Political philosophy – a discipline we trace back to Plato and Aristotle – is reasoning about how we live together in political units. It is about states, government, laws, institutions and citizenship. But it doesn’t have much to say about homes, families, marriage or parenting. The discipline that studies how we live together in family units, as opposed to political ones, used to be called economics, from the Greek oikonomika, or science of the home. This was before the name became exclusively attached to how we make and spend money, when what went on inside the home still mattered to philosophers. It no longer does. This may be because, until very recently, philosophers were almost exclusively male – even today in the UK, only a quarter of those at the top of the profession are women.
Women philosophers, of course, have always written about the home. I write about it in my new book, No Place like Home (2026). But women philosophers have long been excluded from the canon: until very recently, they were not read, they were not studied, they were not taught. This is changing. But, until it does, we can still ask why the home was not a topic of philosophical interest.
My answer is that things needn’t have been that way. Philosophers took from the past what they wanted, and helped the rest disappear. The story of how the home as a domestic space dropped out of philosophical thinking is a story of reception. And I will try and reconstruct a small part of that story here.
Although it’s not clear when thinking about the home as a sphere separate from political life actually started, we can find evidence of it in Aristotle’s political philosophy, which was developed in Athens in the 4th century BCE. Aristotle postulated a natural division between men and the state, on the one hand, and women and the home on the other: a public and a private sphere. He believed human beings could associate in two distinct ways, with a sphere corresponding to each mode of association: the household for the private sphere versus the city-state for the public sphere. The household he saw as a natural necessity for survival, and for bringing up children, and this is where women belonged, both for their protection, and because they were best suited for obeying and not for taking part in public life. Adult men, who did not need protecting, and whose abilities went beyond simple domestic organisation, belonged to the city-state and public service.
However much we’d like to blame Aristotle for millennia of sexist prejudice, he did not write in a vacuum. Nor was he the only one in Athens who believed that men and women needed to live separate lives, in separate spheres.
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