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