The document examines Western political thought in terms of women's and men's expected spheres of concern, the proper male and female nature, and the sex-specific allocation of social values. In addition, the author applies her conclusions to contemporary political issues in the United States. Aristotle, Cicero, Aquinas, Rousseau, and Hegel made a public/private distinction between sex roles. Sex discrimination was explicit to their political theories. Montesquieu, Locke, and Kant granted women more political or domestic powers than did this first group. Machiavelli, Burke, and Arendt made distinctions between private and public matters in their political treatises, but they did not explicitly relegate women to the private sphere. In fact, they largely ignored women altogether. Four philosophers argued to some degree for the sex-neutral assignment of public and private tasks: Plato, Hobbes, Mill, and Marx. An irony in the works of many of these philosophers who considered women to be inferior is that their ideology generally regarded equality and freedom as important values. Four principles of justice emerge from linking the rendering of justice to a view of either unequal or equal abilities in terms of sex: distributive or proportionate justice, numerical justice, pragmatic or utilitarian justice, and redistributive or corrective justice. All four forms of justice are relevant in interpreting present governmental decisions in the United States vis-a-vis women. (Author/KC)