E LEMENTOS C LAVE DE LA G ESTIÓN DE C ALIDAD T OTAL

In order to fill in the lack of primary texts, historians frequently indicate misogynist pagan and Christian thinkers as the source of constraints placed upon women. Part of the problem stems not from historical evidence, but from ideology gleaned from such texts. What scholars do not often discuss, and what we need to discuss more is how the work of feminist historians and historiographers is inhibited by our acceptance and reproduction of the singular,

dominant, and misogynist Greco-Roman ideology itself. We believe historical women did not participate in life outside the home because ideology indicates they were constrained from doing so. The ideology is the one that tells us, assures us, requires us to believe that ancient women did not participate in philosophical or rhetorical tasks, except in rare and exceptional circumstances. For example, Aristotle tells us, “. . . silence is a woman‟s glory”7 (Aristotle qtd. in Lefkowitz and Fant 39). St. Paul asserts “. . . women should keep silent . . . they have no permission to talk, but should keep their place as the law directs” (1 Corinthians 33-34 qtd. in Lefkowitz and Fant). St. Paul also did not “. . . permit women to teach or dictate to the men”8

(1 Timothy 2:12 qtd. in Lefkowitz and Fant). In the second century ACE, Tertullian admonishes women “And do you not know you are Eve? God‟s sentence hangs still over all your sex and His punishment weighs

down upon you. You are the devil‟s gateway” (Greenspan 52). Our frequent dependence on only well-known and canonical texts does nothing to help make the activities of ancient women visible. In fact, while these texts provide evidence of misogyny, dependence only on such texts suggests, even unintentionally, that misogynist ideals were the only ideals in the ancient world when, in fact, they were not.

My concern with overdependence on canonical texts to determine ideology that may have constrained women‟s activities is twofold. For one, given the sometime random survival of

ancient texts, dependant not only on preservation, but also on archaeological finds and historical and contemporary processes of selection, we cannot be sure that texts written by women or from the viewpoints of women, do not exist.9 Indeed, this is the argument Joseph P. Ghougassian

7 _{Lefkowitz, Mary R and Maureen B. Fant. Women’s Life in Greece and Rome: A Source book in Translation 2}nd

edition. p 39.

8 _{There is a debate among biblical scholars about whether Paul actually wrote against women speaking and teaching.}

It is possible that he did not and that the early Church shaped the passages as part of the seven Ecumenical

Conferences whose goal was, in part, to make Church dogma consistent in order to assure its power into the future.

9 _{In fact, Pomeroy identifies texts from Hellenistic Alexandria that include alternate and positive depictions of}

makes in his 1977 text Toward Women: The Study of the Origins of Western Attitudes Through Greco-Roman Philosophy. Ghougassian notes Greek and Roman philosophers argued that the capacities of men and women were similar. Ghougassian lists Greek writers, namely Pythagoras, Socrates, Plato, Aristophanes, Euripides, Sophocles, Thucydides and the Pre-Socratics, in this category. Ghougassian identifies the grammarian Sextus Empiricus, for example, who argued against the generic term „man‟ because of its vagueness; “. . . if by man we mean the male then any logical definition that makes use of that word—excludes the female; if by man we mean the human race, then the male is lost” (Ghougassian Toward Women 122). Among the Romans,

Ghougassian identifies Lucian, Seneca, Musonius Rufus, and Plutarch of Chaeronea. Familiarity with the works of such authors is vital for any understanding of the complex, and sometimes conflicting ideologies concerning women that existed in the Greek and Roman worlds. Conflicting ideologies suggest that women may have had more opportunities than previously imagined.

