ngaged in these services day in and day out that would have made them better then men at those said duties – that men aren’t superior to women on the intellectual plane and better able to perform those duties therein. They thought primarily because women, with the same education as men, can perform and execute those tasks just as proficiently as men can.But in contrast to this is Plato’s student Aristotle. Who wrote why freedmen (Greek citizens) should rule slaves. He stated: “The freeman rules over the slave after another manner that in which the male rules over the female, or the man over the child; although the parts of the soul are present in all of them, they are present in different degrees. For the slave has no deliberative faculty to all; the woman has, but it is without authority, and the child has, but it is immature.” (Lefkowitz and Fant, 39) Here he shows that women have the ability to reason and think but that they lack the authority that the man does. This leaves her out of making decisions such as that of a man would make outside the house; being in the polis or in an army.But later, those two schools of thought believed that women did have those faculties and the authority and inducted them into their schools – Epicureanism and Cynicism. Both of these schools of thought were founded in or about the Hellenistic period – but both taking root and expanding their thoughts throughout the Hellenistic world therein at the least. One famous female Cynic was one by the name of Hipparchia, the wife of Crates. “Who appeared in public and went to dinner parties, and was proud to have spent time in education rather than working at the loom.” (Pomeroy, 132) She stood out among her peers as an independent woman without the need for a chaperone – when one was required to have a chaperone. A Classical Greek institution that required Greek women to have at all times when they lea...
