In citing some qualitative case studies and in building on analytical-survey research design, this article explores the place of African women in warding off the pandemics, with particular reference to coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) in its initial stages (March 2020). With Africa being the most religious continent in the 21st century, African women who led the onslaught against COVID-19 (refer to Ellen Johnson Sirleaf [EJS], Graca Machel, Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, Vera Songwe, Maria Ramos, Zanetor Agyeman-Rawlings, Yvonne Aki-Sawyerr and Blen (...) Sahilu, among others), were largely informed by a religio-cultural concern for the ‘other’ (ubuntu). In demonstrating their sociocultural role of standing out as the bulwark against threats to familyhood, African women met in Monrovia-Liberia on 08 March 2020 during the inauguration of Amujae Leadership Forum that cropped up as a barricade against further COVID-19 spread. In a nutshell, the article draws from Sirleaf’s approach in combating the 2014–2016 Ebola pandemic and samples other leading African women’s contributors who played a pivotal role in responding to the initial stages of the pandemic, a phenomenon that traces its roots from the African heritage.Contribution: This article foregrounds the interface between African women, religious inspiration and health-related matters; and indeed enriches HTS Journal and the academic world. As by-products of a religiously inclined continent, African women’s initial response to the pandemic in March 2020 is well-rooted in their religio-cultural backcloth. (shrink)

The crux of feminist ideological alignments is the struggle for the woman’s liberation from patriarchal subjectivities. This study investigates the utilization of poetry by Patricia Jabbeh Wesley to challenge patriarchal dominance and expose the gimmicks of female devaluation by hegemonic imperialism. Wesley’s poems: “Inequality in Hell” and “My Auntie’s Woman-Lappa Husband” which sufficiently explore feminist consciousness from Wesley’s poetry collection, Where the Road Turns, were purposively selected and subjected to close reading and qualitative analysis. The poems were critically analyzed through (...) the lens of postcolonial feminist literary criticism which examines issues of phallocentric structures, especially in formerly colonized states. The selected poems show the itchy pains of masculinity and devaluation of womanhood in canonical text. Wesley’s poetry invites her readers to a philosophical introspection of patriarchal order with respect to the unbalanced treatment of women in postcolonial Liberia. The poet, through her art, exposes the unfair imaging of women globally. (shrink)

Protection of civilians has become enshrined as a core task for international peacekeeping missions. How to ensure that civilians are safe from violence and human rights abuses is central to developing military doctrine for peacekeeping; how safe civilians are from attack is central to how peacekeeping missions are assessed both by locals and international observers. However, protection of civilians is often seen as something that is done by active peacekeepers on behalf of passive civilians, potentially missing the ways in which (...) peacekeepers’ actions interact with strategies that civilians undertake on their own behalf. Integrating peacekeeper and civilian self-protection strategies is not trivial, either from a practical or a moral standpoint. Drawing on primary research among women in Liberia, as well as case studies of civilian protection elsewhere, this essay examines the ways in which working with civilians on protection—creating ‘hybrid’ systems of protection—inevitably entangles peacekeepers in civilians’ other social, political, and moral concerns, undermining at least a naïve impartiality. To retain their moral stance, peacekeepers ought to focus on using the safety they provide to allow different local actors to interact safely and, ideally, constructively. (shrink)

One way to track the many critical impacts of women of color feminisms is through the powerful structural analyses of gendered and racialized oppression they offer. This article discusses diverse lineages of women of color feminisms in the global South that tackle systemic structures of power and domination from their situated perspectives. It offers an introduction to structuralist theories in the humanities and differentiates them from women of color feminist theorizing, which begins analyses of structures from embodied (...) and phenomenological st¬¬andpoints--with the day-to-day concerns of our lives. The essay is divided into three sections. In section one, I discuss theories of structure in the humanities and sciences, differentiating them from women of color’s analysis of structure as diagnostic of the ways colonial power relations are functionalized through social structures. In section two, I discuss the diverse contexts of interpretation that background women of color feminisms, outlining key themes and ideas related to theories of structure. I argue against a unified theory of women of color structural feminisms that supplants difference, favoring a rehabilitated concept of structure for the purposes of making targeted interventions in contemporary radical anti-colonial politics. I offer the example of systematic marginalization produced by colonial violence and mythology as one reason to take up this approach. In section three, I outline four provisional characteristics of women of color structural feminisms. I conclude that, when divested from colonial myths that guide mainstream notions of structure, it can be a useful hermeneutic tactic in the fight for liberation from ongoing colonial violence. (shrink)

