Hello,
I've done a search for this here but not found this specific question.
I've been reading a fair amount about the lives of women in ancient Greece and I'm seeing a general trend suggesting life for women (especially those in Athens) was not particularly great by contemporary standards.
For all the reading I've done, however, I keep asking myself - "does this mean they were unhappy?" because so many of the things I've been reading suggest (or outright state) that life must have been "miserable." I have been asking myself, "if women were raised in this society, and they knew what was expected of them, and saw how all their female relatives were living, would it have just seemed "normal" to them? Did they resent it and we have no idea because they had no voice, or did they not mind because it was all they knew?"
Perhaps it's a bit of both. I'm sure individual opinions would have varied wildly.
As an example, I know a lot of my friends look at a Niqab as oppressive and misogynistic but I've also read the opinions of Muslim women who wear them proudly and view them as part of their culture and religion. One viewpoint looks at that practice as something that is oppressive, the other sees it as an expression of heritage and tradition.
So I'm wondering, do we have any idea of what ancient Greek women thought about their daily lives and position in society? Do we have any idea if they were miserable, content, or happy?
Thanks for your time :)
It's a bit off on a tangent, but since you mentioned the niqab: it's worth noting that clothing styles, social norms and expected behavior among Muslim women, even in a particular region and even across a few decades, could vary dramatically based on time, location, social class or ethnicity, or politics. You might want to check out this answer I wrote on veiling in Central Asia at the beginning of the Soviet period for a historic example.
In short: it can get complicated. Individual women react very differently. In that situation decisions were often made by men with no real input or concern about what women wanted...but at the same time individual women played roles in either enforcing or challenging social norms.
Which is to say: even in a situation less than a century ago that involved a modern state trying to engage in mass mobilization and education (or alternately engaging in resistance against this state) there were very few, it any, actual attempts to ask individual women how they felt about their life situations.
Kind of along the lines of what Kochevnik81 was saying above, it’s really difficult to tell because the majority of our evidence doesn’t show us the mental state of most men even, let alone women, and that culture changes over time, so that the life of the average woman from generation to generation might be totally different (even though Greek culture was generally more conservative than ours is).
That being said, it’s my personal opinion that the majority of women were generally content about their lives. Of course there were outliers who didn’t like the status quo, and you have to think on an individual level if you want to ask if a specific woman liked her life, much like you have to do today.
For 99 percent of Greek women, there were two concrete lifestyles; that of a Greek man, and that of a Greek woman. There was no gender fluidity in Ancient Greece, so if you were a woman, you 99 percent of the time were expected to live a woman’s life. This lifestyle, of course, also varied from social class to social class, and from city to city. A woman could wield real social power in Ancient Greece, if not political power in the sense we think of nowadays. A man’s wife “wore the pants” so to speak when it came to the household; she handled most of the money, handled the stockrooms of the house, commanded the slaves and servants if they had any, raised the children, and very likely decided much more than the average man let on in Ancient writings. I recall Xenophon’s Economics in which he describes the duties of a woman in the household, and its always seemed to me that the household was an integral part of society which was naturally delegated to women, as opposed to serving as a prison to hide your wife and children in. Women naturally made these spaces lively, not because their husband expected them to—he cared usually about politics and outdoor matters—but because they wanted to themselves, because that was the life their society led them on and they made the most of it.
The key thing is to detach ourselves from our modern interpretation of their lives, and try to understand how they would have seen their situation. Greek women were raised pretty much from birth to live as a Greek woman. To us in modern western societies, that life seems hellish for a woman, and depressing. But to the ancient woman, it might be all she ever wanted and more to have a husband, and a family, and to run a beautiful, vibrant household, because her society would respect her for it, and it was what she was trained and groomed from birth to respect and strive for, much like today in the western world girls can be encouraged to go out and do everything the men can just as good or even better. Your happiness, anthropologically, depends on how well your goals are in line with those your social group expects of you; it might just be that, though we would be miserable leading a Greek woman’s life, nothing would make a good portion of Greek women happier than to live that way (but again, always remember there are outliers...the examples I can think of, though, like Hippolyta and Medea, were distinctly non-Greek characters, and served as an antithesis to what was the accepted norm that men and women saw as their own).