Women in classical Athens
Female children in classical Athens were not formally educated; rather, their mothers would have taught them the skills they would need to run a household.
In most households, women were needed to carry out tasks such as going to the market and drawing water for cooking or washing, which required taking time outside the house where interactions with men were possible.
It cannot be said too strongly or too frequently that the selection of book-texts now available to us does not represent Greek society as a whole.The major sources for the lives of women in classical Athens are literary, political and legal,[3] and artistic.
[5] However, the surviving literary evidence is written solely by men: ancient historians have no direct access to the beliefs and experiences of Classical Athenian women.
Pomeroy writes that since it deals more often with ordinary people than with mythological heroes and heroines, comedy is a more reliable source than tragedy for social history.
[11] Although these sources must be treated with caution because trials in classical Athens were "essentially rhetorical struggles",[12] they are useful for information about the ideologies of gender, family and household.
The first major publication in the field was a 1973 special issue of the journal Arethusa,[18] which aimed to look at women in the ancient world from a feminist perspective.
[19] Lin Foxhall called Pomeroy's book "revolutionary" and "a major step forward" from previous English-language scholarship on ancient women.
[24] Along with feminist theory, the work of Michel Foucault, influenced by structuralism and post-structuralism, has had a significant impact on the study of gender in classical antiquity.
By 2000, a review of books focused on women in ancient Greece published over a three-year period could cover eighteen works without being exhaustive.
[35] In addition to the natural risks of childbirth, the ancient Athenians practiced infanticide; according to Sarah Pomeroy, girls were more likely to be killed than boys.
[36] Donald Engels has argued that a high rate of female infanticide was "demographically impossible",[37] although scholars have since largely dismissed this argument.
[48] The gravestone of Plangon, an Athenian girl aged about five which is in the Glyptothek museum in Munich, shows her holding a doll; a set of knucklebones hangs on a wall in the background.
[68] After divorce, the husband was required to return the dowry or pay 18 percent interest annually so the woman's livelihood would continue and she could remarry.
[70] Hearing that the boy was at my house, he came there at night in a drunken state, broke down the doors, and entered the women's rooms: within were my sister and my nieces, whose lives have been so well-ordered that they are ashamed to be seen even by their kinsmen.
[52] This ideology of separation was so strong that a party to a lawsuit (Lysias' Against Simon) could claim that his sister and nieces were ashamed to be in the presence of their male relatives as evidence that they were respectable.
"[75] The ideal that respectable women should remain out of the public eye was so entrenched in classical Athens that simply naming a citizen woman could be a source of shame.
[84] According to Gould, even Athenian women forced to work outside the home for economic reasons would have had a conceptual (if not physical) boundary preventing them from interacting with unrelated men.
[86] Even the most respectable citizen women emerged on ritual occasions (primarily festivals, sacrifices, and funerals), where they would have interacted with men.
[89] According to D. M. Schaps (citing Cohen), the ideology of separation in classical Athens would have encouraged women to remain indoors but necessary outside activities would have overridden it.
Eva Cantarella disagrees, arguing that both of the Greek words used to denote citizenship, aste and politis, were used to refer to Athenian women.
[97] Josine Blok argues that military and political service were not prerequesites of citizenship; instead, she says, it was participation in the cultic life of the polis which made a person a citizen.
[107] Although Athenian women were formally prevented from participating in the democratic process, Kostas Vlassopoulos writes that they would have been exposed to political debate in the agora.
Once, he says, she criticised Pericles for making war against other Greek cities;[110] on another occasion she pleaded with him not to prosecute her brother Cimon on charges of treason.
R. Walters, for instance, explicitly dismisses the possibility, arguing that without a citizen father a child had no way of gaining entry into a deme or phratry.
The state-controlled Eleusinian mysteries, for instance, were open to all Greek speaking people, men and women, free and unfree alike.
[119] The cult of Athena Polias (the city's eponymous goddess) was central to Athenian society, reinforcing morality and maintaining societal structure.
[142] Women influenced funeral arrangements, with the speaker in Isaeus On the Estate of Ciron explaining that he acceded to his grandmother's wishes for how his grandfather would be buried.
[147] In at least one instance, however, an Athenian woman is known to have dealt with a significantly larger sum[148] and Deborah Lyons writes that the existence of such a law has "recently come under question".
[163] Pornai apparently charged one to six obols for each sexual act;[164] hetairai were more likely to receive gifts and favours from their clients, enabling to them to maintain a fiction that they were not being paid for sex.
