ve the females at home
to look after their puppies. They have the same employments--the only
difference between them is that the one sex is stronger and the other
weaker. But if women are to have the same employments as men, they must
have the same education--they must be taught music and gymnastics, and
the art of war. I know that a great joke will be made of their riding
on horseback and carrying weapons; the sight of the naked old wrinkled
women showing their agility in the palaestra will certainly not be a
vision of beauty, and may be expected to become a famous jest. But we
must not mind the wits; there was a time when they might have laughed at
our present gymnastics. All is habit: people have at last found out that
the exposure is better than the concealment of the person, and now they
laugh no more. Evil only should be the subject of ridicule.

The first question is, whether women are able either wholly or partially
to share in the employments of men. And here we may be charged with
inconsistency in making the proposal at all. For we started originally
with the division of labour; and the diversity of employments was based
on the difference of natures. But is there no difference between men
and women? Nay, are they not wholly different? THERE was the difficulty,
Glaucon, which made me unwilling to speak of family relations. However,
when a man is out of his depth, whether in a pool or in an ocean, he can
only swim for his life; and we must try to find a way of escape, if we
can.

The argument is, that different natures have different uses, and the
natures of men and women are said to differ. But this is only a verbal
opposition. We do not consider that the difference may be purely nominal
and accidental; for example, a bald man and a hairy man are opposed in a
single point of view, but you cannot infer that because a bald man is
a cobbler a hairy man ought not to be a cobbler. Now why is such an
inference erroneous? Simply because the opposition between them is
partial only, like the difference between a male physician and a female
physician, not running through the whole nature, like the difference
between a physician and a carpenter. And if the difference of the sexes
is only that the one beget and the other bear children, this does not
prove that they ought to have distinct educations. Admitting that women
differ from men in capacity, do not men equally differ from one another?
Has not nature scattered all t