History Primary Source Exercise
Gender roles in the Ancient World
Symposiast and Hetairai.
Image Source: http://www.ancient.eu/article/927/
Women in Ancient Societies tended to be defined primarily by their gender. Men, in ancient societies and until very recent times, were more likely to be defined by their status – occupation, wealth, access to political power, and right to bear weapons.
The Impact of Agriculte
Scholars have long known that, as one set of scholars put it, there was “a strikingly robust negative association” between a society’s development of agriculture, and especially of intensive settled agriculture, and “female labor force participation rates, as well as other measures of equality in gender roles.”
Source:www.econ.ku.dk/mehr/calendar/seminars/30112012/Hansen_et_al___2012__pdf.pdf
What this means is that in foraging societies, which tended to be less hierarchical than agricultural societies in every sense, gender roles were more equal. Men and women did similar types of labor and there was less disparity of power between them.
Imagining Women
Throughout history, women have tended to be viewed primarily through the lens of “gender.” We mean by this term the ways in which biological differences between men and women are translated into cultural difference – the ways in which men and women imagine each other’s capabilities, proper roles in society right to wield power, economic activities, and even the location (domestic sphere versus the public sphere) in which each should physically live most of their lives.
Imagining Women
Even societies such as Ancient Egypt, which tended to have greater equality in power and status between men and women, women were primarily imagined as belonging in the “domestic sphere” of the household, where they should focus on bearing and raising children and overseeing the “domestic economy.”
Imagining Women
The reason for this focus on women as sexual creatures lay primarily in the issue of procreation – only women can bear children, and thus a society with many women and few (surviving) males can rebuild its population quickly, which is not the case if there are few women. Hence the need to control women and to protect them from the most dangerous activities of combat or hunting. But there is no obvious reason why this tendency to envision women as belonging more to a domestic sphere should have translated into a sense of female inferiority, or that women should be controlled by their male kin – fathers, brothers, or husbands.
Imagining Women
Patriarchy:
pa·tri·arch·y
ˈpātrēˌärkē/
noun
noun: patriarchy
a system of society or government in which the father or eldest male is head of the family and descent is traced through the male line.
a system of society or government in which men hold the power and women are largely excluded from it.
a society or community organized on patriarchal lines.
To understand why agricultural societies tended to develop more unequal gender roles, we must think about the relationship between accumulated wealth and gender.
Foraging societies tended to accumulate less stored wealth because they were often nomadic or semi-nomadic. There is only so much stuff you can carry around!
Settled societies became more hierarchical and accumulated more wealth, especially among the upper classes.
The question then became, how do you ensure that your accumulated wealth will be passed on to your heirs?
Imagining Women
pat·ri·lin·e·al
ˌpatrəˈlinēəl/
adjective
adjective: patrilineal
relating to or based on relationship to the father or descent through the male line.
mat·ri·lin·e·al
ˌmatrəˈlinēəl,ˌmātrəˈlinēəl/
adjective
adjective: matrilineal
of or based on kinship with the mother or the female line.
Imaging Women
Some ancient societies were matrilineal, meaning that inheritance was through the female line. Ancient Native American societies in North America were often matrilineal.
But societies that developed settled agriculture tended to become patrilineal. The accumulated wealth and status would be passed on through the male line. In these societies, women often came to be viewed as “vessels,” not only for childbearing, but to pass on a portion of their father’s wealth, in the form of a dowry, to their husbands and children.
Imagining Women
Another important factor here was that ancient societies, and especially settled societies engaged in agriculture, also tended to be martial – meaning that they were “warrior societies” where military prowess was the most important factor in winning or keeping power, and warriors were valued above all other members of the society. In fact, some scholars have suggested that one important reason for a society to put in the labor required for intensive agriculture was to enlarge the population, and especially the population of military age men, so as to permit the society to dominate its neighbors.
Imagining Women
In a warrior society, women, such as the “Amazon” warriors below, might be imagined taking part in battle, for the most part they did not, because such a strategy would be too risky for the survival of the society overall if too many women died in battle. Hence in reality women tended to be treated as war prizes to be shared among the men of the victorious society, rather than as participants in battle.
Imaging Women
While goddesses might be imagined in these societies as warriors, women in reality usually did not fight.