Sister Prudence Allen‟s The Concept of Woman: The Aristotelian Revolution 750 BCE-

1250 AD makes a similar argument. Allen‟s text traces the concept of Woman in philosophical discourse from the Pre-Socratics through the early thirteenth century. In her claim that

philosophers always considered women, she names four repeating ideologies or theories about women: sex complementarity, sex unity, sex neutrality, and sex polarity and traces them through philosophy from 750 BCE. (Allen 3). She also argues that Plato‟s and Aristotle‟s perspectives about women were conflated in the middle ages by scholars working from incomplete texts, or by those who did not understand Greek to translate it well. The conflation of the two

philosophers‟ theories eventually became institutionalized at the University of Paris where Plato

was recreated in other institutions, and in the thirteenth century, the conflation of Plato and Aristotle spread across Europe. Many Medieval philosophers were dependant on the

institutionalized and simplified philosophies of Plato and Aristotle and built their own work on misconstrued ideas. The result has been an oversimplification of what is, in fact, a range of philosophical ideas about women and the edification of Plato and Aristotle to canonical status concerning philosophical questions about gender.

The resulting concept of Woman persists into the present day. Few scholars can discuss the ancient Greek history of rhetoric or philosophy without mention of Plato and Aristotle. While their work directly addresses rhetoric in particular, my second concern is about the perpetuation of Woman as a category, particularly in Aristotle‟s work. I am not interested in arguing that Plato and Aristotle should be ignored, devalued, or stricken from our historical canon because it is an unreasonable argument. Rather, the point I am making is that there are other authors and texts with which feminist historiographers may choose to engage, texts that represent a broad variety of ideologies from the ancient world and that support women‟s value, thinking, capacities, and abilities. Choosing to engage with texts presenting positive theories about women may allow us to define more clearly a classical tradition of rhetoric inclusive of women. Such texts may also provide a wider variety of practices, models, and examples that can help to shift our assumptions about ancient women, and aid feminist scholars to ask better, more complex questions.

Indeed, feminist scholars of rhetoric are perhaps best suited to identify the rhetorical nature of misogynistic texts like those of Aristotle, St. Paul, and Tertullian. These texts do not represent the reality of women‟s lives accurately; they merely identify some ideological

assumptions. Misogynist ideology may very well have been dominant in the ancient world, but it was not the only ideology. Furthermore, the insistence of it in the ancient world suggests that

patriarchy was frequently threatened. Women were not universally silent in the ancient world, and we should not allow misogynist ideology to inhibit our ability to recover women and their work. Yes, the works containing proscriptions for women written by Aristotle, St. Paul, Tertullian, and many others were meant to prevent women from participating in society. If women were not active, why bother speaking and writing against them at all? Reading from a position of resistance and deep disbelief makes visible how proscriptions were necessary because women already were active or wanted to be active when these authors were writing. Rather than understand admonitions as the creation and maintenance of actual constraint upon historical women to engage in rhetorical practices of all kinds, we need to reverse the reversal and assume that such texts functioned as counter-discourses to women‟s actual activities. Locating times in which admonitions were unusually common may be a way of pinpointing historical periods of women‟s activity, of re-membering them. Understanding Classical Athens in this way suggests

numerous rhetorical activities by women rather than complete exclusion. Identifying particular patterns of concerns among male leaders may help us narrow our searches to other places and times in which women were very active. Is it possible that scholars have confused the ideology of these great men with the material reality of women‟s lives? The philosophers, rhetoricians,

and teachers included throughout this text and in the appendices are examples that confusion between ideology and material reality of women‟s lives may be so. By understanding canonical

and misogynist texts as counter-discourse to inhibit women‟s activities we may be better able to re-member ancient women.

New scholarship since the 1990s by classicists, archaeologists, and art historians revisits the lives of ancient women and provides new interpretations. An example of contemporary scholarship, which addresses the issue of archaeological evidence as offering new ways of

understanding the reality of Greek women that is not recorded in literary texts, is Joan Breton Connelly‟s Portrait of a Priestess: Women and Ritual in Ancient Greece. Connelly‟s study of

archaeological, literary, and artistic evidence suggests that the material realities of Greek women were indeed, very different from misogynist ancient texts. Dependence on evidence that unveils practices that contradict ideological texts for ancient women is one way to realign ourselves as gynocentric and may allow feminist scholars to identify important historical periods and venues where we may begin searching for foremothers in order to fill the 1500-year absence of women‟s history with women‟s voices.