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  • The Invention of The Female Mind - Women, Property and Gender Ideology in Archaic Greece

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    gfvila
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    This document summarizes an academic paper titled "The Invention of the Female Mind: Women, Property and Gender Ideology in Archaic Greece". It discusses how in early Greek poetry, women were appreciated and evaluated based on their beauty, skills, and intellect, similarly to how men were assessed. However, over time there was a social change where women's beauty and weaving skills were devalued, and a new ideology of gender emerged that portrayed women as intellectually inferior. This restricted women's roles and diminished their contribution to and control over household property. The paper aims to argue how this shift in gender ideology occurred from early Greek society to later periods.

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    This document summarizes an academic paper titled "The Invention of the Female Mind: Women, Property and Gender Ideology in Archaic Greece". It discusses how in early Greek poetry, women were appreciated and evaluated based on their beauty, skills, and intellect, similarly to how men were assessed. However, over time there was a social change where women's beauty and weaving skills were devalued, and a new ideology of gender emerged that portrayed women as intellectually inferior. This restricted women's roles and diminished their contribution to and control over household property. The paper aims to argue how this shift in gender ideology occurred from early Greek society to later periods.

    Drepturi de autor:

    Attribution Non-Commercial (BY-NC)
    Descărcați ca PDF, TXT sau citiți online pe Scribd
    Indicator pentru conținut neadecvat
    149 vizualizări2 pagini

    The Invention of The Female Mind - Women, Property and Gender Ideology in Archaic Greece

    Încărcat de

    gfvila
    This document summarizes an academic paper titled "The Invention of the Female Mind: Women, Property and Gender Ideology in Archaic Greece". It discusses how in early Greek poetry, women were appreciated and evaluated based on their beauty, skills, and intellect, similarly to how men were assessed. However, over time there was a social change where women's beauty and weaving skills were devalued, and a new ideology of gender emerged that portrayed women as intellectually inferior. This restricted women's roles and diminished their contribution to and control over household property. The paper aims to argue how this shift in gender ideology occurred from early Greek society to later periods.

    Drepturi de autor:

    Attribution Non-Commercial (BY-NC)
    Descărcați ca PDF, TXT sau citiți online pe Scribd
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    The Invention of the Female Mind: Women, Property and Gender Ideolo...

    file:///D:/EbooksfrAforMay29-13/TheInventionofthefemalemindUCLH...

    This is the html version of the file http://chs.harvard.edu/wb/1/wo/odsdbWbF18vgg1nVVyTJGg/0.5. Google automatically generates html versions of documents as we crawl the web.

    Page 1

    The Invention of the Female Mind: Women, Property and Gender Ideology in Archaic Greece
    Hans van Wees University College, London Women in early Greek poetry appear to be appreciated for a full range of qualities, by comparison to classical Greek women, whose main virtue in the eyes of men was, it might be said with some exaggeration, their ability to produce legitimate heirs. Agamemnon, for example, rated his favorite slave woman more highly than his wife in stature and physique, in skill, and in her qualities of mind (Iliad 1.113-15). The whole rhetorical list of female qualities could be worse, notes a modern commentator, but it has a suggestion of the cattlemarket all the same. That suits Agamemnons temperament (Kirk 1985, 65-6). Modern sensibilities may prefer a generic declaration of love to an itemized list of admirable qualities, but Agamemnons attitude was in fact widely shared. Homer, Hesiod and their heroes routinely evaluate women by one or more of the three criteria of beauty, skill and mind. Aeneas sister is described as supreme in her age group on all three counts (Iliad 13.427-33). Bellerophons mother is praised for her skill, wisdom, and the charming beauty which radiated from her skin and silvery garments (Hesiod F 43a.70-4 M-W). Given a habit of openly measuring and discussing personal qualities of men no less than women1 one must agree that Agamemnons list of criteria could have been worse. Indeed it is hard to see how it might have been better: looks, skill, and intellectual and emotional qualities of mind surely cover all the major criteria by which any person might care to be assessed. It will be argued in what follows that the portrayal of women in the earliest Greek poets Homer, Hesiod and Semonides reflects a society in which women were valued for all these qualities because these actively contributed to the status of a household. Subsequently, social change brought about a devaluation of female beauty and weaving skills and created the need for a new ideology of gender, which replaced a sense of intellectual equality with the notion of the innate inferiority of the female mind. The result was a society which strictly circumscribed the roles of women and diminished their contribution to, and control over, household property. Beauty The cost of a wife
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