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Education systems in acient greek and rome
Women's role in ancient Greece
Women's role in ancient Greece
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The whole concept of a patriarchal society came about during the early Mesopotamian era, they believed that: “The husband and father made all the key decisions, and the wife gave humble obedience to this male authority. Patriarchal family structure rested on men’s control of most or all property, starting with land. Marriage was based on property relationships, and it was assumed that marriage and therefore subordinate to men was the normal condition for woman. (Woman in Patriarchal Societies, 42)” The roles that men have played throughout history haven’t changed much, men have always been at the top of the food chain. It is the men that have always had the upper hand when it came to what woman get. While studying history this semester I have …show more content…
Upper-class woman living in poleis were allowed to venture outside with some type of chaperone and were required to wear some type of veil to prevent the attention of males from other families. Woman didn’t have the freedom to live a normal life as we do today. The only way a girls in Greece was able to obtain a proper education in Greece was if their families had a lot of landholdings, but much of the lower class families were unable to provide their girls with an education because they couldn’t afford their daughters not helping around with the household duties. This may not be a big example of a patriarchal society but it could be depending on how you look at it. Education should be available for all children, male or female, and with education being so hard to obtain because of the cost is only making girls more naïve to what they could actually accomplish. With girls not getting an education it makes them more vulnerable to fall under the authority of a well-educated male. If the cost of education either lowered or diminished entirely girls would be able to gain the knowledge to grow into a strong and smart individual woman who doesn’t need to rely on a man during their adult
Patriarchy describes the structuring of society on the basis of family units, in which fathers have primary responsibility for the welfare of these units. In some cultures slaves were included as part of such households. The concept of patriarchy is often used, by extension, to refer to the expectation that men take primary responsibility for the welfare of the community as a whole, acting as representatives via public office (in anthropology and feminism, for example).
Throughout history, the roles of women and men have always differed to some degree. In ancient Greece, the traditional roles were clear-cut and defined. Women stayed home to care for children and do housework while men left to work. This system of society was not too far off the hunter gatherer concept where women cared for the house and the men hunted. Intriguingly enough, despite the customary submissive role, women had a more multifaceted role and image in society as juxtaposed with the rather simple role men played. Morals for the two were also different. Men obviously had the upper hand with women being the traditional passive.
Throughout history, it is clear that men are usually seen to be advantaged by the logic of domination while females tend to be disadvantaged. Whether it be in the workplace, household, or even the bible men have always been inferior to women. Through history, cultural norms and stereotypes gender roles were created and have been present throughout society. Although it is believed that males are more advantaged than females the texts Eve and Adam: Genesis 2-3 Reread by Phyllis Trible and The Creation and Fall of Man and Woman explain how men and woman are in fact equal and maybe even disadvantaged by these cultural arrangements. Therefore, throughout history it is clear that gender discourses would allow one to believe that men are advantaged
Patriarchies ruled the world. It’s an almost in-arguable fact. That cannot be clearer than the example of Tang and Song China. Their views on women and why they were below were influenced by two main factors, religion, and social influences. The more powerful of the two is religion. Religion unites people, it controls their daily lives, it changes what people do. It also sets laws and boundaries. Therefore, leading to divisions in gender in some cases like that of Confucianism. There were also the influences of society the ‘status quo’ as so to say. This is what other people think about a way to do something one way or another so as to fit in. It also had a daily impact on the lives of people living in Song and Tang China. They were particularly influenced by views of marriage and beauty, for example, it was deemed not beautiful for a woman to have large feet in Song China. These factors of religion and societal influences continue to affect
Most classical society’s political and social organization revolved around the idea of patriarchy, a male dominated social system. This system exacerbated the inherit difference between men and woman and assigned gender roles based on these observations. Men were generally regarded as superior to woman therefore given greater religious and political roles as well as more legal rights. As the natural inverse, women were subordinated and seen as week; their main roles reproductive and domestic. Information about patriarchy in the classical era, though abundant, was, for the most part, written by men, therefore history does not give us an accurate depiction of women’s viewpoints. Four societies of the classical era, India, China, Greece, and Rome, adopted a patriarchal system, however, due to many factors, each developed identifiable characteristics.
Throughout the history of our society, women have gained a certain respect and certain rights over time. Such simple aspects of life such as getting a job, voting, and even choosing who they would like to marry are things that women have fought for, for many years. At one point, these were all things that women in America and parts of Europe had no right to. Men as a whole had suppressed women and taken control of the society. Despite mass oppression in history, women have risen in society and now posses these natural rights.
When thinking of ancient Greece, images of revolutionary contrapposto sculpture, ornate lecture halls, and great philosophers in togas are sure to come to mind. As the birthplace of democracy and western philosophy, ancient Greece has had an inordinate influence on the progression of the modern world. However, the ancient Greeks’ treatment of women is seemingly at direct odds with their progressive and idealistic society.
