Conditions of life for women in the ancient world followed from one major fact and one major assumption. The fact is that women bear children. Menstruation, pregnancy, labour, and lactation are wearing and restrict activity; contraception varied (as it did until the 1960s) from moderately reliable pessaries and spermicides to mere superstition. But women do not spend all (or, for some women, any) of their lives bearing children. The assumption was that even when they are not doing so, they must lead a domestic life under male protection, for they are not suited to independence. Women were seen as more emotional than men (a question still in dispute), more gullible, more likely to yield to impulse or desire, less rational - generally less in control of their reactions than men are. Much of this, to modern observers, is self-fulfilling prophecy. If you restrict women (or unemployed men) to domestic life, they will lack experience of the world, develop compliance not self-confidence, and have too much time to brood.

But whatever the modifications, in theory or in practice, women continued to be formally excluded from public life. They were ‘citizens’ (Athens and Alexandria called them ‘townswomen’, astai) in the sense that they could make valid marriages with citizens, had legal protection (which had to be invoked by a man), and were liable to tax in states which allowed them to own property. They could not serve as magistrates or administrators, could not vote in elections or lawcourts or policy decisions. Only some religious festivals, or a national emergency, gave them the chance of collective activity. The few women who ruled as widow of a king, mother of a prince or dominant partner of a royal marriage, or who had the title but probably not the power of a magistrate (see section VII), made no difference to the general principle. It was assumed that women could not make rational judgements in politics or law and could not fight in defence of the city.

But life with the slaves and the children might be very dull without other company, especially before the children came. Women could not entertain or visit whom they chose: domesticity was a safeguard as well as a restriction, and marriageable girls or married women were protected from rape, seduction, or just hostile comment (from both sexes) by being home-based and carefully chaperoned when they did go out. Reasonable concern for their safety and respectability was reinforced by the need to show that their children were legitimate. Greek moicheia and Latin stuprum do not mean just any instance of infidelity or sexual assault, but intercourse with a woman who was married or capable of marriage, or who was quasi-married as an acknowledged concubine. Rape, in a sense, was preferable to seduction, since the woman had not assented to her loss of chastity. Menander can envisage a relationship which begins with rape and pregnancy ending in happy marriage, but other authors are less sentimental. Euripides, in Ion (935ff) makes it clear that rape could be detestable even if the rapist was a god begetting a splendid son. Apollo’s victim there was out picking flowers, like Persephone when Hades seized her; the usual setting for rape was a festival crowd (and Christian martyr-feasts, according to Jerome, Letter 107.9, were not much better). Going out was asking for trouble.

Restricting social contacts for women gave assurance that they were virgin on first marriage and that there was no doubt about the legitimacy of their children - all their children, since the ancient world did not have the system of primogeniture, which sometimes makes rich families more relaxed after the birth of the Heir. The most important moral quality for females was sophrosunē, which often (like English ‘virtue’) means simply ‘chastity’. A marriage was distinguished from other sexual relationships precisely by the woman’s ability to bear legitimate citizen children to the man: this is the point of a comment, often misinterpreted, ascribed to Demosthenes ([Demosthenes] 59.122), that men have wives for the procreation of legitimate heirs, concubines for the daily care of the body, and prostitutes for sexual pleasure.

The ancient world never made the social change which would most have altered family structures: delaying marriage for women until they had finished secondary education, and replacing marriage, for some women, with a religious or professional commitment. Perhaps it seemed too dangerous, or too unkind, to deny girls an outlet for the sexual feeling which becomes intense at puberty, or to waste their brief ‘bloom’, which was thought to begin about twelve. But the main reason was that women were thought to be unsuited to higher education. Even if they had the intelligence (which was doubtful), academic study was unfeminine and a formal training in rhetoric (the main purpose of higher education) was irrelevant, and it was all too much for them. When higher education was at last opened to women, in the late nineteenth century, they were threatened with infertility and ‘brain fever’ - and some succumbed.

Political power, for individual women, was like a reputation for philosophy or a gift for painting. You had to be the daughter or wife of the right person: it was not possible to make a career, as a man sometimes could, by sheer talent for fighting or arguing or making. You also had to work in the interests of the family and keep a low personal profile.

Plutarch, who believed that women were endowed with courage and intelligence, collected instances of Great Deeds by Women (Moralia 242–63). These occur in crises: his heroines do not have, and he does not advocate, an acknowledged social or political role. He admires Aretaphila (257de), who withstood torture, conspired successfully to kill a tyrant, declined an invitation from the people to join the government, and retired gracefully to private life in the women’s quarters. When women are found, in Plutarch’s time, holding magistracies and priesthoods (as they did in Asia Minor in the first and second centuries A.D.), or are honoured by their cities as public benefactors, they too are praised for modesty, charm, and self-restraint, as though everyone needed reassuring that no departure from convention was intended. In fact, it cannot be shown that such women ever chaired a meeting or addressed an assembly, or did more than foot the bills and acknowledge the applause. Some actually have public spokesmen; some are obviously the Lady Mayoress, the wife of the man who had the job.

Public status for women, in a city, a craft-guild or a cult-group, very often depended on ability to pay the bills. This was not to be taken for granted. Women were generally thought to need guidance in financial matters, lest they fall victim to impulse or emotional blackmail or simple inexperience. In classical Athenian law, a woman had, by custom, unquestioned control of her clothes and jewels, her ‘personal effects’, which might be of great value. Her dowry, and any possessions or servants she brought to the marriage, were for the use of her husband. If the marriage ended, they had to be transferred to the man who next took responsibility for her. Without the authority of this man, her kurios, she could not in theory (Isaeus 10.10.2–3) contract for anything worth more than a bushel of barley, which sounds like an archaic equivalent of the week’s shopping.

Old thought-patterns die hard: three centuries after the guardianship of women was formally abolished, both halves of the Roman empire legislated to restrict the rights of clergy to receive legacies from women. The West showed more anxiety about property being left away from the rightful heirs, the East about clergy who used religion as a pretext for entering the houses of women not of their family. Great heiresses, like Olympias in Constantinople or Demetrias in Rome, could divert their riches to the church, refusing to perpetuate a family line or to benefit the imperial house.

Religion had always been the one area in which women might have non-family duties. This is not to say that religious duties were likely to conflict with family commitment. Two famous counter-examples, the Antigone of Sophocles and the Bacchae of Euripides, do not prove the point: in both, women are forced out of their proper behaviour-patterns because the man in charge fails to recognize an obligation to family, city, and gods.

A Christian saint, by martyrdom or the ‘long martyrdom’ of renunciation, could reject all that defined her as female: physical weakness, fertility, low resistance to desire, family-centred life. She could thus become an honorary man. Perpetua, a recent mother, dreamed that she was stripped for combat in the arena and found herself physically a man; for centuries before this, women had been praised (or denounced) for a ‘masculine mind’ displayed in good sense or vigorous action. It is not, for the twentieth century, an appealing idea. But the ancient world assumed that being female was worse than being male, though individual females might triumph over the disadvantages of their sex and use to the full their natural endowment of wisdom, courage, self-control, and piety.