Your history teacher is making unsupported assertions. Sparta's practice of infanticide is, to the best of my knowledge, only referenced once in ancient sources in a short passage in Plutarch. Plutarch was writing 500 years after the golden age of Sparta, and since the Spartans left little literature of their own he was likely working mainly from Athenian sources. Plutarch's passage only mentions that babies were killed if they were unfit; he mentions nothing about it being mainly females, so your teacher's statement is pure speculation.

​

It's not even particularly justified speculation. It's true that in modern cultures where infanticide (or selective abortion) is common, it mostly affects females, but we can't necessarily extrapolate that to Sparta. Infanticide mostly happens because the parents feel they can't afford to feed another child, but Plutarch says that in Sparta the judgement was made by a council of elders acting on behalf of the state - who were less likely to be interested in the economic struggles of a family, and more likely to be looking for deformities which would render someone unfit for military service. In which case it might well have affected boys more (and I stress again that we have no real proof it happened at all).

​

As for whether it had a demographic effect, we also have no clear evidence how extensive the infanticide was (if there was any at all). No mass graves of infant remains have been discovered. (In fact, at the base of Mount Taygetus, which Plutarch described as being the place used for infanticide, skeletons were found - but they all adults. Which suggests that Plutarch may have misunderstood his sources). The lack of archaeological evidence, while not conclusive, suggests that if it did happen it wasn't particularly common. There's also no record in ancient sources of Spartans having a particular problem finding wives. In fact, most ancient comments on the subject of Spartan relationships say that Spartans didn't have much interest in getting married (since they had been raised through the agoge in the company of men). Which, insofar as other Greeks commenting on the sexual practices of their enemies is trustworthy, suggests that there wasn't the sort of competitive dating environment which might be brought about by a strong gender imbalance. In fact, if there was a gender balance it was more likely a lack of men, caused by war - Aristotle references the fact that a large amount of Spartan land was in the hands of women, who inherited it from their husbands - which suggests that there were many more women without men than men without women.

​

In answer to your last point, Spartan men did produce children with helot women, but it wasn't considered an actual marriage and those children were considered bastards, with a specific social status which was halfway between helot and Spartiate. We don't have any sources that say one way or the other whether this was the just result of everyday male-female interactions, or whether it was encouraged by the state for the purpose of keeping the population up.

​

So basically to sum up: there's no evidence that Sparta practised female-specific infanticide, and only pretty thin evidence that they practised infanticide at all. There is no evidence of a gender imbalance caused by a lack of women, nor of it affecting marriage customs.

​

Or to answer this question the Spartan way:

If the Spartans commonly practiced infanticide on girls, how did the men find wives?

"If"

​

​

see:

Plutarch: 'Life of Lycurgus'

Aristotle: Politics, book 2

​