Ruled by Women: Gynocratic Disorder in Aristotle’s Sparta

Recent years have witnessed the rise of right-wing rhetoric asserting that contemporary liberal democracies have allowed women to control and rule over men. Scholarship has made sense of these anxieties through studies of online conspiracy thinking and post-truth politics. However, the belief that women are not an oppressed group but rather control and rule over men is not simply puzzling because untrue. This rhetoric also attempts to renegotiate the boundaries of democratic belonging in ways that are far from new. In fact, allegations that women rule over men are reminiscent of ancient concerns about gynocracy, of the potential or actual access to political power of women, prominent in classical Greece. In particular, in the Politics Aristotle theorizes Sparta’s political decay as produced by women’s rule, casting such rule as excessively sharing in democratic traditions of politics. In this article I suggest that Aristotle’s critique of Sparta shows how claims about gynocratic societies not only mark democratic politics as disordered, excessive, and unruly to make “orderly” politics dependent on traditional political hierarchies but also reveal such political hierarchies as fragile because challenged by women’s mere act of refusing their reproductive roles. Hence, in the Politics, the feminization of democratic politics by way of an alleged Spartan gynocracy serves, as I show, to make an argument for the limitation of the political capacity of the demos to counter the political disorder it produces. Understanding Aristotle’s argument today can help us make sense of anxieties about gyno-centrism that ensue when women’s political movements like #MeToo challenge men’s status.