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THE ROLE of WOMEN IN ANCIENT GREECE As the common idea of most societies even today, this is the world of men. Women are born in order to serve for their men. It was not much different in the times of ancient Greece. Women didn’t have any right to vote, serve on juries or own property. Women in ancient Greece couldn’t manage even their own property because they didn’t have right to spend money for the expenses of their household. They always forced to have a guardian beyond themselves.
The guardian of a woman before marriage was his father, and after the marriage, her husband took over her father’s job. If she was a widow, a male relative or her son took over this job. Thus in fact, women’s citizenship in Ancient Greek was under mystery. So, what are the main roles of women in Ancient Greek? Some of the women in Ancient Greece were treated as prostitutes (betairas), Their main duty was to entertain men in both a sexual and a social sense. The betairas could be considered as slaves because men could use them as prostitutes, singers, dancers or flute girls.
Even some of them were didn’t have right to go out of men’s homes. Indeed, a woman had to continue to earn her living with the same way if she didn’t marry with a man. Withou . . . For the most part, the marriages between cousins were favored because the girls wouldn’t have any other opportunity to see their husbands before the wedding ceremony. In ancient Greece, a woman who often appeared outside her home would be viewed not much positively. For instance, the wives of citizens wouldn’t attend dinner parties with their husbands.
Women in ancient Greece predominantly had to face the same difficulties in aspects of the rights and roles in their family, social and religion life. The main reason of such very early marriages was to preserve the honor of girls. Father would have right to accept and raise or to expose the child. Furthermore, women were free to visit each other in order to borrow a household item, assist at captivity, or celebrate the birth of a baby. Childbearing could be regarded as one of the most important duty of them. If we look at the role of women in exposure infants, in fact all the responsibility would belong to the father.
More to the point, they were responsible for the storage and allocation of household goods. Furthermore, childbirth was an important issue for a woman in ancient Greece in order to survive her life with honor. Some of the jobs that women could work freely were such as, venders in agora, wool workers, nurses ribbon sellers, midwives, washerwomen and casual agricultural labors. If there would be an opposite action of the sentence above, that woman who acted with men could easily be called as hetaria. In the case of ancient Greece, the position seems not much different than the others.