Plato's "Feminism": Reassigning the Female as Male

In Book V of the Republic, Plato asserts that women are eligible for admission into the Guardian class, the elite of society. Contrary to the misogynistic attitudes of his contemporaries, this idea is often cited as evidence for his feminism by many feminist philosophers. Here, I challenge the consensus: I argue that Plato's methodology resists the very idea of gender equality. I contend that readings of a gender-equality-advocating Plato rest on a fallacious synthesis of two distinct approaches, one particularistic and one universal. Drawing from Iris M. Young's politics of difference, I show that Plato's proposal exhibits an abstraction of the man — by projecting male qualities onto the Guardian position, the male perspective is upheld as the normal and the universal. Because Plato's proposition fails to affirm and respect the differences between the social groups of gender, it is decidedly not a form of feminism.