friend Flaccus's death. Still I would not have you grieve unduly over it. I can scarcely venture to demand that you should not grieve at all--and yet I am convinced that it is better that way.[26]Utopia is a commonwealth where not only the individual life is held in check, but individual emotions and affections are suppressed. Women are in a distinctly inferior position in Utopia. Dominic Baker Smith, who has written the best recent book on the Utopia, has commented that the position of women in the Utopian commonwealth was about the same as it was in More's Europe.[27] I think in fact that Utopian women have a somewhat better time of it. A small number of Utopians are allowed to spend their lives in study, freed from the obligation to manual labor that is imposed on everyone else. Women are among this privileged group.[28] Divorce is permitted if husbands and wives prove completely incompatible and if the case is investigated by the authorities. But a husband is forbidden to divorce his wife merely because she has become ugly.[29] In Utopia no old rich men throw out the old wife and take a new young trophy wife in exchange. The same harsh penalties for adultery apply to both sexes. Husbands chastise their wives for offenses.[30] But erring husbands are punished by their superiors in the hierarchy of men.Utopia is a male-dominated society. Women have no political authority; that authority is all placed in the hands of fathers. It is hard to escape the suspicion that sexuality is stringently limited as part of a general belief that passion of any kind is dangerous to the superior rationality that only men can possess.And then there is the Utopian restriction on political discussion. "It is a capital crime to discuss such [political] questions anywhere except in the Council or the Assembly".[31] In reading that almost casual sentence, we inevitably call up our own experience in the twentieth century, those many totalitarian states infest...
