March 8: International Woman's Day

“It’s better that one man should see the light of day than any number of women.” The playwright Euripides would have got a standing ovation when his heroin puts out this statement. According to Pausanias, “a lot of men run their lives on the rocks of irrational desires, and women even more so.” The ancient Greeks believed that gods introduced women as a punishment. Right from the moment a woman was born, men determined her life, first her father and later her husband, or her master if she was a slave. As a wife, her only purpose would be to deliver children and even for that, she wouldn’t get the credit. In a play by Aeschylos, Apollo declares: “The woman you call the mother of the child is not the parent, just the nurse to the new-sown seed that grows inside her. The man is the source of life, the one who mounts.” Homer’s Iliad is in fact the story of two women, yet, their names are barely mentioned. Even Perikles, smart, free spirited and considerate, declared women to be “virtuous, if they go unnoticed”. So, time to give them a voice!

A Marriage, Pyxis, Musée du Louvre, Paris, France

Girl with Doves, Grave Stele, Metropolitan Museum of Arts, New York, USA

Did you know...

• According to Pliny the Elder (1st century AD), “the brain of a man is larger than that of a woman.”

• Women had no access to the holy part of the agora. (To avoid the risk of somebody dying there, which was quite common when giving birth.)

• Two obscure myths to illustrate the discrimination of women:

  Melanippe was imprisoned by her father after being raped by Poseidon and her sons were exposed. (They later reunite and the sons, Boiotos and Aiolos, gave their names to the Greek regions Boiotia and Aiolia.)

  Alope too was raped by Poseidon and underwent the same fate: to be imprisoned by her father and to have her son exposed. (Her father would later be killed by Theseus, her son would become king and she herself was transformed into a spring.)