Our evidence for female private lives is fragmentary: sources offer us only broken artifacts spread across decaying houses and small snippets of information gleaned from wider narratives. It is no surprise that most modern investigations into women and religion take a wide ambit. Dillon’s study Girls and Women in Classical Greek Religion offers an invaluable collection of information on female religious practices viewed across a wide spectrum of communities and chronological periods (Dillon 2002). This kind of investigative approach offers us the chance to compare and contrast the religious behavior of women in different times and places. Yet it carries an implicit danger: in gathering a wide range of information we run the risk of homogenizing female religious behavior. No matter how carefully and cautiously we present our research, when we cast with a wide net we cannot avoid gathering women together, masking the wide range of age groups and social backgrounds that the term ‘‘women’’ is capable of containing (Katz 1995). We risk grouping together mistress and slave, matron and maiden, without discrimination. The final result is a composite picture of female lives which ignores the differences that place, time, social status, and political system can bring to religious experiences.
One solution to this problem is for us to control our investigation by directing it at a specific group of women. The obvious candidates are the women of classical and early hellenistic Athens, a place and time for which we have a substantial body of information accumulated from material and textual sources. Yet in doing this, we run into three problems. First, we must accept that we cannot understand the religious lives of all women in the community; we can only see the women that our sources allow us to. As a result our view will be skewed. Even within a single community, women’s religious experiences and behavior can be very different. Financial considerations will dictate not only the roles played by women in a family but also the quality and range of materials used for religious acts. Social position can influence the ability of an individual to participate in ritual occasions, as well as affecting the tenor of the whole experience. Our study will never fully reflect the variety of experiences that must have existed.
Secondly, our ability to investigate female religious behavior in the private sphere will be constrained by the quality of our sources. Most evidence for the religious lives of women focuses on their actions in the public sphere: we have little evidence for practices in the home. When references to women and domestic life do appear in texts, they are tangential to wider narratives: again, our view is skewed rather than direct. Even where we do stumble across a description of private female worship, we have no idea how it fits into a wider context of women’s religious behavior. Menander’s description of a mother worshiping at a domestic shrine offers us no clue as to whether the scene reflects a common or exceptional practice; it is the only example that we have (Ghost 49-56). Equally, we do not know how far Menander and other authors exaggerate female behavior to suit the needs of their narrative.
Our third problem is one of perspective: the view that our sources offer us comes through male eyes. As Plato’s comments at the start of this chapter show, women are narrative tools in the hands of an author. They become visible in our sources when their lives or religious behavior reflect or reinforce male ideology (Just 1989:2-4). How far a man could understand or represent female life is a matter of some debate (Cartledge 1993:65). We must accept the possibility that we may be viewing an ideal of female life and that the view offered to us by texts has little bearing on the day-to-day existence of women. Most Athenian texts divide women into two clean and clear categories: the good citizen wife and the rest. Citizen wives are expected to be modest and invisible, not to draw attention to themselves (Salmenkivi 1997:186-7). They should be like Andromache, wife of Hector, who records how she led a modest life, avoiding the gossip of women and pleasing her husband (Euripides, Trojan
Women 645-56). The good citizen wife stays indoors. Women who deviate from this behavior are stereotyped as frightening and unnatural, like Clytemnestra and Medea, or they are viewed as ‘‘outside’’ of normal gender relations, like hetairas such as Aspasia (Blundell 1995:148, 172-80).
Yet our acceptance of the citizen wife as an ideal projection does not undermine or vitiate the image of female lives offered by ancient sources. As Katz points out, these images must have made sense in a cultural context (1995:30). Oratory, tragedy, and comedy were all written for public performance and appraisal. The pictures of women that they offer must reflect and reinforce the views of the society that produced them. Citizen wives, irrespective of differences in social and financial status, played a vitally important role for Athens in ensuring a steady supply of future citizens; they were also an essential component in the ideology of the home. In order to understand the images of private female religious behavior that appear in Athenian textual sources, we must engage more directly with the male representation of female lives. We must explore the religious occasions where citizen wives become visible and how their behavior reflects or reinforces the ideology of texts. We must seek to understand how the relationship between the citizen wife and the house articulates female religious behavior in public and also in private contexts.
World History
