Women and the Ideology of Political Exclusion

From Classical Antiquity to the Modern Era

Tatiana Tsakiropoulou-Summers, Katerina Kitsi-Mitakou

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781138038790
• eBook ISBN: 9781351709378
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Gender Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Women and the Ideology of Political Exclusion explores the origin and evolution of the political ideology that has kept women away from centers of political power – from the birth of democracy in ancient Athens to the modern era. In this period of 2500 years, two parallel tracks advanced: while male authority tried to construct an ideology that justified women's incompatibility with the political organization of the state, women attempted to resist their exclusion and thwart arguments about their inferiority.

Although the issue of women's status has been studied in detail in specific eras, this interdisciplinary collection extends the boundaries of the discussion. Drawing on a wide range of literary and historical sources, including Herodotus' Histories, Plato's Laws, María de San José's Oaxaca Manuscript, and the work of Émilie Du Châtelet, Mary Boykin Chesnut, and Virginia Woolf, the chapters here reveal the various manifestations of the female-inferiority construct. Such an extensive overview of this historical trajectory promotes a deeper understanding of its causes, permutations, and persistence.

Women may have made great gains toward political power, but they continue to encounter invisible barriers, raised by traditional stereotypes, that block their path to success. Women and the Ideology of Political Exclusion aims to make these barriers visible, raising awareness about the longevity and tenacity of arguments, the roots of which reach classical antiquity.

Part I

Greek and Roman antiquity

1 Solon’s legislation and women’s incompatibility with state ideology

Tatiana Tsakiropoulou-Summers

Introduction

During the seventh and sixth centuries bc, Athenian society underwent a major legal, political, social, and economic transformation that eventually gave birth to democracy in the fifth century bc. A major catalyst in this process was Solon’s legislation: in 594 bc, the Athenian statesman and lawmaker was appointed chief magistrate (archon) and was called upon to reform the Athenian political system, primarily to restore its ailing economy but also to re-establish peace between rivaling classes, aristocratic clans, political ideologies, and economic interests that ravaged Athenian society (Blok and Lardinois 2006). Although his reforms initially seemed to fail, they were subsequently credited for laying the foundations for the rise of democracy and the transformation of Athenian society (Lape 2002; Ehrenberg 1990). Even in antiquity, Solon was upheld as the man who “founded democracy”, in Plutarch’s words.¹ Yet, while these changes helped Athenian men soar politically, women were affected negatively by Solon’s legislation: his sumptuary laws, his law on dowry, and his restrictions on women’s mourning customs cast women’s nature in a negative light and prevented their political integration in Athenian democracy.

Solon’s legislation, whether in its original form or adapted over the years, held sway in Athens for several centuries – he himself bound the Athenians to keep it in force for a hundred years (Plut., Sol. 25.1). In the fifth century, other states under Athenian control also adopted Solon’s laws and kept them long beyond his hundred-year stipulation. As Plutarch (Sol. 21.5) states, most of Solon’s restrictions on women were still part of the contemporary legislation in his homeland, Boeotia, in the second century ad (Garland 1981: 13; Alexiou 2002: 15). Furthermore, influence of Solon’s legislation can be detected in decrees passed by various Greek communities and colonies around the Mediterranean for a period of five or six hundred years after Solon.² The longevity and geographical expanse of his legislation are indicative of its role in shaping ideas, perceptions, practices, and customs in the Greek world (Blok 2006: 212), proving particularly influential in defining female gender identity. In this essay, therefore, I will attempt to show that in the classical era the ideological perception of women as inferior to men stems to a great extent from Solon’s legislation. Although the lack of detailed records and the spotty material evidence make etiological connections between laws and social trends in antiquity tenuous, in the case of Solon there are several testimonies of ancient authors commenting on the impact of his work on Greek culture. This connection highlights the fact that Solon’s legislative restrictions on women are reflected in women’s incompatibility with the organization of the polis, advanced as it is in literary, philosophical, and epigraphical sources.