The impact of Islam upon women’s entrepreneurship in conflict zones is woefully absent from the entrepreneurship literature. This is due to the absence of published scholarship about this context rather than the absence of Muslim women’s entrepreneurship there. To address the gap in the literature, we offer a contextualized analysis and contribution by adopting an Islamic feminism lens and explore how Islamic feminism empowers women entrepreneurs and their entrepreneurial activities and behaviours in conflict zones. We argue that (...) Islamic feminism is a process of ‘ijtihad’ shaping the business ethics of Muslim women entrepreneurs operating in conflict zones and removing the traditional, patriarchal, colonial and other cultural layers with which Islam has been veiled. The findings from the 16 Muslim women entrepreneurs operating in Afghanistan, Iraq and Palestine and participating in our study reveal that Islamic religiousness plays a critical role in shaping the Muslim women’s entrepreneurial behaviour and their ability to endure the hardships of living in a conflict zone. Within all three research contexts, the participants interpreted and practiced their Islamic religiousness in ways consistent with Islamic Feminism principles and that deviated from patriarchal Islam dominating their conflict zones. This paper contributes to the growing research areas on Islamic feminist foundations for business ethics and women’s entrepreneurship in conflict zones by exploring how Islamic feminism empowers women entrepreneurs in Muslim conflict zones. (shrink)

Uncovers the truth behind the ideas, struggles, and eventually success of Black and Puerto Rican Nationalists regarding key feminist issues of the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s While most people believe that the movement to secure voluntary reproductive control for women centered solely on abortion rights, for many women abortion was not the only, or even primary, focus. Jennifer Nelson tells the story of the feminist struggle for legal abortion and reproductive rights in the 1960s, 1970s, and early 1980s (...) through the particular contributions of women of color. She explores the relationship between second-wave feminists, who were concerned with a woman's right to choose, Black and Puerto Rican Nationalists, who were concerned that Black and Puerto Rican women have as many children as possible “for the revolution,” and women of color themselves, who negotiated between them. Contrary to popular belief, Nelson shows that women of color were able to successfully remake the mainstream women's liberation and abortion rights movements by appropriating select aspects of Black Nationalist politics—including addressing sterilization abuse, access to affordable childcare and healthcare, and ways to raise children out of poverty—for feminist discourse. (shrink)

La pregunta por la sujeto de enunciación emerge de una experiencia académica y nutre la visibilización de las diferencias que nos atraviesan como mujeres. Revisar las heridas abiertas que la invasión-conquista-colonización-evangelización europea provocó con la implantación de la matriz moderna, colonial, capitalista, patriarcal, occidental permite localizar la doble subalternidad de las mujeres latinoamericanas. Un desencuentro con el humanismo académico permite traducir las raíces que nos atraviesan a nosotras, las mujeres de América Latina. El constructo delimita en la designación un espacio (...) común, surgido ahora, de una experiencia común que disloca los discursos hegemónicos y gesta un "entre" el feminismo occidental y el feminismo poscolonial, que habilita particulares puntos de vistas en los devenires de mujeres como potencia epistemológica-política. The question of the subject of enunciation emerges from an academic experience and nourishes the visibility of the differences that cross us as women. Revising the open wounds that European invasion-conquest-colonization-evangelization is urgent for us. The occidental, modern, colonial, capitalist, patriarchal, implanted matrix permits to locate the double subordination of Latin American women. A disencounter with the academic humanism allows to translate the roots that cross us, the women of Latin America. In its designation the construct delimits a common space. Now this common space emerges from a common experience which dislocates hegemonic discourses and makes an "in between" among occidental and postcolonial feminisms, which enables individual views on women´s processes as epistemological and political power. (shrink)

Centering Women of Color in Academic Counterspaces offers a rich multidimensional account of teaching, learning, and classroom dynamics among diverse students in a classroom counterspace centered on women of color. This book provides insights into learning outcomes, the process of transformational learning, and some of the challenges related to covering social justice topics like oppression, intersectionality, identity, beauty, body image, and inclusive leadership in a college classroom.

