Gender Roles in Classical Cultures - Term Paper Example

Full Gender Roles in ical Cultures (Greek literature) 12 November Introduction The ancient Greeks had very clear ideas about many things in life. In particular, this clarity can be exemplified as a binary system of worldview by looking at things in black-and-white perspectives to avoid ambiguity. A person is either free or a slave, a native Greek or a barbarian (or a foreigner), rich or poor, royalty or not, and in the case of gender, either man or woman. This kind of dichotomy is a good way to impose social order and maintain harmony in Greek society because their social hierarchy was quite rigid. However, from the early myth of Theogony where misogyny was quite obvious, ancient Greek literature soon took a more enlightened view of female roles in Greek society as their civilization developed further. This categorization of people in ancient Greek culture was intended to define their social status in terms of what is expected of them, what they can expect from others, what in return they are entitled to, and what kind of activities are considered proper for each gender. A man’s role was distinctly separate and different from a woman’s role in ancient Greek society. There are no gray areas with regards to gender pertaining to social norms characteristic of this society that puts a premium on order, discipline, and obedience with clear boundaries. Gender roles in Greek culture were expressed through a variety of media such as in pottery, paintings, sculptures, and in the most prevalent of all medium, in their literature. It is in this form that historians and academicians are given a good view of gender role in Greek societies through their oral and written dramas, epics, and other forms of ancient writings. It can be said literature in ancient Greece was written by men intended for a male readership but the role of women had changed over time as explained and discussed in this paper. Discussion Theogony by Hesiod (circa 700 B.C.E. or before current era) is a very long poem of about a thousand lines that details the genealogy of Greek gods. It was written in the style of a Homeric epic and goes all the way back to the mists of time, in fact, to the very beginning of the world similar to the Genesis in the Christian bible. It is a very massive collection of local Greek cultural traditions and stories that details how the gods came to be. In the story or poem there is the first hint of an attempt to establish a logical reality based on the observations seen in the universe or cosmos. This is a long narrative about ancient Greek mythology in which there is already discernible the underlying theme of gender roles even among gods. In Theogony, the male gods were often in conflict with their female god counterparts. As mentioned earlier elsewhere, this narrative was written by a male Greek bard and as such it had a decidedly male viewpoint. Female gods were portrayed as necessary to the world in the extent these females were to provide companionship to male gods and of course, for purposes of reproduction to bring forth offspring. Other than these requirements, there is a clear line of misogyny thinking throughout the whole poem. Women and girls were shown to be causing all the troubles of the male gods by their machinations, intrigues, and manipulations. There is a feeling that the world is a much better place if only these female gods had behaved. An overall impression a reader gets is that women are better relegated and controlled by these male gods if ever they wanted to put order in the universe. If one considered the time or context of Theogony, this is an understandable outcome when the world was still in its very early stages and the primordial issue is one of survival. There is therefore a strong current of a pervasive effort to impose male dominance over everything in the world, including females. At this time in ancient Greek mythology, there were as yet no refined thinking about equality among the genders and so there is a weird dichotomy among male and female gods. Perhaps in no other place of Greek mythology where this misogynistic viewpoint is more explicitly expressed than in the myth on the birth of Pandora. Her birth signaled a start of all things that soon went wrong with the world. In fact, the connotation of an evil-sounding phrase such as “Pandoras box” has no equal in Western literature, either ancient or modern. It is the singular event wherein the action of opening a Pandoras box symbolized all the evil and misfortune than can happen to anyone or to the entire world itself. The myth of Pandora has endured in all the world literature even to the present day and has no equal in its virulence in terms of symbolizing and portraying the evils that a woman can bring forth to anyone. Hesiod had recounted in the early part of his work how the world before the women arrived as an ideal place where all the tribes of men had lived and existed in an almost idyllic paradise of sorts. Men did not toil so hard in order to live and further, there was no disease yet to kill men so early before their time. In other words, there were no evils yet in the world and it was only after Pandora opened her box that all the evils were spread throughout the world. Before Pandora arrived on the scene, so to speak, men lived long and happy lives in which all men just suddenly grow old for no reason at all at the moment before they die of old age. Pandora herself is not directly portrayed as an evil woman but rather it was her action of opening the box that caused the evils to escape from her box to sow misfortune, ill health, and grief all over the world. There was no way of bringing these evils back into her box. The overall impression is that women, represented by Pandora, is a curse on mankind (in this case the word is used literally in the sense of referring to men only and not to humanity to include the female gender as denoted by the word humankind). Some academicians and researchers have even gone to the extent of pointing to Pandoras box as used in Greek mythology to be a representation of the female womb which is the cause of sexuality, and hence, all the troubles as interpreted by scholars when she removed her hands from her womb (Theogony 95). In sharp contrast, later events in ancient