Women's Responsibilities and Property Rights
Athenian
women1 contributed to the public life of the polis by acting as priestesses and participating as
priestesses2 and participating as
worshippers in religious rites and festivals3. Their private responsibilities included, above all, bearing and raising
legitimate children, the future citizens of the city-state, and serving as managers of
the family's property in the home, including
household slaves4, and its supplies. These aspects of their private lives
obviously had bearing on the public life of the community as well, for it could not
continue without a constant supply of new citizens and management of the goods and
labor that helped sustain them. Women's property rights in classical Athens reflected
both the importance of the control of property by women as well as the predisposition
of Athenian society to promote the formation and preservation of households headed by
property-owning men. Under Athenian democracy, women could control property, even
land—the most valued possession in their society—through
inheritance and
dowry5,
although more legal restrictions were imposed on their ability to dispose of property
freely than on that of men.
Inheritance and Dowry
Athenian men and women were supposed to preserve their property as best they could
so that it could be handed down to their children. Parents who spent all of their
cash and disposed of their other property for their own personal pleasure without
due regard for the ultimate consequences for their offspring incurred social
disgrace. Daughters did not inherit a portion of their father's property if there
were any living sons, but demographic patterns meant that perhaps one household in
five had only daughters, to whom the father's property then fell. Women could also
inherit from other male relatives who had no male offspring. A woman's regular share
in her father's estate came to her in her dowry at marriage. A son whose father was
still alive at the time of the son's marriage similarly often received a share of
his inheritance at that time to allow him to set up a household. A bride's husband
had legal control over the property in his wife's
dowry6, and their respective holdings freqently
became commingled. In this sense husband and wife were co-owners of the household's
common property, which only
had to be alloted between its separate owners if
the marriage was dissolved7. The husband was legally
responsible for preserving the dowry and using it for the support and comfort of his
wife and her children. A man often had to put up valuable land of his own as
collateral to guarantee the safety of his wife's dowry. Upon her death, the dowry
became the inheritance of her children. The expectation that a woman would have a
dowry tended to encourage marriage within groups of similar wealth and status. As
with the rules governing women's rights to inheritances, customary dowry
arrangements supported the society's goal of enabling males to establish and
maintain households because daughters' dowries were usually smaller in value than
their brothers' inheritances and therefore kept the bulk of a father's property
attached to his sons.
Heiresses
Like the rules concerning inheritance and dowry,
Athenian law concerning
heiresses8 also supported the goal of providing resources to enable as many male
citizens as possible to form households. Under Athenian law, if a father died
leaving only a daughter to survive him, his property devolved upon her as his
heiress, but she did not own it in the modern sense of being able to dispose of it
as she pleased. Instead, the law (in the simplest case) required her father's
closest male relative —her official guardian after her father's
death—to marry her himself, with the aim of producing a son. The inherited
property then belonged to that son when he reached adulthood. This rule
theoretically applied regardless of whether the heiress was already married (without
any sons) or whether the male relative already had a wife. The heiress and the male
relative were both supposed to divorce their present spouses and marry each other,
although in practice the rule could be circumvented by legal subterfuge. This rule
about heiresses preserved the father's line and kept the property in his family,
prevented rich men from getting richer by engineering deals with wealthy heiresses'
guardians to marry them and therefore merge their estates, and, above all, prevented
property from piling up in the hands of unmarried women. At Sparta,
Aristotle
reported9, precisely this kind of agglomeration of wealth took place as women
inherited land or received it in their dowries without—to Aristotle's way
of thinking—adequate regulations promoting remarriage. He claimed that
women in this way had come to own forty percent of Spartan territory. The law at
Athens was more successful at regulating women's control over property in the
interests of forming households headed by property-owning men.