A new translation of Liu Xiang’s 劉向 Lienü zhuan 列女傳 is long overdue.1 And most of the translation by Anne Behnke Kinney, Exemplary Women of Early China: The Lienü Zhuan of Liu Xiang, is very well done indeed. At the same time, Kinney has made a series of odd and clearly intentional choices when translating the classic, choices worth querying. Most importantly, she insists on translating the classic as if it directly addressed its readers, even if this insistence rides (...) roughshod over the language used in the text, and flies in the face of the early evidence about both the composition of the text and the literary outputs of the woman, Ban Zhao 班昭.. (shrink)

How did the events of the early modern period affect the way gender and the self were represented? This collection of essays attempts to respond to this question by analysing a wide spectrum of cultural concerns - humanism, technology, science, law, anatomy, literacy, domesticity, colonialism, erotic practices, and the theatre - in order to delineate the history of subjectivity and its relationship with the postmodern fragmented subject. The scope of this analysis expands the terrain explored by feminist theory, while its (...) feminist focus reveals that the subject is always gendered - although the terms in which gender is conceived and represented change across history. Feminist Readings of Early Modern Culture not only explores the representation of gendered subjects, but in its commitment to balancing the productive tensions of methodological diversity, also speaks to contemporary challenges facing feminism. (shrink)

Women philosophers have not received their due in the discipline's reference works. Kersey's international biographical dictionary of women philosophers from ancient times up until the present redresses that situation.... This very capably fills a very evident gap in the philosophy reference corpus. Wilson Library Bulletin This work developed from Kersey's discovery that there existed no biographical dictionaries of women philosophers, and few references to women in textbooks on the history of philosophy. Intended to fill that void, (...) this source book covers more than 170 women born before 1920 who wrote about or pondered questions of Western intellectual life. Using broad criteria, Kersey has included any woman who conducted serious work in the traditional fields of philosophy, including metaphysics, ethics, aesthetics, or logic. Although acknowledging that the field has been dominated by men, the author excluded feminist scholars on the grounds that they have been given serious attention elsewhere, and also omitted women theologians or devotional writers. The volume includes extensive bibliographies of both primary and secondary works about each philosopher. An in-depth introduction establishes the context for the reference, and an appendix provides charts showing women philosophers by century, nationality, and discipline. An index of names completes the source book. This reference will be an important addition to university and public libraries, and a valuable reference for courses in philosophy and women's studies. (shrink)

This article addresses the Egyptian women's movement of the 1950s–1970s through a recent film entitled Four Women of Egypt, which focuses on the lives of four prominent Egyptian women active in the movement during that period. Using the concept of political memory, the article traces some of the major debates within the women's movement throughout this era. By focusing on the ways in which these women conceptualize the geopolitical, I show that the twin concepts of (...) imperialism and capitalism were central to the ways in which they understood gender. The result was a complex understanding of how gender intersected with Egypt's position within a broader global system of imperial capitalism. Following the transition in the 1970s to an open-market economy, the women's movement shifted away from critiques of imperialism and capitalism. This shift can be understood Primarily in terms of geopolitics, specifically the rise of neoliberalism in Egypt. New neoliberal policies had dramatic effects on the women's movement, showing why both the rise and fall of the movement must be contextualized geopolitically and transnationally. (shrink)

Philosophy is in its fourth millennium but this collection is the first of its kind. Twelve contemporary women of color who are American academic philosophers consider the methods and subjects of the discipline from perspectives partly informed by their experiences as African American, Asian American, Latina, Mixed Race and Native American.

In this article, we examine citizenship inequalities in paid reproductive labor. Through an analysis of elder care in Los Angeles, California, based on interviews with Filipina home care agency workers and owners, we delineate citizen divisions made up of two interlocking dimensions. The longstanding U.S. welfare state abdication of responsibility for elder care for its citizens generates a racialized, gendered citizenship division that facilitates another citizenship division between women of color. The outsourcing of elder care by the government to (...) the private sector including small business in the ethnic economy allows Filipina immigrants with legal citizenship to become middle-women minorities who hire undocumented Filipinas to provide care for white, middle-class, older adult women and their families. Through this new social organization of reproductive labor, responsibility is directed away from the state and generating tensions between women of color with different legal statuses. Our findings show how racialized, gendered inequalities are reinforced through this new social organization of reproductive labor but also demonstrate potential for undermining intersecting inequalities. (shrink)

