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PAR.TISAN lliVIEW
ulated attitudes toward women which, at least fi-om the sixth through the
fourth century
[3.
c.,
coexisted with a valued male homosexual culture
among the upper classes. The Homeric epics present neither overt homo–
sexuality nor a view of women as incompetent or inferior; and compar–
isons between archaic and classical Athens indicate that at least upper-class
women flourished in an aristocratic society, while none fared as well un–
der the democracy. Pomeroy suggests that the degree of democratic
equaliry imposed was intolerable to male citizens, who proceeded to sepa–
rate themselves as a group, emphasizing their superiority to women, as
well as
to
slaves and foreigners.
In Athens, women lacked status even as 1110thers. The female contri–
bution to the fetus not being understood , they were thought to provide
only a fertile field in which the male sowed the seed. In Aeschylus's
EUl1/ellides,
presented in 45813.
c.,
Apollo says:
She who is called the mother is not her of1spring's
Parent, but nurse to the newly born embryo.
The male - who mounts - begets. The female , a stranger,
Guards a stranger's child if no god bring it harm.
Since children were produced to perpetuate the father's house, they
wcre thc property of the father and rel11ained with his family in the case
of his dcath. In fact, only men and male children belonged to the £1ll1ily
in any permanent sense. Women were easily transferred from their fa–
thcr's families to those of successive husbands in the case of widowhood,
and men were readily, with a self-created reason, suspicious of the loyalty
of women to the fal1lilies in which they found thel11selves. Married off at
thc age of fourteen or fifteen
to
men of thirty, women in classical Athens
had a shorter life expectancy by five to ten years than their warrior hus–
bands. Poor nourishment for women, enforced lack of exercise in the
rigid seclusion of their lives, and early childbearing was apparently the
more dangerous regimen.
Since a baby was not a member of a family until the father made a
ceremonial declaration to that effect, exposure of the newborn often
served in the place of abortion. Except in Sparta, where Plutarch asserts
that all girls were reared to become the mothers of warriors, there is evi–
dence that female inf:lI1ts were more frequently disposcd of than male.
Responsible fathers did not raise girls unless they foresaw a proper mar–
riage for them at maturity, which implied also the ability
to
provide an
appropriate dowry; but even rich fathers abandoned female babies . A
study of threc-hundred forty-six propertied and influential families listed
in Johannes Kirchncr's classical work,
Prosop(~~mphica
Allica,
shows the ra-
