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Essay on Women in Different Cultures
Women in Classical Greece were not citizens, held no property, and indeed were not even allowed out of the house except under guard. Men and women were not treated equal, men by nature were important and the female were less important, the male is the ruler and the female is the subject.The Greek word for woman, “gyne” was also their word for wife. No distinction was made between the two, which leads one to believe that the Greeks assumed a woman’s primary role was to be a wife.
Greek law makes it clear that women were owned by men. Women could not be trusted to handle their own personal affairs, or to support themselves. They were to be under the guidance and instruction of a man at all times, whether it was their father, husband, or another male relative. Their status differed from that of the slaves of Greece only in name. This alone, however not a problem -- the problem was that the Greeks was knew, in their hearts, that this was wrong.
Indeed, their playwrights harangued them about it from the stage of Athens continually. All of the great Grecian playwrights -- Sophocles, Euripedes, and Aristophanes -- dealt with the women's issue. All of them argued, in their various ways, that the women of Greece were not nearly as incapable and weak as the culture believed them to be. All of them created female characters of strength and intelligence.
Women in Early Christian Rome:
Most women in Rome were viewed as property of the men who they lived with. Basically they were handed from their father to their new husband at the time of their marriage and surrendered any property they owned, or dowry they were given, to their husband. There were however two types of marriage in early Rome, manus and sine manus......
