CW: sexual violence, humiliation and oppression of women

 

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There are many problems with the claims in this video. This is probably because it's based on the scholarship of Sarah Pomeroy (1975), who broke new ground by studying Ancient Greek women in their own right, but mostly did so in an excessively optimistic way that isn't very well supported by the sources. More recent work is more careful in its judgment of the position of Spartan citizen women. The main source for this answer is Ellen Millender's chapter on the subject in Anton Powell's Companion to Sparta (2018).

The critical point is that the supposedly liberated and empowered position of citizen women in Sparta is part of the so-called "Spartan mirage", the fictional version of Sparta imagined by outsiders in the centuries after Sparta had faded as a prominent state in the Greek world. In that sense the myth of the powerful Spartan woman is as little grounded in fact as the myth of the invincible Spartan warrior or the myth of a moneyless society that cared only about honour and valour in combat. This is not what Sparta was but what others liked it to be. All of these concepts make Sparta into the Other against which outsiders could contrast their own societies. But the way in which Sparta was sketched as different wasn't always the same. Where non-Spartans painted Sparta as the perfectly ordered society in order to push ideas about education and virtue, they painted Spartan women as free and licentious in order to warn others about the corruption that came with the notion of women's rights. They leered at the bodies of “thigh-flashing” Spartan girls and characterised them as promiscuous and unfaithful. They ascribed the downfall of their great society to the greed and political power of women.

To get at the truth about Spartan women, we need to try and get behind this moralistic agenda of our sources. The real question is not "What made Spartan women better off?" but rather "Were Spartan women really better off?"

First of all, of course, I should stress that I’m referring here to the very select group of Spartiate citizen women. Spartan society included many groups that were excluded from power, and while we know virtually nothing about the status of women in those groups, we can assume that they would be no better off than subordinate groups elsewhere in the Greek world. The freeborn but disenfranchised perioikoi likely upheld laws similar to those of other Greeks; the unfree helots were an enslaved labour force, and both men and women were subject to the outrageously violent whims of their Spartiate oppressors. When we speak of Spartan women being better off, we are talking only about those who were born as citizens, the children of citizen parents – at most a few thousand women, at the height of Spartan power, in a population of a few hundred thousand.

And even when we’re talking only about these women, in most ways the answer to our question is No. From what we can tell, where the married life of elite Spartan women was different from the lives of women elsewhere in the Greek world, it was actually worse. In Sparta as elsewhere, citizen women were primarily regarded as baby factories, whose primary duty as citizens was the production of more citizens. Women grew up under the control of a male guardian (their father or close male relative) who decided on their behalf to whom and when they would be married. They had no say in their choice of husband. After the wedding, their husband became their new guardian. They could not instigate divorce. But Spartan customs made this whole experience even more difficult. The particularly traumatic Spartan marriage ceremony involved women having their heads shaved and being dressed as men, since their husband's sexual experience up to that point would have been exclusively with boys, and the idea of having sex with a woman might scare them. And the Spartan rule that younger men had to spend their days with their messmates meant that husbands and wives might not actually see each other in daylight until years into their marriage.

The linked answer above further discusses the wife-sharing practices that Spartans introduced, either to increase the number of babies or to concentrate inheritances; in each case, control of the woman's sexuality was entirely in the hands of men, with the woman having no freedom of choice and no ability to protest her guardian's decisions. In other words, women were not “permitted to have two husbands”, as you put it. Rather, two (or more) Spartan men were permitted the use of the reproductive capacity of one woman. There is really no way to spin this as a matter of female empowerment (though Xenophon tries, by claiming that women enjoy the opportunity to run two households at the same time). As far as we know, the practice was unique to Sparta.

It is true that the life of Spartan girls was different. Their unique upbringing prompted many comments from ancient authors on the fact that they “wore revealing clothes and often did sports naked in the presence of men”, as you say. But, first of all, these things applied only to girls preparing for the transition to womanhood. As far as we know, Spartan women stopped doing exercise once they got married, and were expected to live indoors like the wives of other Greeks. Secondly, they would only have been a part of the girls’ upbringing, the rest of which would have focused on learning to spin and weave and other things common to girls’ education in other Greek states. Thirdly and most importantly, we may wonder if the athletic exercises should be seen as a form of liberation or empowerment. After all, they were not optional, nor were they private. We can therefore interpret the practice in different ways. There is a world of difference between “girls were allowed to go out in public wearing little to nothing and do sports” and “young girls were forced to give evidence of the strength and beauty of their bodies by exercising naked while closely observed by teenage boys and adult men.”

We should never forget that the purpose of making girls exercise, as several sources attest, was eugenic. Spartans believed that strong and healthy women produced strong and healthy babies. In other words, girls did not exercise because it was fun, or because they wanted to; it was not a right they claimed for themselves but a duty that was imposed on them. They did it in order to meet the demands of the state, and they were constantly scrutinised and held to account for the extent to which they lived up to Spartan standards. Plutarch adds that their public performance was also intended to “encourage young men to desire marriage”, which is a really euphemistic way to phrase the way teenage boys typically react to the sight of lightly dressed or even naked teenage girls. It cannot be stressed enough, then, that girls’ sports at Sparta were not a matter of women doing what they wanted. They were part state-enforced eugenics and part striptease, and girls had no choice but to take part in it. The only perk was that they got to return the leering and vicious criticism of male bodies when the boys did their performative athletics in turn.

