Women as citizens in Plato's "politeia”

Abstract

Plato seems to be a feminist only in our imagination. It is extremely utopic even to imagine that, as a modern thinker, he would play a leading part in any claim for the improvement of the individual conditions of life and women. This, nevertheless, conceals, in my current opinion, a long settled matter for him, as to the conflict of the two sexes. The deconstruction of the concept of gender in the Republic where women philosophers also rule, could characterise him as a post-modern philosopher, to a greater extent than we gradually discover him to be. He renounces conflicts between men and women as belonging to a world that is more aggressively modernised and seemingly sensitised to the human rights, our own modern world, where people still oppress each other, fight and kill each other, excluded from the blissfulness of the Platonic Utopia.