The world upside down. Female power and community of women in ancient Greece.
Beautiful Letters| N° d'inventaire | 17198 |
| Format | 16 x 23 |
| Détails | 259 p., paperback. |
| Publication | Paris, 2013 |
| Etat | Nine |
| ISBN | |
Since Bachofen and his book on Maternal Rights (1861), there has been a great deal of interest in the state of women. After him, there have been countless attempts to find in the distant past of humanity or in distant regions of the globe the reality of feminine power and the existence of a community of women. This book, on the contrary, is an exploration of the imagination of the Greeks. It shows how the city, which was a men's club and made marriage and family the cornerstone of society, emerged in opposition. After recalling what was obvious to the Greeks, namely the natural inferiority of women, based on a study of the status of females in Aristotle's biology, it shows how the Greeks warded off the double threat of feminine power and a community of women by keeping it at a distance. From the classical period to the Empire and from Herodotus to Strabo, their historians rejected it among savages who live on the edge of the inhabited world. From the archaic period to late antiquity, their poets, orators, and mythographers pushed it back into the mists of time with the Amazons, who are virile women. They put the reminder of their value and their conquests at the service of the glory of the heroes or peoples who triumphed over them. Through the mouth of a comic poet like Aristophanes or a philosopher like Plato, they projected it through utopia into a universe of nowhere. Aristophanes, in the Assembly of Women, staged the feminization of power and the establishment of a community of women. But the triumph of the domestic, which turns the political animal into an animal pure and simple, only results in the death of the city. Unlike the comic utopia, which pushed the egalitarian logic of democracy to the extreme, the Platonic utopia defined itself in opposition to democracy. In his Republic, Plato, by establishing for the members of the ruling class only a community of goods, women and children, gives only a very limited place to feminine power in the context of a digression with limited consequences, because he thus seeks only to eliminate a divisive individualism, to reinforce the symbolic link which unites the citizen to the State with all the weight of family ties, while putting the sexual instinct at the service of eugenics. Suzanne Saïd, professor emeritus at the universities of Paris X-Nanterre and Columbia University, New York, has devoted a series of works to Greek literature from Homer to late antiquity.
Since Bachofen and his book on Maternal Rights (1861), there has been a great deal of interest in the state of women. After him, there have been countless attempts to find in the distant past of humanity or in distant regions of the globe the reality of feminine power and the existence of a community of women. This book, on the contrary, is an exploration of the imagination of the Greeks. It shows how the city, which was a men's club and made marriage and family the cornerstone of society, emerged in opposition. After recalling what was obvious to the Greeks, namely the natural inferiority of women, based on a study of the status of females in Aristotle's biology, it shows how the Greeks warded off the double threat of feminine power and a community of women by keeping it at a distance. From the classical period to the Empire and from Herodotus to Strabo, their historians rejected it among savages who live on the edge of the inhabited world. From the archaic period to late antiquity, their poets, orators, and mythographers pushed it back into the mists of time with the Amazons, who are virile women. They put the reminder of their value and their conquests at the service of the glory of the heroes or peoples who triumphed over them. Through the mouth of a comic poet like Aristophanes or a philosopher like Plato, they projected it through utopia into a universe of nowhere. Aristophanes, in the Assembly of Women, staged the feminization of power and the establishment of a community of women. But the triumph of the domestic, which turns the political animal into an animal pure and simple, only results in the death of the city. Unlike the comic utopia, which pushed the egalitarian logic of democracy to the extreme, the Platonic utopia defined itself in opposition to democracy. In his Republic, Plato, by establishing for the members of the ruling class only a community of goods, women and children, gives only a very limited place to feminine power in the context of a digression with limited consequences, because he thus seeks only to eliminate a divisive individualism, to reinforce the symbolic link which unites the citizen to the State with all the weight of family ties, while putting the sexual instinct at the service of eugenics. Suzanne Saïd, professor emeritus at the universities of Paris X-Nanterre and Columbia University, New York, has devoted a series of works to Greek literature from Homer to late antiquity.