The study of the lives of women in classical Athens has been a significant part of classical scholarship since the 1970s. The knowledge of Athenian women's lives comes from a variety of ancient sources. Much of it is literary evidence, primarily from tragedy, comedy, and oratory; supplemented with archaeological sources such as epigraphy and pottery. All of these sources were created by—and mostly for—men: there is no surviving ancient testimony by classical Athenian women on their own lives.
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. They married young, often to much older men. When they married, Athenian women had two main roles: to bear children, and to run the household. The ideal Athenian woman did not go out in public or interact with men she was not related to, though this ideology of seclusion would only have been practical in wealthy families. 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.
Legally, women's rights were limited. They were barred from political participation, and Athenian women were not permitted to represent themselves in law, though it seems that metic women could (a metic was a resident alien—free, but without the rights and privileges of citizenship). They were also forbidden from conducting economic transactions worth more than a nominal amount. However, it seems that this restriction was not always obeyed. In poorer families, women would have worked to earn money. Athenian women had limited capacity to own property, although they could have significant dowries, and could inherit items.
The area of civic life in which Athenian women were most free to participate was the religious and ritual sphere. Along with important festivals reserved solely for women, they participated in many mixed-sex ritual activities. Of particular importance was the cult of Athena Polias, whose priestess held considerable influence. Women played an important role in the Panatheneia, the annual festival in honour of Athena. Women also played an important role in domestic religious rituals.
Historiography
Sources
The major sources for the lives of women in classical Athens are literary, political and legal, and artistic. As women play a prominent role in much Athenian literature, it initially seems as though there is a great deal of evidence for the lives and experiences of Athenian women. 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. It is because of this that John J. Winkler writes in The Constraints of Desire that "most of our surviving documents simply cannot be taken at face value when they speak of women".
According to Sarah Pomeroy, "tragedies cannot be used as an independent source for the life of the average woman" since the position of women in tragedy was dictated by their role in the pre-classical myths used by the tragedians as sources. However, A. W. Gomme's 1925 "The Position of Women in Athens in the Fifth and Fourth Centuries" relied heavily on tragedy as a source and argued that classical Athenian tragedy modelled its female characters on the lives of contemporary women. The relevance of comedy as evidence is also disputed. 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. Gomme, however, criticised the use of Old Comedy as evidence of daily life "for anything may happen in Aristophanes".
Another major source for the lives of women in classical Athens is surviving legal speeches. Since many concern inheritance, they are valuable sources of Athenian attitudes toward gender and the family. Although these sources must be treated with caution because trials in classical Athens were "essentially rhetorical struggles", they are useful for information about the ideologies of gender, family and household. These speeches also frequently contain references to, and even the texts of, Athenian laws not otherwise preserved. The pseudo-Demosthenic speech Against Neaera, for instance, contains a law on adultery which is not otherwise attested.
Archaeological and iconographical evidence provide a wider range of perspectives than literature. Producers of ancient Athenian art are known to have included metics. Some of this art may have been produced by women and children. Although the art produced (particularly pottery, grave stelai and figurines) was used by a wider range of people than much Athenian literature was—including women and children—it is not known how accurately the iconography of classical art mapped the reality of classical society.
Approaches
Before the 20th century, and in some cases as late as the 1940s, historians largely took ancient literary sources at face value as evidence for the lives of women in the ancient world. In the middle of the 20th century this began to change. Early innovations in the study of women in ancient history began in France, as the Annales School began to take a greater interest in underrepresented groups. Robert Flacelière was an influential early author on women in Greece. Around the same time, feminist philosophy, such as Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex also examined the lives of women in the classical world.
