Aristotle has regularly been pilloried by modern writers (and especially feminists) for saying that “The female is as it were a deformed male.”1 New feminist Prudence Allen, for example, argues that this statement from Aristotle among many others renders him morally retrograde in his views on women.2 It may be the case that he is guilty as charged. I do not intend to adjudicate that point. I do wonder, however, if his statement about women being “deformed” has been rightly understood on its own terms.
The Greek term translated as “deformed” is peperomenon, and it literally means maimed or mutilated. Figuratively, it denotes something like incapacitated.3 But Aristotle’s usage of the term does not fit well under these English glosses. Aristotle uses the word elsewhere to describe seals as “defective” because they don’t have ears. But he nevertheless argues that a seal’s lack of ears is fitted to its nature and has purpose.
In a stimulating article exploring Aristotle’s statement, Michael Nolan observes,
“So in being a peperomenon [deformed] quadruped, the seal is not defective or deformed in any normal sense of the term. It ‘departs from type’, but it is what Nature intends it to be. The female is peperomenon [deformed] in precisely the same sense: she ‘departs from the male type’, but she is not defective. She is what Nature intends her to be.”4
On this reading of Aristotle, “deformed” means something like “privation” of masculine characteristics, but the female’s resulting feminine nature has its own necessary purpose and virtue. Nolan continues,
“The English word deformed does not carry Aristotle’s true meaning. The example of the seal shows that, for the seal is peperomenon, but, manifestly, not deformed in our meaning of the word. Woman departs from the male type ? and Nature intends she should… Because Woman has a uterus, she can ‘generate in herself’ ? whereas the male can only ‘generate in another’. By being peperomenon, a woman can become a mother.”5
Nolan also points out the context in which the word translated as “deformed” appears.
“The main fact to note is that the phrase occurs in Aristotle’s biological writings, and only in those writings. It does not come from his Metaphysics, the work in which he discusses general philosophical issues, nor from his Ethics, in which he discusses the relations between human beings, including the relations between husband and wife. It is a technical phrase used in a technical context, and to give it an overarching meaning is rather like arguing that when modem genetics speaks of ‘dominance and recessivity’, it is talking psychology or politics.”6
Aristotle’s views on women are not above critique. However, I do wonder if his statement about a woman being a “defective” male has been misunderstood as a result of its translation into English.
1 Aristotle, De generatione animalium, II.3. See also the English translation in Aristotle, Generation of Animals, trans. A. L. Peck, Loeb Classical Library 366 (Cambridge, MA / London: Harvard University Press, 1943), 175.
2 Prudence Allen, The Concept of Woman: The Aristotelian Revolution, 750 B.C. – A.D. 1250, 2nd ed. (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1997), 97-98.
3 LSJ, s.v. peroo.
4 Michael Patrick Nolan, “Passive and Deformed? Did Aristotle Really Say This?,” New Blackfriars 76, no. 893 (1995): 253.
5 Nolan, “Passive and Deformed?”, 254.
6 Nolan, “Passive and Deformed?”, 238.
