Property, Social Freedom, and Athenian Women
Athenian
women1 exercised power and earned status both in private life and public, through
their roles in the family and religion respectively. Their absence from politics,
however, meant that their contributions to the city-state might well be overlooked by
men. One heroine in a fragmentary tragedy by Euripides,
Melanippe,
vigorously expresses this judgment in a famous speech denouncing men who denigrate
women: “Empty is the slanderous blame men place on women; it is no more than
the twanging of a bowstring without an arrow; women are better than men, and I will
prove it: women make agreements without having to have witnesses to guarantee their
honesty ... Women manage the household and preserve its valuable property. Without a
wife, no household is clean or happily prosperous. And in matters pertaining to the
gods—this is our most important contribution—we have the greatest
share. In the oracle at
Delphi2 we propound the will of Apollo, and at the
oracle of Zeus
at Dodona3 we reveal the will of Zeus to
any Greek who wishes to know it.” Euripides portrays his heroine
Medea4 as insisting that women who bear children are due respect at least commensurate
with that granted men who fight as hoplites: “People say that we women lead a
safe life at home, while men have to go to war. What fools they are! I would much rather
fight in the phalanx three times than give birth to a child only once.”
Women's Responsibilities and Property Rights
Athenian
women5 contributed to the public life of the polis by acting as priestesses and participating as
priestesses6 and participating as
worshippers in religious rites and festivals7. 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 slaves8, 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
dowry9,
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
dowry10, 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 dissolved11. 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
heiresses12 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
reported13, 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.
Women's Lives at Home and at Work
The character Medea's comment in Euripides' play14 named after her that
women15 were said to lead a safe life at
home reflected the expectation in Athenian society that women from the propertied
class would avoid frequent or close contact with men who were not members of their own
family or its circle of friends. Women of this socio-economic level were therefore
supposed to spend much of their time in their own home or the
home of women
friends16. There, women dressed and slept in
rooms set aside for them17, but these rooms usually opened onto a walled courtyard where the women could
walk in the open air, talk, supervise the
domestic chores of the family's
slaves18, and
interact with other
members of the household19 male and female. Here, in their territory as it were,
women would spin
wool20 for clothing while chatting with women friends who had come to visit,
play with their children21, and give their opinions on various matters to the men of the house as they
came and went. Poor women had little time for such activities because they, like their
husbands, sons, and brothers, had to leave their homes, often only a crowded rental
apartment, to find work. They often set up
small stalls22 to sell bread, vegetables, simple clothing, or trinkets.
Their husbands and sons sought jobs
as laborers in workshops or foundries or on
construction projects.23.
Restrictions on the Lives of Upper-Class Women
Upper-class women were supposed to observe
standards of decorum24 that restricted her freedom of movement in public life and her contact with
men outside her family. A woman rich enough to have servants in her home who answered
the door herself would be reproached as careless of her reputation. So, too, a proper
woman would go out of her home only for an appropriate reason. Fortunately, there were
many such occasions:
religious festivals25,
funerals26, childbirths
at the houses of relatives and friends27, and trips to workshops to buy shoes or other articles. Sometimes her husband
would escort her, but more often she was accompanied only by a servant, which left
more opportunity for independent action. Social protocol also dictated the way in
which men dealt with women. For example, custom demanded that men not speak the names
of women in public conversations and speeches in court unless practical necessity
demanded it or the women were not socially respectable, as in the case of prostitutes.
Presumably, many upper-class women valued their limited contact with men outside the
household as a badge of their superior social status. In a gender-segregated society
such as that of the wealthy at Athens, the primary opportunities for personal
relationships in a wealthy woman's life probably came in her contact with her children
and the other women with whom she spent most of her time.
Standards of Beauty
Since they stayed inside or in the shade so much28, women rich enough not to have to work maintained very pale
complexions. This pallor was much admired as a sign of a enviable life of leisure
and wealth, much as an even, all-over tan is valued today for the same reason. Women
regularly used powdered white lead as make-up to give themselves a suitably
pale look29. As
depictions of women on vase paintings30, richly decorated and colorful
clothing31,
headbands, coiffures, and jewelry32 constituted important aspects of a woman's beauty as well.
