Thomas Aquinas — "Women are by nature 'deficient and misbegotten.'"
Women are by nature 'deficient and misbegotten.'
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More from Thomas Aquinas
"It is lawful to take usury from Jews."
"The children of slaves are slaves by birth."
"A man is bound to prefer the good of the community to his own good."
"All that I have written seems like straw to me."
"The purpose of marriage is the procreation of children."
Details
Summa Theologica, Part I, Question 92, Article 1, Reply to Objection 1 (following Aristotle's view of women as 'mas occasionatus')
Date: c. 1265-1274
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Understanding this quote
What it means
This quote asserts that female humans are biologically inferior — a kind of failed or incomplete version of the male form. It frames womanhood itself as a natural accident or defect rather than an intended state. In plain terms, it claims men are the default human template and women a deviation from it. This view is now entirely rejected by modern biology, medicine, and ethics.
Relevance to Thomas Aquinas
Aquinas borrowed this directly from Aristotle's flawed reproductive biology, which he systematically wove into Catholic theology at the University of Paris. As a Dominican friar and the architect of Scholasticism, he treated Aristotle as the supreme natural authority. His uncritical adoption of this claim reveals how even rigorous theological minds of the era accepted Greek biological errors as settled fact, embedding them into Church doctrine for centuries.
The era
In 13th-century Europe, Aristotle's works were flooding Western universities through Arabic translations, and Aquinas was their chief synthesizer. Women were barred from universities, guilds, and clergy. Aristotelian natural philosophy carried near-scientific authority, and challenging it was intellectually dangerous. Aquinas embedding this view into Summa Theologica gave it theological weight, cementing a misogynist biological framework inside the most influential Catholic intellectual tradition of the medieval period.
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