Women are the key to politics and society. Men show their power by appearing or by recounting their actions. When women protest, it is not against men’s decisions, it is against a failed dynamic or status quo.
On the March 8th 1917, women took to the streets of Petrograd, then capital of the Russian empire. They asked for 'bread and peace' (хлѣбъ и миръ). Their complaint was against the government which had made daily life difficult and, in the process, it had taken fathers, brothers, husbands, and sons and put them to fight and die on the front lines of World War I. A week after this protest Czar Nicholas II abdicated (March 15th 1917).
Aristophanes would have known that this was not an isolated event. He wrote a theatre play, a comedy, in 411 BC, entitled Lysistrata. The protagonists are women and they meet to bring peace to war torn Greece.
ὅλης τῆς Ἑλλάδος ἐν ταῖς γυναιξίν ἐστιν ἡ σωτηρία. (Aristoph. Lys. 29-30)
(The salvation of all of Greece resides in women).
The absence of men is one of the reasons for seeking peace (Aristoph. Lys. 99-102). The women decide that they should force men to make peace (Aristoph. Lys. 120). The play is a comedy and the means the women find is to enact a ‘sex strike’: they would abstain from sexual intercourse until the men agree to end the war.
The role of women in politics was clear in Classical Athens. Pericles’ famous funeral oration (Thuc. 2.35-46, 431bc), one of the most celebrated defences of democracy, was recited before an audience of women.
Aristophanes thought that misogyny or despising women was ridiculous. He often made fun of Euripides as a male intellectual who despised women.
He did not believe that couples were formed exclusively by a man and a woman. Plato in his Symposium has the comic playwright illustrate how the original creatures (ἀνδρόγυνον ‘androgynon’ / ‘man-woman’) were divided into two and each half would spend life trying to find its other half. Some would seek the other gender, others the same, based on their original unit. (Pl. Symp. 189c-193c).
It seems that Plato and Aristophanes both agreed that the aim was the result rather than the means. Plato argued in his Republic for the equality of man and woman in society, not based on their gender or status quo, but simply on the results of their actions:
- Each person in the city has an aptitude towards contributing with a type of work (Pl. R. 455b)
- Aptitude is distributed to each regardless of whether the person is man or woman (Pl. R. 455c-e)
- Therefore, each person in the city, regardless of whether man or woman, contributes with a type of work (Pl. R. 456a).
Καὶ γυναικὸς ἄρα καὶ ἀνδρὸς ἡ αὐτὴ φύσις εἰς φυλακὴν πόλεως, πλὴν ὅσα ἀσθενεστέρα ἢ ἰσχυροτέρα ἐστίν. (Pl. R. 456a10-11)
(Therefore it is the same nature of woman and man for the protection of the city, except that one woman may be weaker, and another stronger).
Plato thought that in the decadent phase of democracy there would be a sort of equality for equals and unequals alike (Pl. R. 8.557d2-558a8).
If one thinks of women’s contribution to society, their condition at birth or that they chose during life, is a personal matter, while the results of their action are foundational and essential to the development of the public sphere.
Aristophanes was not a feminist, but a pacifist, like the women he portrayed in the Lysistrata and those who went to the streets of Petrograd on the March 8th 1917 and whose memory is honoured on International Women’s Day (8th March).