Greece caused an abrupt change in how their women were treated in subsequent periods. In particular, the work of Thucydides as shown in his The History of the Peloponessian War showed that women now occupied a higher place in ancient Greek society. The variety and range of the female experience in this period were now markedly more open and more influential in terms of their participation in the affairs of state, their role in society, and even in personal matters whereas before, the women were generally confined to the home only and concerned with the household and family matters. After the Peloponessian War (a 27-year conflict between Athens and Sparta fought in 431 to 404 B.C.E. as the two leading Greek city-states), the menfolk had been decimated. The ancient Greek societies suffered a marked decline in the proportion of men to women as result of so much death in this war that women were now forced to play a more active role in society such that ancient Greek women now worked outside the home to replace the lost men in work like shepherding, as wool-workers, as grape-pickers, as nurses, and as construction workers. In retrospect, economic circumstances forced this shift in gender roles because there were no other alternatives in the face of economic ruin and penury caused by the said wars. Ancient Greek society was supposed to be democratic in many respects but even in Athens which attained the highest form of democratic rule in these ancient times did not grant their women much independence in relation to men. In Athens, women were not given a right to vote, for example. Women were likewise not allowed to own property nor could the women decide on important matters on their own. In other words, women were relegated to the role of second-class citizens with very few political and economic rights, or otherwise. The economic situation was greatly altered by the after-effects of the Peloponessian War such that women in ancient Greece increasingly taking over many of the social, political, and economic functions previously exclusively for men only. Women had attained a measure of equality. The economic liberation of the women was soon inevitably followed by political and social emancipation. This economic upheaval caused women to take a more active political role in the affairs of their city-states because they saw they themselves were affected by how their men made decisions. In the eyes of some women, the men made poor decisions that were causing adverse effects on Greek society and so women fought for an equal role in the affairs of the state. Additionally, this increased political role blurred the previously clear demarcation line between the genders. Everything in Greek society became muddled and confused due to these economic and political changes that were happening quite fast in their own time. Gone was the misogyny of Hesiod (Theogony 300-305) when female gods and Greek women bore monsters and other hideous beings capable of so much evil, fear, and loathing. Females were nymphs in Hesiods time but these negative portrayals were no longer evident by the time of Thucydides. Instead, women were talked about in more positive ways such as women arguing for political equality in the Athenian courts of law or Spartan women training for athletics, gymnastics, or eventual motherhood. The women in many Greek city- states, in particular in Sparta, were now allowed to own lands in the same way as men. The Peloponessian War as written and told by Thucydides was a massive war in the context of the ancient Greek world. Everything was prepared in anticipation of the war in that practically all the known world, including the barbarians, had been drawn into it by taking one side of the impending war or the other opposing side. Everybody was armed, and this includes the women who were now allowed to carry arms themselves for their protection. Among the barbarians, there was no strict dichotomy between men and women as their society was not very hierarchical in the sense that the Greeks had. In ancient Greece before the war, everyone had a proper place in society but everything had changed with a war looming and there was a likeness between the Hellenic world of old and the barbarian of to-day (Thucydides 1.6). The women, including their slaves, participated in the war such as the siege against the Thebans who had invaded their city (Thucydides 2.42) which showed women no longer were confined to their homes only but actively took part in the war by shouting and pelting the enemy with stones and tiles. Where previously women were only talked about in the most circumspect ways, such as how Thucydides commented that the greatest glory for women is to be least talked about by the men, whether either in praise or in blame, the women in his time were no longer naïve, submissive, controlled, or relegated to a lower status. In the comedic play Lysistrata by Aristophanes written at the height of the war (circa 411 B.C.E.), the main female protagonist Lysistrata was an extraordinarily able woman who set out with an extraordinary mission which was to end the Peloponessian War which was in many ways draining her city of Athens. She had the brilliant idea of forcing the Athenian men to end the war by withholding sexual favors from these men. Put differently, she convinced other women to subscribe to her idea as the only means of ending the war that was ill-conceived as only the men decided. Now, the women want an active part in the decision-making affairs of the city, a clear sign of female liberation and feminism. Women are now unmanageable rascals (Lysistrata 10-11). The women under her leadership had become unruly and even fought back against the constables sent to subdue them (Lysistrata 457-458). Conclusion The women of ancient Greece had gone from being second-class citizens who were virtual social non-entities to becoming equal partners of their men in later periods. Theogony was in many instances misogynistic in recounting the travails of women while the literature of later Greek eras showed a different picture of females asserting their gender role as partners in nation-building. In more ways than one, their experiences mirrored the same experiences that women of the modern century had endured to attain equality such as fighting for suffrage. Read More