What role did women play in Greek society? How has the Greeks" view of women influenced our own? The role of women in Greek society and the Greeks view of women will be exposed. It was found that men and women were not treated equal. I found that 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. A woman's role in society is limited, one major responsibility after marriage, was producing daughters for her husband. "Xenophon believed that God had created women for this purpose and he also believed that since God had created the woman and had imposed on her the nourishment of the infants, he meted out to her a larger portion of affection for new-born babes than to the man." A woman in ancient Greek society had to produce children. .
Xenophon, Aristotle, and other great minds of the time thought "men and women are, by nature, provided with opposite faculties, which nevertheless provide for the "partnership" .
of the household. Men, for example, are naturally adapted for movement, while women's nature is sitting and being patient, courage is given to men and fear to women so that man .
can defend the household and woman can preserve it." This further kept the need for a woman's role to be dictated by the men or man who controlled her. The woman's place is in the home. These great philosophers explain this as certain truth, unwritten-law, unchangeable human nature, supposedly because it is the way God made women rather than the way society defines them.
