I was just reading about the roles of women in ancient greece, and although they have quite a strong presence in mythology, I was surprised to read that their actual roles in society were pretty basic. Like being raised only to rear children, being expected to marry as virgins, that sort of thing. But I'm seriously confused because this page I read said "There was no place in Greek society for a grown single woman"....so where did they go? Surely not every single Greek woman got married so what did these non-married women of Greece do with themselves? Were they driven out? Or just shunned or something? Or was the thought of being unmarried so terrifying that they would just shack up with any old geezer to avoid problems?
Also, not related to the question but I also read that while they would be seriously punished if they were caught cheating, their husbands could not only cheat on their wives but have LIVE-IN fuck buddies and their wives couldnt do anything about it. Just leaves a sour taste in my mouth... like I get it was a different time but as a girl especially its hard not to let it get under my skin.
As a sort of side question, what would happen to the widows of soldiers in ancient Greece?
In Ionian/Attikaean Greek cities, this was a non-issue. Laws of inheritance made all sons equal heirs of the father. Rather than the eldest getting everything, the estate had to be equally divided. So a man's farm would get divided into smaller bits over the generations, until each bit could no longer support a family.
Their solution to the problem, in the classical period, was simple infanticide. It was a rarely wealthy man who would keep more than 2 of the sons born to him and his wife. The rest were abandoned in large pots in the courtyard of a temple within a day or two of birth. Weak or deformed neonates went there anyway.
By this period, girls had to be dowered. They were an expense. But even these folks realized you had to have women, too. Especially in the restricted group that were citizens, it was necessary for a citizen to marry a citizen's daughter for their sons to be citizens.
The rub is that they would keep only one daughter. It's almost unheard of for a woman to have a sister. Poor men, especially non-citizens, might not keep any. They couldn't afford to dower them.
So you wound up with an artificial 2:1 ratio. While the greed for doweries might seem to threaten some girls with spinsterhood, in reality almost any girl could get married.
In his translation of Pausanias's Guide to Greece, in his notes Peter Levi claims that the probable age of puberty was about 16, not our 11 or 12. So when Athenian girls were married at 10 to 12, they weren't women. It would be several years before they could have children themselves. This is kind of corroborated by the Hippocratic writers in the essay on virgins: they have apparently never dealt with a girl who is still a virgin starting menstrual flows. (Or if she did, they "knew" she was a hussy who had had sex.)
So never-married women didn't really exist in the Ionian/Attikaean world.
In the Dorian Greek states, women were actually considered human beings who could inherit a lesser part of their parental estate, own property, and stuff like that. They also didn't marry until after 18. As usual, an author's "ancient Greece " translates as "Athens."