The Athenian women of the fourth century were the women that Aristotle knew best, and, given Aristotle’s character and scientific method, it is not surprising that he should judge Woman in the abstract to be an inferior animal. If he had been a little more of a poet and idealist—in other words, if he had not been Aristotle—he might have taken another view; but considering the facts of Athenian life in his day, and Aristotle’s disposition to cling to facts, we need not wonder at his estimate. The real mischief—and Aristotle’s influence in this matter has been an enormous hindrance to human progress—was done not by the philosopher himself, for in his time the position of women could hardly have been altered for the worse, but by his blind followers in later ages when his slightest word was regarded almost as inspired truth. Aristotle himself is never dogmatic (he leaves that to weaker men), and does not profess to give anything but the somewhat casual expression of his own personal knowledge and opinions.
It is hardly right to blame him: women in his time undoubtedly were the inferior sex, and Aristotle is always the prophet of things as they are. The _protégé_ of the absolute monarchy which had overthrown the city-states, he has no belief in abstract freedom or in social reform. For him, what is is right. ‘Women and slaves are inferior,’ he says to himself, ‘by the conditions of existence as I see them: _therefore_ they are inferior by the laws of nature,’ and although he knows that this inferiority was the result of the conditions of their life, his business is only with facts.
But he generalises from insufficient data: Woman for him means the women of his time, and although he points out the influence of environment, he fails to distinguish between innate and accidental characteristics. And so again, in treating of the female sex in nature, he is too inclined to confine himself to the higher mammals. He emphasises the case of the herbivorous animals, those that go in herds, and are polygamous in their habits: deer, for example, where the male has a distinct advantage in size and strength; while he says little of the carnivora, who hunt in pairs and are monogamous, where the female tends to be equal in every respect to the male. Insects he almost disregards, and the microscope, in the hands of a naturalist of genius like M. Fabre, has opened up for us a world from which Aristotle was debarred by the material limitations of his instruments.