The long Nineteenth Century spans a host of important philosophical movements: romanticism, idealism, socialism, Nietzscheanism, and phenomenology, to mention a few. Hegel, Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and Marx are well-known names from this period. This, however, was also a transformative period for women philosophers in German-speaking countries and contexts. Their works are less well-known, yet offer stimulating and path-breaking contributions to nineteenth-century thought. In this period, women philosophers explored a wide range of philosophical topics and styles. Throughout the movements (...) of romanticism, idealism, socialism, and phenomenology, women philosophers helped shape philosophy's agenda and provided unique approaches to existential, political, aesthetic, and epistemological questions. While during the Nineteenth Century women continued to be (largely) excluded from formal education and positions, they developed ways of philosophizing that was accessible, intuitive, and activist in spirit. The present volume makes available to English-language readers--often for the first time--the works of nine significant women philosophers, with the hope of stimulating further interest in and scholarship on their works. The Editors' introductions offer a comprehensive introduction to the contributions of women philosophers in the period, but also to individual figures and movements. The translations are furnished with explanatory footnotes and are designed to be accessible to students as well as scholars. (shrink)

The Warrior Women of Islam: Female Empowerment in Arabic Popular Literature. By Remke Kruk. London: I. B. Tauris, 2014. Pp. xxv + 272. £62 ; £15.99.

This paper imagines what the liberatory possibilities of (full) ectogenesis are, insofar as it separates woman from female reproductive function. Even before use with human infants, ectogenesis productively disrupts the biological paradigm underlying current gender categories and divisions of labour. I begin by presenting a theory of women’s oppression drawn from the radical feminisms of the 1960s, which sees oppression as deeply rooted in biology. On this view, oppressive social meanings are overlaid upon biology and body, as artefacts of (...) culture and history. I then argue that ectogenesis should be pursued to replace two modes of assisted gestation that can be seen as outgrowths of oppressive assumptions about women's function, ectogenesis should be pursued to replace two modes of assisted gestation. These are gestational surrogacy and uterine transplant, which arise partly from gendered, pronatalist, and geneticist norms. These practices are supported by assumptions about women’s identity and value. Pursuing technologies such as ectogenesis, which weaken the presumed link between biology and gender, is beneficial to (trans-inclusionary radical) feminist aims, as part of a broad project of challenging dominant power relations resting on and maintaining gender categories. By allowing the conceptual separation of female reproductive function from ‘woman’, ectogenesis raises questions about how we determine who counts in this gender identity, and also how we value those who claim the identity ‘woman’. I conclude that ectogenesis has the potential to challenge traditional patriarchal family structures, and thence all other male-dominated structures (of work, education, cultural production), allowing a reimagining of the family and society in more radical ways than we have yet achieved. (shrink)

This book offers an in-depth study of the female experience in one Mormon polygynous community, the Apostolic United Brethren. Women in such rigid, patriarchal religious groups are commonly portrayed as the oppressed, powerless victims of male domination. Janet Bennion shows, however, that the reality is far more complex. Many women converts are attracted to this group, and they are much more likely than male converts to remain there. Often these women are seeking improved socio-economic status for themselves (...) and their children, as well as an escape from their marginalized status in the mainstream Mormon church. In the polygynous group women experience rapid assimilation, autonomy, and upward mobility. Bennion supports her study with narratives from the lives of women now living in the group--narratives that clearly reveal why many mainstream Mormon women are viewing polygyny as a viable alternative to the difficulties to single-motherhood, "spinsterhood," poverty, and emotional deprivation. (shrink)

In this article, I present the arguments of three republican women philosophers of eighteenth-century France, focusing especially on two themes: equality (of class, gender, and race) and the family. I argue that these philosophers, Olympe de Gouges, Marie-Jeanne Phlipon Roland, and Sophie de Grouchy, who are interesting and original in their own right, belong to the neo-republican tradition and that re-discovering their texts is an opportunity to reflect on women’s perspectives on the ideas that shaped our current political (...) thought. (shrink)

This is a unique, groundbreaking collection of autobiographical essays by leading women in philosophy. It provides a glimpse at the experiences of the generation that witnessed, and helped create, the remarkable advances now evident for women in the field.

Examines the relationship of women of color's armed resistance to their aesthetic struggles.

