The Dialogue on Women

Abstract Settembrini’s ‘Platonic fictions’ are the subject of Part II; chapter 6 focuses on the early Dialogue on Women. The circumstances in which it was written (during Settembrini’s first incarceration) are documented, as is the influence of Gigia Faucitano on its contents. Like The Neoplatonists, the Dialogue leverages the classical past in order to suggest new bonds of equality, justice, and love. The two works share key concerns, most obviously the intellectual education of women and the sexual education of men. Capra and Graziosi show, for the first time, how closely the Dialogue on Women is structurally modelled on Plato’s Phaedrus (a key text also for The Neoplatonists as they go on to argue in chapter 7). The Dialogue stages a battle between the ancients and the moderns in which Plato’s arguments about the equality of women in the Republic are pitched against the positions of Rousseau, whom Settembrini (rightly) castigates for sacrificing women as collateral in establishing democratic relationships among men.