Paternity and Women's Social Standing
The social restrictions on women's freedom of movement served men's goal of avoiding
uncertainty about the
paternity of children33 by limiting oppportunities for adultery among wives and protecting the
virginity of daughters. Given the importance attached to citizenship as the defining
political structure of the city-state and of a man's personal freedom, it was
crucially important to be certain a boy truly was his father's son and not the
offspring of some other man, who could conceivably even be a foreigner or a slave.
Furthermore, the preference for keeping property in the father's line could be
maintained only if the boys who inherited a father's property were his legitimate
sons. In this patriarchal system, the value attached to citizenship for men and its
accompanying rights to property therefore led to restrictions on women's freedom of
movement in society. Women who did bear legitimate children, however, immediately
earned a higher social standing and greater freedom in the family, as explained, for
example, by an Athenian man in
this excerpt from his remarks before a
court34 in a case in which he had killed an adulterer whom he had caught with his
wife: “After my marriage, I initially refrained from bothering my wife very
much, but neither did I allow her too much independence. I kept an eye on her.... But
after she had a baby, I started to trust her more and put her in charge of all my
things, believing we now had the closest of relationships.”
The Value of Sons
Bearing male children brought special honor to a woman because sons meant security
for parents. They could appear in court in support of their parents in lawsuits and
protect them in the streets of the city, which had no regular police patrols. By
law,
sons were required to support their parents35 in their old age, a
necessity in a society with no state-sponsored system for the support of the elderly
like Social Security in the United States. So intense was the pressure to produce
sons that stories were common of barren women who smuggled in a baby born to a slave
in order to pass it off as their own. Such tales, whose truth is hard to gauge, were
only credible because husbands customarily were not present at childbirth.
Prostitutes and “Companions”
Athenian men, unlike women, had opportunities for heterosexual sex outside marriage
that carried no penalties. “Certainly you don't think men beget children out
of sexual desire?”,
wrote an Athenian man36. “The streets and the brothels are swarming with ways to take care
of that.” Besides sex with female slaves, who could not refuse their
masters, men could choose among various classes of
prostitutes37, depending on how much money they had to spend. A man could not
keep a prostitute in the same house as his wife without causing trouble, but otherwise
he incurred no disgrace by paying for sex with a woman.
The most expensive
female prostitutes the Greeks called
“companions”.38 Usually from another city-state than the one in which they
worked, “companions” supplemented their physical attractiveness
with the ability to sing and play musical instruments at mens' dinner parties (which
wives never attended). Many “companions” lived precarious lives
subject to exploitation or even violence at the hands of their male customers. The
most accomplished “companions,” however, could attract lovers from
the highest levels of society and become sufficiently rich to live in luxury on their
own. This independent existence strongly distinguished them from citizen women, as did
the freedom to control their own sexuality.
“Companions” and Freedom of Speech with Men
The cultivated ability of “companions” to converse with men in
public was as distinctive as their erotic skills. Like the geisha of Japan,
“companions” entertained men especially with their witty,
bantering conversation. Indeed, “companions,” with their
characteristic skill at clever taunts and verbal snubs, enjoyed a freedom of speech
in conversing with men that was denied proper women. Only very rich citizen women of
advanced years, such as
Elpinike the sister of Cimon,39 could
occasionally enjoy a similar freedom of expression.
She, for example, once
publicly rebuked Pericles for having boasted about the Athenian conquest of Samos
after its rebellion.40 When other Athenian women were praising Pericles for his success, Elpinike
sarcastically remarked, “This really is wonderful, Pericles, ... that you
have caused the loss of many good citizens, not in battle against Phoenicians or
Persians, like my brother Cimon, but in suppressing an allied city of fellow
Greeks.”
