Women in Ancient Greece

by Susan Blundell

To read the history of ancient Greece as it has been written for centuries is to enter a thoroughly male world. This book, a comprehensive history of women in the Archaic and Classical Ages, completes our picture of ancient Greek society. Largely excluded from any public role, the women of ancient Greece nonetheless appear in various guises in the art and writing of the period, and in legal documents. These representations, in Sue Blundell's analysis, reveal a great deal about women's day-to-day experience as well as their legal and economic position--and how they were regarded by men. Here are women as portrayed in Homer, in Greek lyric poetry, and by the playwrights; the female nature as depicted in medical writings and by Aristotle; representations of women in sculpture and vase paintings. This is evidence filtered through a male Sappho is the only female writer of antiquity much of whose work survives. Yet these sources and others such as regulations and law court speeches reveal a great deal about women's lives and about their status as defined by law and by custom. By examining the roles that men assigned to women, the ideals they constructed for them, and the anxieties they expressed about them, Blundell sheds light on the cultural dynamics of a male-dominated society. Lively and richly illustrated, her work offers a fresh look at women in the ancient world.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Greece, Ancient History, Historical, Classics, Classical Studies

224 pages, Paperback

First published May 5, 1995

Reviews

[Carlo]

¡¡primer llibru lleíu pa'l TFG!!

[Mallory anderson · Rating 4 out of 5]

huge help for my history project which is on how women in ancient Greece were viewed and there daily life.

[Frikiflower]

me cago en todo que me he leído este libro prácticamente entero hoy pq mañana tengo una reunión para preparar un debate sobre la mujer espartana y la mujer espartana solamente sale en un subcapítulo del libro voy a matar a alguien

Bueno, que la culpa es mía por organizarme fatal. A ver, el libro.
Mentiría si no dijera que me ha parecido interesantísimo y he aprendido muchas cosas y me ha aclarado otras sobre la mujer en la Antigua Grecia (literalmente lo que pone en la portada). De hecho, me lo he leído entero porque tenía genuino interés en él. La autora describe muy bien, aunque creo que muchas veces se repite. Si os interesa la historia y sabéis inglés, leerlo.

[Noa Shapiro · Rating 3 out of 5]

A very readable book. It glosses over some points and is very focused on others. It is also missing some key elements like the role of women in Warcraft. But as an overview was very nice.

[Ay Oh Be · Rating 3 out of 5]

Blundell’s writing style is very clear and concise. I don’t have any real issues with her book stylistically. It wasn’t overbearing in its scholarly language and the sentences and thoughts flowed quite well together. The organisation of the book is also very well put together. The order of subjects makes sense and it is easy to reference areas of interest or cross references points made within the book with ideas discussed earlier. I especially appreciated the photos of various artefacts that the author references. This was much more effective than having the author describe the pieces and then their significance.
This is the area of history that I am the most interested in so I found the content fascinating. I especially liked when the author discussed the lives of women in Athens and Sparta back to back. It created an interesting back drop to set the prior information on. I really have no complaints against her content either, it was clearly well researched, she provides notes and a full bibliography at the end of her book.
My biggest complaint about this book is that the author constantly undermines her own validity by pointing out, over and over, that there is not a lot of female based evidence detailing the lives of women in classical Greece so the information that she is interpreting often comes from artefacts or male writing. While I appreciate that she needs to make this point clear I found that her repeating it so often made her sound unsure of her own conclusions.

[Tony Gualtieri · Rating 5 out of 5]

This very readable book gives as good a look as possible at the position of women in Archaic and Classical Athens. As women's writings from this time haven't survived, the author looks at legal documents, literature and sculpture as ways of understanding women's lives. At the same time, she is careful to note that her sources, with the single exception of Sappho, are male and biased. The concluding pages on the Hellenistic era make one wish she hadn't decided to stop her story with the rise of Macedonia.

[Leisha · Rating 4 out of 5]

I got this book for some research for a paper I am writing on how Women are represented in classical Greek literature and how it is similar to or different from how they were in actual Greek life. This book was the perfect pick for this assignment. The writing flows nicely allowing for quick reading and the information was golden. I would recommend this book to anyone who is interested in women in history.

[Dee Eisel · Rating 5 out of 5]

It has taken me a long time to get through this book. I wish I could say because it was long and dense, but it's not. This one's all on me. It's a well-written academic volume, and Blundell has done a good job pulling together scanty and disparate sources to try and pin down the roles of women and girls in the Ancient Greek culture.

This is clearly a dissertation or related work, and it assumes that you're familiar with the history of the region. I, sadly, am not as familiar as I should or would like to be. But she does break the book down by period as well as by sphere of life, and that's useful. Some of the areas she covers are literature and poetry, home and family life, and the spiritual aspects of life through the period. She also covers the differences between the most-represented Athenian society and the Spartan. I found that section the most interesting.

Her expectation that people will be familiar with the history, coupled with the paucity of primary sources from women, make the subject a bit frustrating. I can only imagine how she felt as she was forced to continually tell the reader "we don't know exactly how this worked" and "there are no sources that can tell us how the women themselves felt about this." It does bring home to the casual reader how patrifocal most of the history we absorb in school really is, which is a valuable insight for many people.

Another thing that comes across is that these traditions, which are so easy to see as static, were active and evolving. For instance, within only a few hundred years upper-class households went from family-centric to supporting-the-society-centric.

I have always felt comfortable referring to my own household as my oikos, and I am in charge of it. Reading through Blundell, I can imagine the heart attacks and apoplexy that statement would have caused 2500 years ago. Yet this is the real start of the nuclear family as we understand it today, and it's worthwhile to realize that it has always been male-centered and that everyone trying to make their path different is fighting powerful inertia.

Well worth the read. Five stars.