Women's Rights

Aristotle’s views on women include the beliefs that women are incomplete; a woman is an “unfinished man.” It is unfortunate that his views of women were so misguided, but most people shared these views, so Aristotle cannot be blamed. In the current era, it has been proven that women are just as capable as men; both sexes are equal. Many ideas from so far back have been proven wrong, and the views on women were among these. However, Plato had more positive views of women and their level of intelligence, and he lived in the same era as Aristotle. Plato believed that women had the sense of logic as men, so they would be able to reason just as well. Thomas Aquinas, who Christianized Aristotle’s philosophical views, shared his thought that women are the lesser sex. He bases this on the description of how woman was made from man in the Bible. John Locke gets a little closer to feminism, but he does not outright believe that women are equal to men; he just believes that women should have more rights than they currently had. Marquis de Condorcet, a philosopher during the French Enlightenment, was more in favor of women’s rights, based on his philosophy; he even published his writings on the subject. Olympe de Gouges may not be considered a well-known philosopher, but she voiced her strong opinions on equality of the sexes during the French Revolution. In my opinion, philosophy discusses the world around us and inside us, which affects everyone, no matter their sex or race, so everyone should be able to make their opinion known. It is certainly regrettable women have not contributed much to the history of philosophy. One can only assume that if they had been included, more brilliant ideas from earlier centuries could have been saved. However, philosophy is not the only academic discipline from which women have been excluded. The fact that female philosophers are not included in the novel is not unusual or surprising. Women were not educated as men were, even as recently as in the last century. John Locke was one of the first philosophers to be notably interested in women’s rights, and he was born in the seventeenth century. When Locke first introduced his ideas of women’s rights, it was a new, radical idea. He influenced John Stuart Mill, who studied philosophy in the nineteenth century. “Equal rights” for women is a fairly new concept, comparatively.