Approval and Condemnation: Must they be based on Morality?

[Yoshie Furuhashi]

>At 03:02 18-05-01, you wrote:
>
>>Maybe we should distinguish between the Socrates Plato constructed for his
>>arguments and the one of flesh and blood.  Socrates died for his rhetoric,
>>and the evidence suggests (to me, anyway) that he was a great fan of
>>Aspasia's - in fact he names his two great mentors as Aspasia and Diotima -
>>both women.  Just possibly, our view of gender relations in 5th century
>>Athens is coloured by the particular sources we have available to us, and,
>>whilst the law was exceptionally patriarchal at the time, practice was not
>>quite so universally so, if for no other reason that the outside world
>>differed on a lot of these points.
>>
>>Cheers,
>>Rob.
>
>Not to speak of the fact that it would be foolish to take as gospel 
>all men's assertions of women's inferior status and influence since 
>it is often politic, and at the very least self-aggrandising, to 
>claim to have power -- as long as there's no likelihood of the claim 
>being publicly disputed -- even (perhaps especially) in areas where 
>one has less power than one'd like to have.
>
>cheers
>Joanna S.

The very fact that we often have to comb through men's writings about 
women but not vice versa says a lot about gendered differences in 
social power.

Yoshie