Gender Roles in Classical Greece

Gender Roles in Classical Greece

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In Classical Greece, roles played by males and females in society were well-defined as well as very distinct from each other. Expectations to uphold these societal norms were strong, as a breakdown within the system could destroy the success of the oikos (the household) and the male’s reputation—two of the most important facets of Athenian life. The key to a thriving oikos and an unblemished reputation was a good wife who would efficiently and profitably run the household. It was the male’s role, however, to ensure excellent household management by molding a young woman into a good wife. Women were expected to enter the marriage as a symbolically empty vessel; in other words, a naïve, uneducated virgin of about 15 years who could be easily shaped by a husband twice her age. Through the instruction of her husband, the empty vessel would be filled with the necessary information to become a good wife who would maintain an orderly household and her husband’s reputation, thereby fulfilling the Athenian female gender role for citizen women.

In order for a young woman to be marriageable—unadulterated, inexperienced, and unknowing—she had to have been raised in an extremely sheltered environment, given little contact with the world beyond her father’s household. In Xenophon’s Oeconomicus, the husband, Ischomachos describes his new wife to Socrates:

How Socrates . . . could she have known anything when I

took her, since she came to me when she was not yet fifteen,

and had lived previously under diligent supervision in order

that she might see and hear as little as possible and ask the

fewest possible questions (Oeconom...

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...imately men were in command in all situations: Ischomachos’s wife says, “For my guarding and distribution of the indoor things would look somewhat ridiculous, I suppose, if it weren’t your concern to bring in something from outside (Oeconomicus, VII 39).” This suggests that even though the wife was the indoor household manager, she was still obeying her husband’s orders that were the driving force of her own agency within the oikos.

Making the transition from living a naïve existence under the protection of the father to presiding over the oikos under the supervision of the husband was the essential social norm for youthful citizen Athenian women. It is unsurprising, then, that in a patriarchal society, the young female could only fulfill her societal role as manager of the oikos when her assumed empty vessel was filled by her husband with the proper knowledge.