page_title: Aristotle's views on women
section_title: Women's role in inheritance
hierarchical_section_title: Aristotle's views on women / Women's role in inheritance
caption_attribution_description: English: Aristotle's model of Inheritance
context_page_description: Aristotle's views on women influenced later Western thinkers, as well as Islamic thinkers, who quoted him as an authority until the end of the Middle Ages, influencing women's history.
  In his Politics, Aristotle saw women as subject to men, but as higher than slaves, and lacking authority; he believed the husband should exert political rule over the wife. Among women's differences from men were that they were, in his view, more impulsive, more compassionate, more complaining, and more deceptive. He gave the same weight to women's happiness as to men's, and in his Rhetoric stated that society could not be happy unless women were happy too. Whereas Plato was open to the potential equality of men and women, stating both that women were not equal to men in terms of strength and virtue, but were equal to men in terms of rational and occupational capacity, and hence in the ideal Republic should be educated and allowed to work alongside men without differentiation, Aristotle appears to have disagreed.
context_section_description: Aristotle's inheritance model sought to explain how the parents' characteristics are transmitted to the child, subject to influence from the environment. In his view, an active, ensouling masculine element brought life to a passive female element. The system worked as follows. The father's semen and the mother's menses encode their parental characteristics. The model is partly asymmetric, as only the father's movements define the form or eidos of the human species, while the movements of both the father's and the mother's fluids define features other than the form, such as the father's eye colour or the mother's nose shape. The theory has some symmetry, as semen movements carry maleness while the menses carry femaleness. If the semen is hot enough to overpower the cold menses, the child will be a boy; but if it is too cold to do this, the child will be a girl. Inheritance is thus particulate (definitely one trait or another), as in Mendelian genetics, unlike the Hippocratic model which was continuous and blending. The child's sex can be influenced by factors that affect temperature, including the weather, the wind direction, diet, and the father's age. Features other than sex also depend on whether the semen overpowers the menses, so if a man has strong semen, he will have sons who resemble him, while if the semen is weak, he will have daughters who resemble their mother.
caption: Inheritance: model of transmission of movements from parents to child, and of form from the father. The model is not fully symmetric.[8]
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