth, $25.00. Paper, $11.95. The stated aim of Bluestone's book is intriguing: to uncover systematic biases in scholarship (from roughly 1870 to the present) on Plato's discussion of women's role in the ideal state. The book does not disappoint. It is clear, scholarly, and scrupulously fair. It is a delight. A little less than half the book is devoted to Plato scholarship from 1870 to 197o, or from the first English translation of Plato's complete dialogues by Benjamin Jowett to the advent of the past two decades of feminist scholarship on Plato. Here Bluestone describes several types of antifemale bias among Plato scholars. The first, by commentators in many languages, including Karl Popper in The Open Societyand Its Enemies, is to ignore Plato's proposal for sexual equality; the issue is not deemed important enough to discuss. Among those who do not ignore it, the most common bias, Bluestone claims, is a denial of Plato's view that sexual equality is "according to nature." Most of those who deny this simply accept without evidence that there are natural differences between the sexes. Included among these scholars are Benjamin Jowett, Walter Pater, A. E. Taylor, and Leo Strauss. Bluestone names another bias: "Plato Didn't Really Mean It." Most well-known among proponents of this view is, of course, Allan Bloom. Bluestone takes Bloom's arguments seriously here and throughout this book; her objections to them are scholarly , patient, and thorough. Following her discussion of four other biases, she considers two nineteenthcentury , unbiased exceptions: George Grote and Theodor Gomperz. Here, as elsewhere , she argues her case. Bluestone herself is a feminist who believes that we should abandon separate-but-equal roles for women and men. She believes that women's subjection is wrong on utilitarian grounds: it is harmful to everyone. She is skeptical of and argues at length against claims that there are "natural" differences between males and females; she wants to wait and see. But regardless of whatever "natural" differences unbiased researchers may find, Bluestone believes it is a mistake to try to derive desirable human behavior from women's and men's biological natures. It is with these beliefs that she critiques post-197o feminist scholarship on Plato, and here she discovers different sorts of biases. Many contemporary commentators on Plato, Bluestone says, fall into one of two camps: those who accept and those who reject Plato as a feminist. She argues that [283] 284 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 28:2 APRIL t99o acceptance or rejection depends on how they view the inconsistencies in Plato's views on women. Among those in the first camp are "informed" defenders such as Martha Lee Osborne, Christine B. Allen, and the classicist Dorothea Wender. Also in the first camp, but "misinformed," argues Bluestone, are Joseph Ghougassian, Mary Cohart, and Elizabeth G. Davis. Among the second camp, those who reject Plato as a feminist, there are also the informed (e.g., Julia Annas) and the misinformed (e.g., Elizabeth Janeway). Bluestone is very careful to spell out the arguments of and her oppositions to both the informed and the misinformed commentators. Bluestone also pays special attention to the views of Susan Moiler Okin and Jane Roland Martin, and to critiquing those who find Plato an enemy because he values "masculine" reason over "feminine" ways of being. Included here are Jean Elshtain and Carol Gilligan. Once again, Bluestone is thorough and fair in presenting their arguments, and very careful with her objections to them. Bluestone believes that the major contemporary issues of sex equality are all broached in Book 5 of Plato's Republic, and even that the order in which they are raised is to the point. Thus she is able to accomplish several things at once: to discuss these issues, to analyze and critique historical and contemporary scholarship on Plato's views of sex equality, and, in the final portion of the book, to discuss and critique (as a kind of update on Book 5...