Henrik Ibsen once said, “A woman cannot be herself in the society of the present day, which is an exclusively masculine society, with laws framed by men and with a judicial system that judges feminine conduct from a masculine point of view.”(Notable Quotes) Ibsen’s statement exemplifies what life was like for women during ancient times. In many of the organized ancient civilizations, it was very common to find a primarily patriarchal civilization in government as well as in society. The causing factors can be attributed to different reasons, the main being the Neolithic Revolution and the new found dependence on manpower it caused. As a result of this, a woman found herself to be placed into an entirely different view in the eye of society. In comparison to the early Paleolithic matriarchal societies, the kinds of changes that came about for women due to the introduction of agriculture are shocking. Since the beginnings of the Neolithic era, the role and rights of women in many ancient civilizations began to become limited and discriminatory as a result of their gender.
Throughout Western history it was known to have this Patriarchal system in which the men are the head of the family, and community, during which these spheres between the male and female were divided, each having their own set of roles: the male in the public view and the women in the private view. The men worry about what is going on outside the home like politics, money, control over property while the women take care of what happens on the inside of the home doing things like taking care of the children and doing the house work. With these roles set in place the women have had a hard time being respected because of this Patriarchy.
In the Greek society women were treated very differently than they are today. Women in ancient Greece were not allowed to own property, participate in politics, and they were under control of the man in their lives. The goddess Aphrodite did not adhere to these social norms and thus the reason the earthly women must comply with the societal structure that was set before them. Aphrodite did not have a father figure according to Hesiod, and therefore did not have a man in her life to tell her what to do. She was a serial adulteress and has many children with many men other than her husband. She was not the only goddess from the ancient Greek myths to cause doubt in the minds of men. Gaia and the Titan Rhea rise up against their husbands in order to protect their children. Pandora, another woman in the Greek myths, shows that all evil comes from woman. Aphrodite, Gaia, Rhea, and Pandora cause the ancient Greek men to be suspicious of women because of her mischievous and wild behavior.
Some aspects of the lifestyle ancient civilizations lived almost seem appalling or intolerable when compared to the very developed and carefully shaped the world inhabited today. One of these characteristics of previous societies that prove to be rather challenging to conceive in current times consists of the lack of rights, privileges, and equity women had. Society maintained this assumption of a man’s superiority up until the women’s rights movement of the early twentieth century; yet with the two sexes essentially equal in America today, imagining a restricted life as a female proves unfathomable. Looking back at the history of human kind, men almost always subdued women and treated them as property. When focusing on the first civilizations appearing thousands of years ago, particularly in the west, the differences between men and women in most cultures remained accentuated, strict, and very structured. However, each different society allotted different regulations pertaining to women for their citizens to abide by. One of these ancient cultures consisted of Babylon. With the evidence provided by Hammurabi’s Law Code, it remains clear that ancient Babylonian women exercised little rights and privileges, forced to mainly maintain the structural unit of family and the home.
It is difficult to fully understand the role of women in ancient Egyptian society because the understandings of the society and government are still incomplete. There are also two other major problems, those being that there is very little source material on women, and the material that has been found was biased by the ideas and minds of previous Egyptologists. The only source material that has survived from great kingdoms of Egypt is material that has been either found in tombs on the walls and sarcophaguses, or carved on major government and religious document. None of the writings on papyrus and other delicate materials survived. This material, which has survived, is the writings of the Egyptian literate male elite. In their writings the also did not show any emotions or feelings, this was not the style of the Egyptian people, writings were purely a record keeping device. Because of these limitations, “It is essential to avoid the temptation to extrapolate from the particular to the general, a process which can only too easily introduce error.”
Women were often subjects of intense focus in ancient literary works. In Sarah Pomeroy’s introduction of her text Goddesses, Whores, Wives, and Slaves, she writes, “Women pervade nearly every genre of classical literature, yet often the bias of the author distorts the information” (x). It is evident in literature that the social roles of women were more restricted than the roles of men. And since the majority of early literature was written by men, misogyny tends to taint much of it. The female characters are usually given negative traits of deception, temptation, selfishness, and seduction. Women were controlled, contained, and exploited. In early literature, women are seen as objects of possession, forces deadly to men, cunning, passive, shameful, and often less honorable than men. Literature reflects the societal beliefs and attitudes of an era and the consistency of these beliefs and attitudes toward women and the roles women play has endured through the centuries in literature. Women begin at a disadvantage according to these societal definitions. In a world run by competing men, women were viewed as property—prizes of contests, booty of battle and the more power men had over these possessions the more prestigious the man. When reading ancient literature one finds that women are often not only prizes, but they were responsible for luring or seducing men into damnation by using their feminine traits.
The Ancient Greece civilization was very different in between female and male. Female and male had a unique role in the ancient Greece civilization. This civilization was under male control because only men possibly will be citizens and only highborn males benefit from a proper education. Men got instruction in military, involve in politics or went to the Theatre for amusement. The men observed dramas tragedies, or comedies that they were related to.
Patriarchy is a social system in which families and societies are dominated by males as primary authority figures. Due to patriarchy, females have been disadvantaged in many aspects of life including employment, family life, crime, health, education and media. This has led sociologists to try and find out what causes gender inequality. Feminists would agree that patriarchy is the main cause of gender inequality, however, there are different strands of feminism and these different strands have different views. There are also other theorists, such as functionalists, Weberians and postmodernists who offer different views as to the causes of gender inequality.