Introduction

Abstract

When I decided, some years ago, to explore the role of women in Plato’s political theory and confessed to friends that this was my project, I was usually greeted with two types of response. The first, given particularly pithy expression by a male colleague, ran along the lines of ‘Oh, another of those “feminist perspectives” on something or other’. While this was said with a good-natured smile and was genuinely not meant to offend, it brought to my attention yet again the fact that enquiries of this sort still rested, for some academics at least, in that pastel pink area of ‘soft options’, philosophy shot through gauze. It did not aspire to the academic rigours of ‘real philosophy’. I felt also that implicit in such remarks is a notion that such studies provide a cosy refuge for female academics who are cheating just a little in choosing a field which is, by its nature, not only intellectually less demanding, but in addition is especially easy for them, having as they do a biological head start.