In a society that thus valued warriors and military achievement, and associated these things with power and honor, those who could not participate in war – peasants, who often lacked the weapons and training, especially after the development of the chariot, slaves and, especially, women, were also viewed as less powerful, and thus less valuable.
Imagining women
Not all societies were the same in the amount of inequality between men and women. In ancient Etruscan society, in Italy, as this funerary monument suggests, men and women were more equal how they were viewed in the family economy.
Imagining Women
But in general in the ancient world, and in fact in the modern world until the last century, women were assumed in most settled societies to belong primarily in the home, to be ill-suited for warfare or for most jobs, especially that took them out of the home, and were primarily defined in their relationship to child-bearing or rearing.
Imaging Women
Women’s lives tended thus to be categorized by whether or not they were married, and whether or not they were mothers. And the assumption was that women should defer to their male kin. Women who were independent were viewed with suspicion.
We can find evidence of these ideas about women’s roles in literature, law codes (such as the Code of Hammurabi), art and even architecture.
Imagining Women
We need to remember, however the difference between “prescription” and “practice.” Most of our sources about the ancient world come from men, and they are what we call “prescriptive.”
As anyone who’s ever gotten a traffic ticket knows, practice and prescription rarely coincide.
Prescription: Idea, ethics, rules, laws, etc. that tell us what the author THINKS people SHOULD DO or how they should live.
Practice: What people actuallY DO or DID.
Imagining Women
Women often found means to do what we call “playing within the structures” of a society.
This means that they found ways to bend, circumvent, or simply ignore rules. Some of these women were exceptional – queens or priestesses, for example.
One of the earliest surviving images of Sappho, from c. 470 BC. She is shown holding a lyre and plectrum, and turning to listen to Alcaeus as he sings. Alcaeus is the other great poet from Lesbos and her contemporary.[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sappho
Imagining Women
Large granite sphinx bearing the likeness of the pharaoh Hatshepsut, depicted with the traditional false beard, a symbol of her pharaonic power—Metropolitan Museum of Art
Keith Schengili-Roberts – Own Work (photo)
Closeup shot of a large granite sphinx bearing the likeness of the female pharaoh Hatshepsut. Dating to the joint reign of Hatshepsut and Thutmose III, circa 1479-1458 B.C.
This, for example, is an image of the Egyptian Queen Hatshepsut, wearing a false beard. This image tells us two things:
Women could gain immense power in Egypt
Power in Egypt was still “gendered male,” meaning that Hatshepsut felt in necessary, despite her female biology, which was no secret, to “gender herself male” in public in order to exercise power. She was a women, but the “role” of ruler was male.
Imagining women
En Hedu’Anna (c. 2280 B.C.E.) for example, was a priestess, was a priestess of the Sumerian Moon Goddess. Daughter of Sargon of Akkad, she was also the author of an ancient set of poems to Innana, the Moon Goddess. She may be the first named author in world history (so far!).
Imaging Women
Sappho, a Greek poet from the Island of Lesbos (630-570 B.C.E.) became renowned in the Greek world for her elegant and beautiful poetry.
Moreover, most women in ancient societies made important contributions to the economy and survival of their societies. They were partners with their husbands, albeit unequal ones, in the work of farming or the domestic workshop. That economic contribution often provided women more “clout” in their households, neighborhoods and societies than laws and prescriptive literature acknowledged.
Imaging Women
For this unit’s Primary Source Assignment, read first the background reading “Gender and Sexual Relations in Ancient Greece” which can be found at this link: https://web.ics.purdue.edu/~ rauhn/greek_gender.htm and the encyclopedia article “Women in Ancient Greece,” found here: https://www.ancient.eu/article/927/women-in-ancient-greece /
Then read the excerpts from Xenophon, “How to Train a Wife,” 4th century BCE, and respond to the prompt on the following slide (please answer all the questions, as they are related). In this case you will be comparing and contrasting both sets of documents.
Imagining Women
Prompt: Think about the difference between “practice” and “prescription” described in this document. For whom do you think Xenophon wrote this document? How does Xenophon describe “proper” gender relations within a marriage. Given that we know that fundamentally Greece was a patriarchal society, so what extent do you think women’s roles and lived experiences in marriage relationships actually reflected what Xenophon describes here as the ideal? Do you think some women found ways to circumvent male dominance? Do you think that some men have been motivated to afford their wives more agency than Xenophon recommends?
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