[455c]
while, for the other, the body was a hindrance?
Were there any other points than these by which you distinguish the well
endowed man in every subject and the poorly endowed?”
“No one,” said he, “will be able to name any
others.” “Do you know, then, of anything practised by
mankind in which the masculine sex does not surpass the female on all these
points?1 Must we make a long story of it by alleging weaving and the
watching of pancakes
1 On the alleged superiority of men even in women's occupations cf. the amusing diatribe of the old bachelor in George Eliot's Adam Bede, chap. xxi.: “I tell you there isn't a thing under the sun that needs to be done at all but what a man can do better than women, unless it's bearing children, and they do that in a poor makeshift way,” and the remarks on women as cooks of the bachelor Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, 234. But Xenophon Memorabilia iii. 9. 11 takes the ordinary view. On the character of women generally Cf. Laws 781 and Aristotle in Zeller trans. ii. 215.
Plato. Plato in Twelve Volumes, Vols. 5 & 6 translated by Paul Shorey. Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press; London, William Heinemann Ltd. 1969.
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