FEMINIST CRITIQUE ON ARISTOTLE GENDER PERSPECTIVE

The research work titled “Feminist Critique on Aristotle Gender Perspective” examined Aristotle notion on women in the society. Aristotle gave equal weight to women's happiness as he did to men's, commenting in his Rhetoric that a society cannot be happy unless women are happy too. Aristotle believed that in nature a common good came of the rule of a superior being, states in his Politics that by nature the female has been distinguished from the slave. For many feminist scholars, often without a specialist grounding in ancient philosophy, Aristotle has come to represent the very base or foundation of western misogyny. Non-feminist historians of philosophy have tended, however, to pull too firmly in the opposite direction. This research is a Qualitative research. Data were sourced from books, journals and the internet. The research adopts expository and evaluative methods. The expository method was used to expose Aristotle notion on gender. The evaluative method was used to examine Aristotle’s gender perspective and how it’s related to the contemporary times. Finding revealed that, Aristotle compares between male and female that the former by nature is superior and ruler, the latter inferior and subject, Aristotle concludes that women are inferior beings who cannot participate in political activity because of their shortcomings in reason. He believes that the deliberative faculty in the soul is present in a female but ineffective, thus not qualified for politics that requires reasoning and virtues. The research therefore concludes that, in the modern society, however, arguments presented by Aristotle to advance his ideologies cannot be easily accepted. Numerous examples exist to show that women can actually perform better than men in a number of ways. Whether in politics, education, or at work, negative attitudes about women are quickly fading away.