Solon was numbered among the Seven Sages of antiquity (Isocrates 15.235; Plato, Protagoras 343a4; Timaeus 20e1). He was already considered a good statesman when he was elected archon (high public officer) in 594 bc, but his reputation as a wise man was based mainly on the legislation he enacted and his philosophical views.³ The ancients considered Solon an exceptional thinker, whose ground-breaking legislation had no precedent. Plutarch in his Comparison of Solon and Publicola (3.2) explicitly describes Solon as a lone agent, who stood on the border between the old and the new era, and blazed a new trail with his monumental public legislation. Aristotle also highlights Solon’s unique position in Athenian constitutional history, noting that all legislators that came after him based their work on his laws and simply tweaked his constitution to make it more democratic (Pol. 1274a9–10), while they themselves contributed nothing new to Solon’s law code (Athenian Constitution 29.4.1).

The significance of Solon’s legislation lay in the fact that it dissolved oligarchy and established democracy (Arist., Pol. 1273b35), for which he was considered “the champion of the people” (Isocrates 15.313). Xenophon characterizes Solon’s laws as “excellent and influential” (Symposium 8.39), and admits that he himself, compelled by Solon’s perception of justice, applied its principles to his own construction of household management (Oeconomicus 14.4). Aristotle agrees with Xenophon’s assessment and points out that Solon’s laws made the Athenians truly prosperous and happy (Rhetoric 1398b17), since his reforms helped rectify economic injustices (Athen. Const. 5.3.1–5), settled the social strife ravaging Athens (5.2.3), and established the people (dēmos) as “masters of the state” (6.23). Solon was not merely honored by the Athenians (Plato, Symposium 209d), but was actually loved in the words of Isocrates (15.232) for the way he arranged the social and political organization of the state, so much so that they kept it in force for centuries beyond the initial agreement. As a result, Athenians often attributed to him most of their later laws (Antiphon, fr. 15.4; Aristophanes, Birds 1660); and, although this was not always correct, it suggests an awareness of the transformative power of Solon’s legislation on Athenian society.

To understand how deeply Solon affected Athenian attitudes, especially in regard to women, we must consider briefly the perception of women in the pre-Solonian era (eighth to sixth centuries bc), when the literary world was dominated by Homer, Hesiod, and Semonides. In the Homeric epics (eighth century bc), female characters appear both fearsome and appealing, ambivalent in their ability to cause both goodness and destruction. On the one hand, the female monsters that populate the world of the Odyssey, most notably the Sirens, Scylla, Charybdis, Circe, and Calypso, are clearly menacing forces, able to overwhelm and annihilate men, who were warned to be on their guard around them (Bergren 2008; Vergados, 2009: 7–20; B. Cohen, 1995; Slatkin 1992 Foley, 1984: 59–78; duBois, 1982). On the other hand, recognizing that men were bound inescapably to women for their reproductive powers, the rhetoric about the relationship between the genders encouraged (to a degree) the incorporation of women into the male world, by upholding positive female archetypes to motivate women to emulate them, while coaxing men to cultivate women’s inclusion in their world. In this sense (and only in this sense), it may be said that in the pre-Solonian, archaic, era the general attitude toward women was ‘inclusive’. For example, Arete, Nausicaa’s mother in the Odyssey, is a woman honored by her husband, her family, and the people of Phaeacia for her wisdom, her generosity, and her justice “as no other woman was honored on earth” (Od. 7.67).⁴ To Nausicaa herself, Odysseus wishes that gods grant her the blessing of a husband and “harmonious interaction” with him, for “there is nothing better or more precious than a husband and a wife communicating in harmony” (Od. 6.180–5). Hesiod, in the seventh century bc, despite his reputation for misogyny, complains that Zeus created women deliberately to be an evil for men, yet bound the latter to cherish and embrace the female race (Works and Days 58); complaints notwithstanding, good women do exist and, Hesiod admits, for men there is “nothing better than a good wife” (702–3): although the lot of marriage is tough, a good wife can “balance good with evil” (Theogony 608–9; Stoddard 2004: 156; Arrighetti 1998: 465). Even Semonides, in the seventh century bc, whose grotesque satire of female types is seen as the hallmark of misogynism in archaic Greece, concedes that there are also women who, like bees, “blameless in everything”, make their husband lucky with their hard work and good sense (fr. 7.82). We do not suggest here that conditions were ideal for women in the archaic era, but wish to point out that there were literary attempts to balance negative views of women with a modicum of positive rhetoric. The foundation of positive perspective in literature was bolstered to a great extent by the marital custom of exogamy, which made women quite valuable for their natal families in the archaic era (Seaford 1994: 206–11; Vernant 1980: 45–70). Aristocratic daughters would often be given in marriage to men outside their community (exogamy), helping ambitious fathers expand not only the base of their political power but also their wealth: the general custom in exogamy was for the groom to offer a valuable gift package (hedna or brideprice) to the bride’s father. In this system, the more daughters a father had, the happier he was.

