Читать книгу Western Civilization - Paul R. Waibel - Страница 29

Women were Athenians, but little else. Athens was a men's only club. Girls in their mid‐teens normally married men in their early thirties. The marriage was arranged by the girl's male guardian. Often the bride did not meet her chosen husband until the wedding day. Once married, her life was largely restricted to the women's quarters. She did not go out in public unless accompanied by a male. Men did the shopping, not women. Wives did not dine with their husbands. They could not act in plays, and if they attended a play, they were required to sit in the rear, away from the men. Married women were not allowed to attend the Olympic Games, where the athletes competed in the nude. The penalty for violating this regulation was death. Unmarried women were allowed to attend the games.

Women were not given any formal education, unless one considers training in household chores an education. A wife's proper station in life was to keep her husband's house and raise his children. Aristotle believed that women were incomplete males. They were necessary for a successful and happy community, but “the male is by nature superior, and the female inferior; and the one rules, and the other is ruled” (Perry et al. 2003, p. 57). The character Procne (sister of Philomela and wife of king Tereus) in Sophocles play, Tereus, points to a woman's fate in classical Athens:

And now I am nothing on my own. But often have I seen women's nature to be like this, since we are nothing. Young girls in their father's house live, I think, the happiest life of all humanity. For folly always brings up children delightfully. But when we have reached the prime of life and are prudent, we are pushed out and sold, away from our ancestral gods and our parents, some of us to foreign husbands, some to barbarians, some to joyless homes, and some to abusive ones. And, when a single night has yoked us, this is what we must approve of and think of as a good life

(Sophocles n.d.).