This book deals with the relationship between feminism and liberalism in theory and practice. The author argues that rather than seeing liberalism as exclusionary of women's specificity, as many contemporary feminists do, we should look at variations in liberalism, and in particular at its democratization in the nineteenth century and how feminists have used liberalism as a resource. Liberalism is analyzed using a post-structuralist theory of hegemony: texts of liberal political philosophy are deconstructed to show how the term " (...) class='Hi'>women" is used as an "undecidable" in the Derridean sense to produce the opposition between feminine private and masculine public spheres; these texts are then linked to liberal-democratic social and political practices, including feminism as a social movement. (shrink)

This essay engages Chandra Mohanty, M. Jacqui Alexander, and María Lugones in a “plurilogue” to elaborate and exhibit a method that animates the differential mode of Women of Color politics while rendering more acute the strategies each scholar offers against the racialized, gendered oppressions of colonialism and global capitalism. Ella Shohat describes “a multifaceted plurilogue” as a “dissonant polyphony” that “links different yet co-implicated constituencies and arenas of struggle” (Shohat 2001, 2). The emphasis on reading differences within Women (...) of Color theorizing resists the homogenizing tendency of superficial engagement that glosses Women of Color scholarship as a unified genre of thought. A plurilogue thus pursues dissimilarities to clarify the conceptual interventions made within Women of Color theorizing and the relationship among the different patterns of oppression that each intervention exposes. Plurilogued engagements bring these conceptual strategies and understandings of multiple oppressions together, not to resolve or rank them, but to more effectively ascertain the complexities of, and varied coalitional strategies for, resisting the racialized, heteropatriarchal oppressions of global capitalism and colonialism. (shrink)

Recent turmoil in the Middle East and North Africa has prompted renewed concerns about women’s rights in Muslim societies. It has also raised questions about women’s agency and activism in religious contexts. This article draws on ethnographic research with women activists in Indonesia, the country with the world’s largest Muslim population, to address such concerns. My fieldwork shows that some Muslim women activists in democratizing Indonesia manifest pious critical agency. Pious critical agency is the capacity to (...) engage critically and publicly with religious texts. While some scholars have argued that pious and feminist subjectivity are inherently at odds, the emergence of pious critical agency in Indonesia demonstrates that piety and feminism can intersect in surprising and unexpected ways. Moreover, it shows that women’s agency can draw on both secular and religious resources and that religion can be used to promote critical discourses on gender. (shrink)

This article focuses on service provision for women who are involuntarily referred under the UK Mental Health Act (1983) into medium and high security care in England and Wales. We explore how physical and procedural security in such settings is prioritized over relational care (see also Fallon Report, Department of Health, 1999a and NHS Executive, 2000 – Tilt Report). We are not arguing against the importance of protecting the public from the acts of dangerous members of our society. However, (...) we are arguing that many of the women in our secure services are inappropriately placed and receive inappropriate forms of treatment and care. Rather than physical security, it is high relational care, which the women require. Further, we argue that current service provision often re-produces forms of violence and violation which have marked many of women's lives prior to their entry into the secure system. (shrink)

Given that care duties are central to the definition of motherhood across contexts, an extended separation from the woman’s family due to migration presents a major threat to her social identity as a mother and wife. Drawing on West and Zimmerman’s notion of “doing gender” and ethnographic research on Vietnamese low-waged contract workers in Taiwan, I provide vital insights into the discursive processes and everyday practices that underlie migrant women’s negotiations of motherhood and femininity. Specifically, I examine the various (...) ways migrant women perform and negotiate meanings of hy sinh and chịu đựng that are core values of Vietnamese womanhood. Combating the stigma of bad motherhood and failed femininity, I emphasize, is not just about reasserting one’s sense of gendered self but also about reassuring her access to the future support and care of the family. The study emphasizes intentionality and pragmatism in women’s social doings of gender and highlights moral dilemmas in gender politics. (shrink)

Review of Márta Bodó (ed.), Women and Religion, (Cluj: Verbum, 2009).