By contrast, in the classical period, we encounter a drastically different view of women. First, endogamy (marriage within the community) gradually replaced exogamy, while brideprice was replaced by the dowry,⁵ which the father transferred to the groom on the wedding day (Seaford 1994: 209). Shifts in marriage customs are indirectly associated with Solon’s laws, to the extent they lay the foundations of democracy: political power in a democratic setting relies more on local support and votes rather than external networks. In a democratic state, a marital alliance, even with a powerful local family, could not guarantee one’s rise in the political world, which undercut significantly women’s ability to advance men’s political interests. Eventually, with Pericles’ law of 451 bc, which made citizenship a corollary to the marriage between Athenian-born individuals, endogamy became the only legal option (Patterson 1990: 40–73; Goody 1976: 20–1). The new marriage customs had fathers of daughters carve out a percentage of their estate to offer as dowry to the grooms; therefore, the more daughters a father had, the smaller the portion of his estate that would be left to his male children. Women, once instrumental in creating networks of reciprocal obligations between their natal and marital families, in the classical era were seen as economic liability and burden by both families: the natal for having to secure a sizeable dowry for their daughters and the marital for having to support the woman in the event of an inadequate dowry (Wilgaux 2000: 659–76; Seaford 1994: 213).

Changes in marriage practices are not the only factors in the decline of women’s social value in the post-Solonian era. As we will see below, literary, philosophical, and political authorities started putting more emphasis on the idea of women’s inferior nature and exclusion. We must clarify here that in this study we are focusing on the ideological exclusion of women (necessitated, as shown in the introduction, by the patriarchal framework within which democracy developed) and not on the actual conditions of their life – recent studies have shown that women were able to bypass both ideological and legal restrictions, and quietly lead an active life in public spaces (Vlassopoulos 2007: 33–52; Westgate 2007: 229–45) without, however, impacting the official ideology about them. The ideological exclusion of women can be associated in many ways with Solon’s laws, which for the first time introduced peculiarly detailed and intrusive restrictions for women into state legislation, regulating among other things women’s mourning practices and public appearance, even the number of dresses they could own and wear in public, which, as we will see, sent negative messages about female nature and character.

There are no direct sources of Solon’s laws, but several fragments are conveyed to us through various ancient literary, philosophical, and legal works (Ruschenbusch 1966), while further details can be gleaned from later laws that were based on Solon’s legislation. Modern scholars offer various explanations of Solon’s motives behind the laws he drafted about women, of which Blok gives a detailed overview and bibliography (2006: 197–9). Some scholars understand his motivation as an aspiration to create an egalitarian society and balance power dynamics among social and economic classes for the sake of social peace (Garland 1985; Seaford 1994). Others detect in it the influence of a change in ancient Greek society toward a more secular approach to death and burial (Loraux 1986; Garland 1989; Sourvinou-Inwood 1995); as the state created a democratic model of a public funeral, professional women’s lamentations were replaced by funeral oratory (Bennett and Tyrrell 1990: 444). In this context, some scholars see Solon’s legislation as aiming at preventing women’s excessive d...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Notes on Contributors
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: The Ideological Construct of the ‘Inferior Female’
• Part I Greek and Roman Antiquity
• Part II Renaissance Through Modernity
• Index