{"id":69288,"date":"2022-06-01T01:00:07","date_gmt":"2022-06-01T05:00:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=69288"},"modified":"2022-05-31T09:29:29","modified_gmt":"2022-05-31T13:29:29","slug":"qotd-spartiate-women","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2022\/06\/01\/qotd-spartiate-women\/","title":{"rendered":"QotD: Spartiate<\/em> Women"},"content":{"rendered":"

Sparta has obtained a reputation in the popular culture \u2013 derived from the sources \u2013 for affording a greater degree of freedom and importance to its women than any other Greek polis<\/a><\/em> (I should stress this is a very low bar) and, so long as we are talking about spartiate<\/a><\/em> women<\/strong> there is some truth to this.<\/p>\n

Spartiate<\/em> girls went through a similar “rearing” to spartiate<\/em> boys, although they were not removed from the home as their brothers were. Spartiate girls ran races and were encouraged to be physically active (Plut. Lyk<\/em>. 14.3; Mor<\/em>. 227; Xen. Lac<\/em>. 1.4). The evidence is thin, but points fairly strongly to the suggestion that spartiate<\/em> women were generally literate, in quite the contrast (again, as the evidence permits) to the rest of Greece. Now our sources make clear that this is in part a product of the leisure that spartiate<\/em> women had, since the primary domestic tasks of Greek women \u2013 textile manufacture and food preparation \u2013 were done entirely by slave labor forced upon helot<\/a><\/em> women (Xen. Lac<\/em>. 1.3; Plato, Laws<\/em>. VII; Plut. Mor<\/em>. 241d).<\/p>\n

Whereas the sources paint a portrait of elite citizen Athenian women as practically cloistered, spartiate<\/em> women had significantly more freedom of movement, in part because they appear to have been the primary managers of their households. Male spartiates<\/em> didn’t live at home until thirty and were likely frequently away even after that (Plut. Lyc<\/em>. 14.1; Mor<\/em>. 228b). Spartiate<\/em> women could also inherit and hold property in their own name to a greater degree than in Athens or elsewhere in Greece (note for instance Plut. Agis<\/em> 7.3-4). The strong impression one gets from the sources is that this gave spartiate<\/em> women quite a bit more sway; our largely male sources, especially Aristotle, disapprove, but we don’t need to (and shouldn’t!) share their misogyny. The sources are also very clear that spartiate<\/em> women and girls felt much freer to speak their minds in public than Greek women in most poleis<\/em>, although they were still completely and universally excluded from formal politics.<\/p>\n

But \u2013 and you knew there would be a but (surprise! there are two) \u2013 but the role of women in Spartan society as we can observe it remains fundamentally instrumental: in the Spartan social order, spartiate<\/em> women existed to produce spartiate<\/em> boys. The exercise that spartiate<\/em> girls undertook was justified under the assumption that it produced fitter (male) children (Plut. Lyc<\/em>. 14.2; Xen. Lac<\/em>. 1.4). Plutarch implies that the age of marriage for spartiate<\/em> women was set in law, though generally older than in the rest of Greece (Plut. Lyc<\/em>. 15.3; Mor<\/em>. 228a).<\/p>\n

Spartiate<\/em> women appear to have had no more say in who they married than other Greek women, which is to say effectively none. Marriages seem to have been arranged and the marriage ceremony itself as it it related to us was a ritualized abduction (Plut. Lyc<\/em>. 15.3-5; Hdt. 6.65) without even a fig-leaf of (largely illusory) consent present in some other ancient marriage rituals. Husbands apparently also “lent out” their wives to other spartiate<\/em> men (Plut. Lyc<\/em> 15.7; Xen. Lac<\/em>. 1.7-8); descriptions of this passage stress the consent of the men involved, but completely omit the woman’s consent, although Xenophon implies that the woman involved will “want to take charge of two households” and thus presumably be in favor; I have my doubts.<\/p>\n

Everything<\/em> we have about the Spartans (honestly, just read Plutarch’s Sayings of Spartan Women<\/em>, but also Xen. Lac<\/em>. 1.4, 7-8, Plut. Lyc<\/em>. 15, etc.) reinforces the impression that spartiate<\/em> women were viewed primarily as a means towards producing spartiate<\/em> boys. Gorgo’s retort that spartiate<\/em> women “are the only women that are mothers of men” (Plut. Mor<\/em>. 240e), her husband’s command that she in turn (when he died), “Marry a good man and bear good children” (Plut. Mor<\/em>. 240e), the anonymous spartiate<\/em> woman who shames an Ionian woman for being good at weaving because raising children “should be the employments of the good and honorable woman” (Plut Mor<\/em>. 241d) and on and on. Most of the sayings that don’t<\/em> involve the bearing of children, either involve spartiate<\/em> women being happy that their sons died bravely, or disowning them for not doing so.<\/p>\n

Now, there is a necessary and very important caveat here: this is the role of spartiate<\/em> women as viewed by men<\/strong>. It is striking that the one of the largest things we can be reasonable sure that spartiate<\/em> women did do \u2013 they seem to have had the full management of the household most of the time \u2013 doesn’t figure into these sayings or our sources hardly at all (save, to a degree, to Aristotle’s polemic in Book 2 of the Politics<\/em>). We should not be surprised that our \u2013 elite, aristocratic and exclusively male<\/strong> sources pick out the roles that seem most important to them. The average spartiate<\/em> woman may well have felt differently \u2013 for my part, I can hardly imagine many spartiate<\/em> mothers were overjoyed to hear their sons had fallen in battle, whatever brave face they put on in polite society. And I have to imagine that many spartiate<\/em> women were likely shrewd managers of their households, and probably took some pride in that skill.<\/p>\n

All of that said, I think it is fair to say that, on the whole, spartiate<\/em> women seem to have had a relatively better condition than free citizen women in other poleis<\/em> in Greece. Where they were sharply constrained \u2013 and to be clear, by modern standards, spartiate<\/em> women were still very sharply constrained \u2013 they were constrained in ways that were mostly typical in Greek society. Quite frankly, ancient Greek poleis<\/em> did quite poorly by their women, even by the low, low standards of other pre-modern societies. But given that low bar, the life of spartiate<\/em> women does seem quite a bit better and our sources reflect this fairly openly.<\/p>\n

But \u2013 and this is the other “but” I alluded to above \u2013 a huge<\/em> part of this is that spartiate<\/em> women were freed from the demand to do hours and hours of difficult labor preparing and serving food and producing textiles. And here we circle back to last week’s problem: spartiate<\/em> women probably represented around 6%<\/strong> of Spartan<\/em> (including the helots<\/em>) women. If we want to talk about the condition of women in Sparta, we need to talk about helot<\/em> women<\/strong>.<\/p>\n

Bret Devereaux, “Collections: This. Isn’t. Sparta. Part III: Spartan Women”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry<\/em><\/a>, 2019-08-29.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Sparta has obtained a reputation in the popular culture \u2013 derived from the sources \u2013 for affording a greater degree of freedom and importance to its women than any other Greek polis (I should stress this is a very low bar) and, so long as we are talking about spartiate women there is some truth […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":35193,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[62,1526,7,41],"tags":[1457,262,912,1151,43],"class_list":["post-69288","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-europe","category-greece","category-history","category-quotations","tag-bretdevereaux","tag-culture","tag-privilege","tag-sparta","tag-women"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/favicon.png","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-i1y","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/69288","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=69288"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/69288\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":73992,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/69288\/revisions\/73992"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35193"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=69288"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=69288"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=69288"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}