This article presents the findings of a study about the history of aversion therapy as a treatment technique in the English mental health system to convert lesbians and bisexual women into heterosexual women. We explored published psychiatric and psychological literature, as well as lesbian, gay, and bisexual archives and anthologies. We identified 10 examples of young women receiving aversion therapy in England in the 1960s and 1970s. We situate our discussion within the context of post-war British and (...) transnational medical history. As a contribution to a significantly under-researched area, this article adds to a broader transnational history of the psychological treatment of marginalised sexualities and genders. As a consequence, it also contributes to LGBTQIA+ history, the history of medicine, and psychiatric survivor history. We also reflect on the ethical implications of the research for current mental health practice. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Historically, maternal HIV research has focused on prevention of mother‐to‐child transmission and child outcomes, with little focus on the health outcomes of mothers. Over the course of the HIV epidemic, the approach to including pregnant women in research has shifted. The current landscape lends itself to reviewing the public health ethics of this research. This systematic review aims to identify ethical barriers and considerations for including pregnant and postpartum women living with HIV in treatment adherence and retention (...) research. We completed a systematic literature review following PRISMA guidelines with analysis using a relational ethics perspective. The included studies (n = 7) identified ethical barriers related to (a) women research participants as individuals, (b) partner and family dynamics, (c) community perspectives on research design and conduct, and (d) policy and regulatory implications. These broader contextual factors will yield research responsive to, and respectful of, the needs of pregnant and postpartum women living with HIV. While current regulatory and policy environments may be slow to change, actions can be taken now to foster enabling environments for research. We suggest that a relational approach to public health ethics can best support the needs of pregnant and postpartum women living with HIV; acknowledging this population as systematically disadvantaged and inseparable from their communities will best support the health of this population. (shrink)

Women and Comedy: History, Theory, Practice brings together leading researchers from Canada, the United States, and Europe in an interdisciplinary collection of essays to chart the future of critical inquiry in gender and comedy studies.

Assuming that all cultures have gender roles, religion affects women differently than men. What have Catholic women’s religious lives, roles, and images been like? Although all women share a common experience of being women, differences of class, race, religion, culture, and sexual orientation separate them, and therefore taking into account women’s experiences and views can be a difficult task in complex religious contexts. Religious practices have different significance to men and women and their engagement (...) is different. In foraging and horticultural societies, women and men have more egalitarian and complementary roles and women play significant roles in religion – while in agrarian societies the situation is quite different. Large denominations such as Roman Catholicism, the Eastern Orthodox Church, and Orthodox Judaism are strongly against the ordination of women to sacramental ministry. Catholic women are left with a God with whom they cannot identify and who cannot identify with them. (shrink)

As the future of the Internet in Africa seems promising from an infrastructure point of view, the issue of the women of Africa should not be forgotten, in particular women who are already in academia who continue to struggle for equality despite their relative achievements. Women all over the world face similar hurdles and conflicts related to their gender, such as tenure vs. biolog-ical clock and shrinking pipeline. However the glass ceiling in the West is made of (...) iron in Africa. One cannot yet aspire to reach the top. Luckily thanks to the Internet, women communicate with each other and African women as well are being heard. The Internet is serving them as a sound board and support in their struggles. (shrink)

While previous studies have examined the impact of informal institutions to determine entrepreneurial activities, this paper explores the different configurational paths of informal institutions to promote men’s and women’s entrepreneurial activities across factor-driven and efficiency-driven economies. We collected data from the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor for 56 countries for the years 2008-2013 and employed fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis to conduct the empirical analysis. The results confirm that a single antecedent condition is unable to produce an outcome while combination of different (...) conditions can produce an outcome. We find that cultural-cognitive institutional antecedents in combination with social-normative antecedents create configurations of conditions that lead to the higher levels of men’s and women’s entrepreneurial activities in factor-driven and efficiency-driven economies. Moreover, this study shows that these causal conditions configure differently to promote men’s and women’s entrepreneurial activities in factor-driven and efficiency-driven nations. This paper may create awareness in potential entrepreneurs regarding specific sets of institutional antecedents that can increase the emergence of entrepreneurship in different economic clusters. We show that institutional antecedents which are essential to promote entrepreneurship combine distinctly for men’s and women’s entrepreneurship and this combination varies in different stages of economic development. (shrink)

The prominent role of women in the Spartan and Persian Speech in Plato's dialogue Alcibiades Major has not been sufficiently appreciated. We remedy this by (1) laying out the context in which the speech is presented; (2) explaining what precisely the women of the speech say about Alcibiades' challenge to their men; (3) surveying and critiquing what commentators have said about the role women play in the speech; and (4) advancing a reading of the speech that unifies (...) the sentiments attributed to each woman as expressed by Socrates. (shrink)