Influenced by second-wave feminism, the study of women in antiquity became widespread in the English-speaking world in the 1970s. The amount of scholarship on women in the ancient world has increased dramatically since then. The first major publication in the field was a 1973 special issue of the journal Arethusa, which aimed to look at women in the ancient world from a feminist perspective. In 1975, the first edition of Sarah Pomeroy's Goddesses, Whores, Wives, and Slaves was published. This has been described as "the inauguration of women's studies within classics". Lin Foxhall called Pomeroy's book "revolutionary" and "a major step forward" from previous English-language scholarship on ancient women. According to Shelley Haley, Pomeroy's work "legitimized the study of Greek and Roman women in ancient times".
However, classics has been characterised as a "notoriously conservative" field, and initially women's history was slow to be adopted: from 1970 to 1985, only a few articles on ancient women were published in major journals. In 1976, a single review was able to cover "the entire field of recent scholarship on women in all of classical antiquity". However, by 1980, writing about women in classical Athens was called "positively trendy", and in 1989 women's studies was described as "one of the most exciting growth points" in classics.
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. Foucault has been praised for looking at gender through the lens of social systems. According to Lin Foxhall, his approach has "had more impact on the scholarship of gender than anything since second-wave feminism" and is "virtually canonical in some quarters". However, Foucault's work has been criticised for its "shallow discussion of women as historical subjects".
Scholarly interest in the lives of women in the ancient world has continued to increase. 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. The range of subjects covered by women's historians also increased substantially; in 1980 the question of women's status was the most important topic to historians of Athenian women, but by 2000 scholars were also working on "gender, the body, sexuality, masculinity and other topics".
Until the 1980s, scholars of women in classical Athens were primarily interested in the status of women and how they were viewed by men. Early feminist scholarship aimed to assert that women were significant in ancient history and to demonstrate how they had been oppressed. Early scholars held that Athenian women had an "ignoble" place, but in 1925 this position was challenged by Arnold Wycombe Gomme. According to Gomme, women had high social status despite their limited legal rights; his view has reinforced that position ever since. Pomeroy attributes the variety of viewpoints to the types of evidence prioritised by scholars, with those arguing for the high status of Athenian women predominantly citing tragedy and those arguing against it emphasising oratory.
With increased interest in women's history by classical scholars, a number of related disciplines have also become more significant. Classicists have become more interested in the family since the Second World War, with W. K. Lacey's 1968 The Family in Classical Greece particularly influential. The history of childhood emerged as a sub-discipline of history during the 1960s, and other disciplines such as the study of ancient medicine have been influenced by feminist approaches to the classics.
Childhood
Infant mortality was common in classical Athens, with perhaps 25 percent of children dying at or soon after birth. 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. Donald Engels has argued that a high rate of female infanticide was "demographically impossible", although scholars have since largely dismissed this argument. Although scholars have tried to determine the rate of female infanticide, Cynthia Patterson rejects this approach as asking the wrong questions; Patterson suggests that scholars should instead consider the social importance and impact of the practice.
Janet Burnett Grossman writes that girls appear to be commemorated about as frequently as boys on surviving Attic gravestones, although previous scholars suggested that boys were commemorated up to twice as often. If they survived, Athenian children were named in a ceremony (the dekate) ten days after birth. Other Athenian ceremonies celebrating childbirth (at five, seven, and forty days after birth) were also observed. Later rites of passage were apparently more common and elaborate for boys than for girls.
Classical Athenian girls probably reached menarche at about age fourteen, when they would have married. Girls who died before marriage were mourned for their failure to reach maturity. Memorial vases for dead girls in classical Athens often portrayed them dressed as brides, and were sometimes shaped like loutrophoroi (vases which held water used to bathe before the wedding day).
Athenian girls were not formally educated; instead, their mothers taught them the domestic skills necessary for running a household. Formal education for boys consisted of rhetoric, necessary for effective political participation, and physical education in preparation for military service. These skills were not considered necessary for women, who were barred from learning them. Several fifth-century vase paintings depict women reading, suggesting that some girls did learn to read, although little is known about how and by whom they were taught. Classical art indicates that girls and boys played with toys such as spinning tops, hoops, and seesaws, and played games such as piggyback. 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.