The Place, Role, and Rights of Women, Essay Example

Introduction

The role of women in the society has over the last several decades been insignificantly looked down into (Michael Grant, 1992). There has existed a debate on whether the olden day women were more significantly considered as important parts of the society, with different schools of thoughts offering different views of the matter. On this study, we go through the role, place and rights of women in Hellenic, Roman and Medieval societies, with the aim of comparing and contrasting the way through which they were taken.

Women in Hellenic Society

According to Michael Grant, (1992) the ancient Greece was characterized by a culture that perceived females as inferior and weak. They were relegated to the household, and enjoyed limited rights as compared to their male counterparts. The only areas through which they found their outlets for respect in the society were the religion and the festivals. Throughout most of the history of Greece, women’s role was strictly relegated to the household, in which they had no voice in political, civil or military matters.

As Michael Grant, (1992), further puts it, Historians suggest that there was an increase in women rulers (or women enjoying exceptional powers) following the Macedonian period. However, that only held for sometime, and the period followed another time for the women to be perceived as weak including the later civilizations such as Christianity.

From the earliest times of Greek Civilization, females were under the males’ patriarchal authority (Michael Grant, 1992). Women were segregated into severely enforced domestic spheres, where they passed from the father’s male authority to that of their husbands. It was only till the time of Solon that they began inheriting property from their fathers, in the cases that their fathers had no sons. The inferior perception on women called for their protection in their positions as mothers as well as wives; in which they were responsible for the nurturing and educating the family children.  According to Michael Grant, (1992) women “kept life going”. To show how limited their roles were, historians have in the pasty suggested that the women’s role in conception was as well narrow in the sense that it was the men who provided the soul, in which they believed that males turned the embryonic matter in to a living being (Michael Grant, 1992).

There was however a place in the society that women found solaces i.e. the religion. In Hellenistic society, women were allowed to take part in the church, in which they acted as priestesses in several temples. As Michael Grant, 1992) puts it, the elevation of women by the church was copied elsewhere, thus bettering the women’s positions in their respective societies. That resulted to women choosing to reside in convents as nuns, saints or female ascetics. For instance, Greek Goddesses such as Athena were undoubtedly not the regular Greek females, but rather represented the sublime.

The irony of it came from the fact that yet the women were elevated by the religion, the same took away the elevation in which church mythology taught that it was through woman that earthly pains and tribulations came to the world (Michael Grant, 1992). I.e. Pandora through whose misguided inquisitiveness and foolishness introduced evil into the world, resulting to Aristotle’s statement that “….the female is a deformed male” (Michael Grant, 1992).

Roman Society

Equally as the women in the Hellenic Society, women in the Roman society were not treated any better. As Rahab Dixon (112) puts it, when looking through the sources for ancient Roman Women, one quickly discovers that most of them were subjected to unfair aristocracies. Men from the upper social classes received the best education as well as the best positions in the society. Women married in the Aristocratic families, were not taken as highly, but were meticulously mentioned by the rest of the society as to have belonged to better standard. That notion in itself is indicative of the fact that women had to bow down to the standards established by the society.

According to Rahab Dixon (112) poorer women had extremely limited rights that were only dependent on their duties as child bearers. The role of bearing and rearing children in the Roman society held to all women regardless of their economic levels. Women were usually married by the time they got to their twelfth birthday and at times even younger. They held no rights to decide on the moment to marry.  A research documented by (Rahab Dixon 113), entitled, “The intricacies of being born female”, clearly shows that the abuse of rights to marry often resulted to the woman being perceived as a property of the males, in which a man could divorce her for simple mistakes, and marries another one without much hassles.

In fact, a man who possessed many wives was considered wealthy, regardless of the feelings that the women harbored. Many girls who were married very young often died in child birth, or as a result of having being weakened from having too many children without getting any reprieve. This is evidenced by a funeral inscription to a female named “Venturia”  in Rome, that shows that she was married at eleven, got six children and later died before the age of twenty seven (Rahab Dixon 114).

Given the place for women in the Roman society, as that of bearing children, coupled with limited rights to express themselves resulted to their abuse. The society wanted male children that would carry the family name and lineage (Rahab Dixon 114). That opened a room for abuse of the women who bore no male children or who was infertile. In actual fact, the inability to bear male children, or infertility was enough ground for a man to seek divorce.

Women in the Medieval Societies

According to Sarah Pomeroy (1999) the historical study of the medieval roles of women has been one obscured by different stigmas that facilitated women to be excluded from public records. However, their roles and lifestyles differed on the basis of their marital or social class, i.e. whether noble or peasant. For noble women they lived on a rural estate and supervised the manor’s upkeep. Her role was somewhat respectable compared to the peasant’s inn the sense that she could supervise the work of her many servants in the day to day duties such as cooking, clothing etc.

For the peasant woman, she worked alongside her husband in the fields to supplement the family income. She would also pick on some other jobs in the noble households. However, the rights to earn equal pay were denied to her.  Even though the woman worked in the fields together with her husband, her pay was significantly lower than a male counterpart’s (Sarah Pomeroy 1999). Besides all that, it was the role of the woman to maintain her household.  That was coupled withy the responsibility of bearing and rearing children, in a manner similar to that of women in both the Hellenic and Roman society. Marriages in the medieval society were for the most part perceived as an economic venture. As such, the rights of women were abused as the fathers would give them to the highest bidder.

In a manner to stress that point, men who considered themselves noble, expended immense energy to vie for approval of a wealthy man who had a daughter. The women were also materialized in the sense that their worth was measured in the amount of dowry her father could pay for her, and had no say concerning the selection of a husband since her marriage was perceived of as a business transaction

Conclusion

Throughout the study, we can see that women’s rights were not considered as important as the males’. To make the matter worse, they were made to work at little or no pain, which in today’s terms amounted to abuse of labor laws. In as much as their contributions in the society were immense, the society did not seem to care much in appreciating them.

Works Cited

Michael Grant, “A Social History of Greece and Rome” New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1992

Sarah Pomeroy, “Ancient Greece: A Political, Social, and Cultural History” Oxford University Press, 1999

Rahab Dixon, “The intricacies of being born female” Journal of women rights in the ancient times, 2000, pp 112-114