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Spartan women do seem to have enjoyed a considerable degree of social and economic freedom as compared to other contemporary societies such as Athens. We should not overstate their power and suggest that this was an egalitarian society when it came to gender, however I think it is unfair to characterise Sparta as solely a brutal and oppressive regime.

One of the biggest factors that contributed to female empowerment in Sparta was the problem of “Oliganthropia” - this is referred to by Aristotle meaning (I think though my Ancient Greek is awful) “fewness of persons”. We are not entirely sure exactly why this became such a problem in Sparta but essentially the issue was that as Spartan society progressed the system could not produce enough citizens to replace their population - some have pointed to natural disasters and continuous Warfare in the 5th century BC (such as the earthquake that rocked Sparta in 464 BC and caused a Helot revolt) whereas others (linking to Aristotle’s original point) point to the land distribution in Sparta - because land could be inherited by both men and women and because land was not redistributed as happened in the original Lycurgan revolution some time in the 6th-7th centuries BC, over time the land “passed into fewer hands” as Aristotle tells us and “many invariably became poor”. Because in Sparta to become a full citizen you needed to be able to contribute produce from your Kleros (allotment of land) to your mess hall (which Spartan citizens were required to attend) - the result was that many Spartans could not meet the mess hall commitments and could not become citizens. Aristotle tells us that Lycurgus encouraged the begetting of children and so women became increasingly important in Sparta for this reason: firstly because they had to produce the next generation of warriors, and then when the population declined (from roughly 10,000 citizens at the start of the 5th century to 4,000 by the Peloponnesian War) their importance increased as the need for new citizens increased. This explains some of their rather odd policies such as women having multiple lovers (not husbands as the YouTube vid suggests) to encourage childbearing which may have developed into response to this decline. The importance placed on childbirth is emphasised by the fact that in Sparta to gain a headstone on your grave as a man you had to die in battle, as a woman in childbirth - both are seen as dying in service to the state.

As to what you stated in your original comment, certainly the men being away at war does contribute to their power, Aristotle says that they became independent due to their husbands’ “frequent campaigning” but this does not explain the full picture when you compare Sparta to other societies who were also at war for successive generations. As to why they exercised naked Plato suggests this is sexual in nature and essentially it was to increase the passions of the men, but Plutarch also suggests it did away with prudery - and the men exercised naked to encourage maintaining healthy bodies; so we can guess the intention was partly the same for women. Xenophon tells us the Spartans believed physically healthy mothers would produce healthy children so it was to ensure the women could endure childbirth more easily

With regards to why they enjoyed such relative freedom (such as being able to own land) in the first place a more pessimistic interpretation would be to set the bar very low and suggest the freedom they did enjoy was only impressive relative to other contemporary societies. That approach definitely has some merit: as I originally mentioned it was certainly no feminist paradise, but you need only read the quotes of Spartan women as preserved by Plutarch or the maiden songs of Spartan poet Alkman to see the Spartan women taking a fair degree of pride in their position within the Spartan system (most famously, though perhaps the reliability of the origin of the quote may be questionable the quote attributed to Gorgo when asked by an Athenian women why Spartan women are the only women to lord over their men, her response was “because we are the only ones to give birth to men”) - the evidence we do have from Sparta shows a relative degree of respect between the two sexes that is certainly surprising.

This partly could be due to the collective responsibility placed in Sparta on instilling and maintaining Spartan values within the community. Aristotle tells us that Lycurgus tried to “discipline” the women but gave up when he could not control their “considerable licence”, but Plutarch directly refuted this and he and Xenophon tell us women had a range of roles that benefitted the state beyond their primary role of bearing children. In public they informally policed Spartans on a local, we are told they would sing songs that praised the most successful Spartans and ridiculed the others to encourage competition, A Spartan nurse alongside the mother would raise the boys up to the age of 7 to prepare them for the agoge, and they would help keep a watch on the Helots, particularly whilst the men were away on campaign. Thus in order for Sparta to be successful everyone had to “buy-in” to the system so to speak; and this couldn’t be confined just to the men. Their respect and importance therefore came from the fact that they were perceived as equally important to maintaining the success of the state and its collective values.

Edit: an extra paragraph and some books that may interest:

https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=0NYdCgAAQBAJ&printsec=frontcover&dq=woman+in+the+ancient+world&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjP4d354L3oAhXQDOwKHeiZAzEQ6AEILDAB#v=onepage&q&f=false a “companion” to Women in the Ancient World which covers a broad range of studies and societies - one of which focused on the role of Spartan women as perceived by Athenian men.

A companion to Sparta https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=QqA6DwAAQBAJ&printsec=frontcover&dq=powell+sparta&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwiB056E473oAhXLsKQKHViJDmoQ6AEILTAB#v=onepage&q&f=false