In many Eurasian societies, the married woman “disappeared,” so to speak, into her family; to the outside world, she was represented by her husband, and a woman was not usually seen outside the family home. But in some regions and among some peoples, women had a much more independent position—although never fully equal to that of men. That seems, for example, to have been the case among some peoples in Southeast Asia and among Celts and Germans and their ancestors in Northwest Europe. In the Greek world, a difference can be observed in this respect between Sparta and Dorian Greece on the one hand and the rest of the country, but especially Athens, about which we know the most, on the other. In the more “primitive” and more collectively regulated society of Sparta, the position of women vis-a-vis men was in fact better than was the case in more “individualized” Athens. In Sparta, for a long time, dowries were forbidden; marriages could be arranged by the kings; daughters enjoyed inheritance rights (albeit half of a son’s inheritance); girls married on average a little later, at an age that did not imperil their health, at a time when early marriage was the norm elsewhere, for instance, in Athens; girls participated in public choirs and dances and in athletic competitions; and married women often ruled the households in the absence of their husbands, who spent most of their time with their companions in the common messes. In Athens, in contrast, girls and women always were under some form of tutelage, whether of the father, the husband, a son, a brother, or another male family relation; she could not legally inherit and had not, strictly speaking, any possessions of her own, and in all her dealings with the outside world she always was dependent on her husband or her legal tutor (in practice, though, often ways could be found that gave a woman more independence and even property of her own, but that would always remain precarious from a legal point of view).
Thus, in Greece, social life was mainly centered around men. Only at religious festivals with their processions, games, sacrifices, and feasts in the open air could respectable women appear in public. Naturally, there were many differences in this between various regions and also between classes of the population. Among the very poor, there always was a certain equality between men and women, since they often did the same work and lived in such simple dwellings that a separation of spheres between them was physically impossible. Among the elites, women often exerted great influence and enjoyed some independence, although never legally, while decency demanded that there too, for instance, the married woman did not participate in the meals or sumposia to which her husband invited his friends. In Greece, such dinner parties and literary soirees with few exceptions were male affairs, as were club life and all sorts of collective entertainment. This situation was, if anything, even more pronounced among non-Greek peoples in Egypt and in most parts of Asia. Only the so-called barbarian peoples of Europe, some societies far away in Asia, and the Dorian Greeks of Crete and Sparta offered women a little more freedom, though even there women were always restricted by what was in essence a male world.
World History
