> Asserting that literature should be free from biases of race, class, gender, or feminist criticism...
I'd like to think they put that comma there on purpose.
> values each member of society
https://dl1.cuni.cz/pluginfile.php/1172856/mod_resource/content/1/Simone%20Weil_Human_Personality_Self.pdf
We live in a bureaucratic society. Everyone who fits is either a cog in the machine, or tries to reason like it is. People who wrote that did not care about art and philosophy, nor about position of women is society, they simply prepared the “document” with negative examples and positive points that should be appropriate to make, and used the scandalous newspaper article style either unconsciously, or because it was most familiar to the public.
Great teacher would take just the Aristotle example, and make the whole class on how social environment shapes the mind, how metaphorical master-slave relationship is still not about actual slavery, what “men” and “women” were in Aristotle's model, etc. In other words, to understand why it was said.
Even the first quote itself undermines the whole narrative. If you think about, it tells you the no matter how many masturbatory stories about great war leaders and strictly male achievements they wrote and read, women easily tricked those couch dwelling thinkers, so the accounts of the era are missing not just history of women, but also history of such unfortunate interactions with them.
