Introduction

Red-figure pelike: Side B of an Attic red-figure pelike (jug), 500 B.C., showing the figure of a woman holding a pestle. She is one of the fifty daughters of Nereus, a sea god, whose dwelling is depicted on side A.

Staatliche Antikensammlungen und Glyptothek Munich, Inv 8762. Photograph: Renate Kühling.

Clichés about ancient Greece abound. The conventional wisdom is that women were cloistered—veiled or kept hidden from view in a gynaeceum, unable to hold either civic office or public position. Deprived of education and culture, they are said to have lived in the shadow of men, in a misogynistic society. Without underestimating the inequality that existed between men and women, the goal of this exhibit is to offer a different view of ancient Greece (7th-2nd centuries B.C.). By incorporating new findings from philologists, epigraphists, and archeologists, and by drawing on recent tools from research on the history of women and gender, this exhibit will allow visitors to discover the spheres of action and domains in which women of ancient Greece acted, supervised, thought, created, and loved. Gender, as an analytic tool that posits the historicity of the categories “man” and “woman” as well as the social and cultural dimension of identities, allows us to go beyond clichés and to understand the particularities of Greek society: the fundamental importance of the distinction between slaves and free people, a definition of politics different from our own, and a variety of contexts for individual action. 

This exhibit is the product of the “Anthropology and History of Ancient Worlds,” research project, UMR 8210 ANHIMA.