Ancient Greece: Gender Roles In Greek Society

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Since the development of the agricultural based society people have wanted power. Peoples want for power helped drive the establishment of governments and nations. Mankind craved power and Classical Greek society was no different. People’s seemingly endless want for power triggered the oppression of women and people demende inferior for centuries. In this essay I will be explaining how gender roles functioned in Greek society as well as comparing gender roles in Greek society to gender roles in different societies in history. As society made the transition from a hunter-gatherer based culture to that of a farming culture gender roles also changed. Because of men’s physical advantage in battle and hunter they became the primary hunters while the women gathered the seed and different plants that they needed to substance their diet. As society shifted to a farming based culture man began to take over most duties involving crops and the cultivating and…show more content…
Women in Greek society were usually confined to the home and had none of the same rights afforded of men. We can see example of this in Aristophanes play, Lysistrata, in one scene we see that after the women have seized the acropolis in order to stop the war, a group of men confront them at the gate one of the men says to another “there is no beast so shameless as a women” (Lysistrata, act one, line 386). Two things are happening in this particular quote, first of all the man is attempting to dehumanize the woman by calling her a beast which shows how low the male lead society thought of women. And secondly he is referring to her as the most shameless beast which implies women are somehow even more inferior to any actual beasts. Throughout the entirety of the play we can also see how women were viewed in Greek society by the numerous jokes made at the expense of women and also how women are portrayed as sex crazed and willing to use sex to get whatever they

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