Women in Greek Plays

Women in Greek Plays

Since the early Renaissance women have played very small roles in almost all of the plays and theatre, but why were their roles so insignificant? It was rare but some would say that their plays gave women the starring role and gave women all the credit, while writers only did things as rare as to just mention women but when that was done, it was because they were being depicted only for sexual matters. Aristophanes spoke of women in comical circumstances as was shown in Bob Willenbrink’s remake of his play Ladies Day. Aristophanes used women as the primary subject in this play while allowing them to make fun of men on both serious and humorous levels. The women portrayed in this play were those that are known best for identifying their sexuality. Men were a very small part of this play and when they were mentioned it was usually in the aspect of making fun of them. Aristophanes portrayed women as cooks, cleaners, and babysitters and why women are known for those things some women became very offended and thought brought about the discussion of how gender would be addressed in Greek theatre.

With the acceptation of Ladies Day, there were more stories about women and how rare they were used in writings at Athens. Some scholars see Athens as completely male-centered and misogynistic (3); others find it no more oppressive to women than other traditional societies (e.g., Lefkowitz 1986). So what’s with aggression over women not being mentioned and depicted like most writers did men? Some would say that these problems are exacerbated by the fact that most of our sources are elite texts and art works produced by men, in which representations of women’s lives are expressed through, and complicated by, the ideology of gender. Whatever the gender of the writer I feel that the characterization should be the same for both men and women. Setting the argument of the author aside in Euripides’ book “Women on the edge he states that “the scarcity of evidence about Athenian women is directly related to their public invisibility. Women were not permitted to participate in the civic life of the polis: they could not vote in the Assembly, serve on juries, testify in court, own property, or handle more than small sums of money without the consent of a man.” After reading this excerpt it seems to put more reason on how different the times were back then and it helps realize that maybe the playwrights were only writing about the things they were familiar with. This book puts more of a justification on the outlook of women being downsized in Greek plays.

So what exactly would happen if we were to look at women playwrights and their stories? In Savas Patsalidis’ book “Greek Women Dramatists: The Road to Emancipation” she did just that. Patsalidis takes women playwrights and reflects their position in Greek society. She states that “Greek women play a game that almost none of them can win so long as social structure remains the same.” It’s hard to break the mold and become different from the genre of men being the superior gender but Patsalidis took the chance and she was one of the few that became very successful for it. She expresses this in her article called “Greek Women Dramatists: The Road to Emancipation” when she says that “although many women have done well in Greek theater as actresses and company owners, comparatively few have succeeded in the field of playwriting. The public nature of the genre and its complicated and male-dominated network of operation, along with its association with immorality (a taint that has lent a certain notoriety to the institution of the theater well into the twentieth century), have discouraged many talented women writers from entering the field, forcing them to choose more "domestic" and "respectable" modes of writing, like poetry and fiction. Among those few who have tried to write for the theater despite the odds, there is a handful of who have managed to bring psychological insights of their own gender into their dramas and have successfully emphasized the confusion in roles resulting from a society that accepts only male characteristics as the norm.” This article opens eyes saying that although the times have changed do we really forget the way things used to be with men and women? Most would say no and it