Cohen, D. 1991 - Adultery, women, and social control
Responses to Adultery
Husbands responded to adultery with silence, extortion, or complicity. This indicates a range of reactions influenced by factors like social standing and personal circumstances.
Some women bought favors, and some men acquiesced in financial gains from wives' infidelity. This suggests that adultery could sometimes be a transactional activity.
Social Control and Gender Dynamics
Social control involves dynamic interrelation of normative structures and social practices within gender, reputation, and spatial differentiation. It highlights how these elements are interconnected in regulating behavior.
Poses questions about how women formed and consummated adulterous relationships, and why both men and women risked adultery, considering potential legal and social consequences. This encourages investigation into the motivations and methods of those involved in adultery.
Challenges the notion of women's strict confinement by questioning how adultery occurred. It prompts a reevaluation of the extent of women's freedom and mobility.
Conflicting Characterizations of Women
Scholars offer conflicting characterizations of women, either denying contradictions or attributing them to cultural themes and conflicts. This reflects differing interpretations of women's roles and characteristics in society.
Anthropological studies reveal varying interpretations of women's roles, influenced by researcher's gender and marital status. It acknowledges potential biases in research and analysis.
Conflicting characterizations stem from manipulation of norms and cultural ideals to convey specific viewpoints. It suggests that these portrayals are not always objective but are used to support specific agendas.
Normative ideals, manipulated strategically, illuminate contradictions in social practices. It shows how these ideals can be employed to highlight inconsistencies in behavior.
Awareness of Contradictions
Euripides and Aristophanes were aware of contradictions in female characterizations.
Euripides embodies conflicting positions in dramas, highlighting ambivalence about women and sexuality.
Aristophanes exploits contradictions between cultural ideals and real-life portrayals of women in comedies.
Analyses connect these conflicts to social regulation of sexuality and women's social and legal position.
Studies emphasize need to explore relationship between symbolism/ideology and politics of gender/reputation.
Honor, Shame, and Sexuality
Honor and shame are linked to sexuality; the honor of men is defined through the chastity of women.
Male honor involves actively defending female purity, while vigilance is needed due to societal norms around masculinity.
Fear of unbridled female sexuality necessitates social convention and male vigilance.
Illicit expressions of sexuality bring dishonor; women are perceived as powerful, dangerous, and embodying the demonic.
Male role is ensuring chastity, as a wife's infidelity threatens family reputation.
Anxiety results, manifested in paternity concerns and fear of cuckoldry.
Gender Ideology in Athenian Society
The ideology of gender influences relationships between the sexes.
Athenian society also exhibits a nexus of honor, shame, and sexuality, with men feeling dishonored by compromised women.
Law allows killing adulterers, highlighting code of honor and shame.
Literature references dangers of women's sexuality, associating them with negative traits.
Women must be guarded to protect family and social order.
Sexual hostility arises, portraying women as a hated thing.
Some scholars portray Athenian society as misogynistic, while others argue against exaggerating male fear of female sexuality.
Social Practices Beyond Literature
Conflicts in gender politics require understanding the broader context of social practices, transcending literature and myth.
Public sphere associated with men, private with women; this shapes social roles and expectations.
Honor requires protecting the sanctity of the house, with violations questioning women's chastity.
Separation of men and women is key, but scholars often confuse separation with seclusion.
While women didn't participate in politics like men, this doesn't mean they lacked public, social, and economic spheres.
Social anthropological studies show similar Mediterranean patterns, debunking notions of Greek society's isolation.
Adultery and Family Reputation
Adultery highlights the importance of a wife's sexual purity for family reputation and standing.
Athenian women engaged in various activities outside the house, including economic roles.
Such engagement aligns with Mediterranean patterns, challenging perceptions of women's solitude.
The extent of participation can vary depending on the period of warfare.
Even if seclusion has a great impact on women's social roles, historical evidence suggests that they often navigated these constraints to assert their agency and influence within their communities.
DIRECT QUOTES
Introduction
Although the law provided that the husband, or the appropriate magistrates, could put to death the adulterer taken in the act, some aggrieved spouses were perceived as responding with silence, extortion, or complicity.
Although social norms of honor and shame linked the woman's sexual modesty to the honor of her husband and other male relatives, some women were thought to buy the favors of young men, and some men to acquiesce in the financial advantage they might gain from their wives' infidelity.
Rather than inquiring what such practices tell us about the normative evaluation of sexual relations, a positivistic, in strumental approach to social control would dismiss all such conduct as "violations" of social and legal rules, as deviations from the norm.
As Chapters 2-4 suggested, however, such rules represent but one facet of social control in "face-to-face" societies: they influence, but do not determine, the social practices through which they, and the social order, are reproduced.
Further, though they may reflect the norms of ethical and legal ideals, they may vary widely from other normative expectations which play a central role in patterns of social conduct.
In the case of adultery, then, one must investigate the dynamic interrelation of these normative structures and social practices within the larger social context constituted by what Chapter 3 described as the politics of gender, reputation, and spatial differentiation.
How and Why
In sketching this social context, the seemingly banal questions of "how and why" furnish a convenient starting-point. If, as much contemporary scholarship holds, women were strictly confined to every movement by relatives or slaves, how did they form adulterous relationships and then consummate them?
Further, why did men and women run the considerable risks that adultery entailed?
After all, as Lysias' On the Murder of Eratosthenes makes clear, some husbands, at least, were not loath to exercise the summary procedures provided by the law, and other passages attest to the ill treatment which adulterers were likely to suffer if apprehended.
Indeed, the question of motivation arises with particular force for men, since, according to many scholars, the only significant romantic attachments for men were homosexual, and sexual gratification, in this slave society, was ubiquitous and cheap.
After all, if Andromache's description of her life in Euripides' Trojan Women is taken as typical, one wonders why and how adultery happened at all, let alone achieved its pre-eminence in the pantheon of sexual misconduct:
I made good reputation my aim... As Hector's wife I studied and practiced the perfection of womanly modesty. First, if a woman does not stay in her own house, this very fact brings ill-fame upon her, whether she is at fault or not; I therefore gave up my longing to go out, and stayed at home; and I refused to admit into my house the amusing gossip of other women... Before my husband I kept a quiet tongue and modest eye; I knew in what matters I should rule, and where I should yield to his authority.
This statement is all too often regarded by scholars as representative, yet it contrasts markedly with the many assertions of the sexual intemperance of women and the frequency of adultery one finds in the sources.
It also stands in stark opposition to the evidence discussed above concerning the financial aspects of adultery: husbands who accept payment, women who pay men, etc.
As a character in Euripides' Stheneboea, mouthing a commonplace, puts it, "Many a man, proud of his wealth and birth, has been disgraced by his wanton wife." What accounts for these antithetical descriptions of the married woman and her role?
Conflicting characterizations of women in the ancient sources have caused considerable confusion, which scholars have dealt with in two ways.
The more primitive method denies the force of the antinomy, explaining it away in some fashion. Thus Flaceliere accepts the Andromachean typology at face value:
Whereas married women seldom crossed the thresholds of their own front door, adolescent girls were lucky if they were allowed as far as the inner courtyard since they had to stay where they could not be seen - well away even from the male members of the family.
He admits, though, that Aristophanes presents a very different picture of Athenian women, but concludes that this must represent a change towards greater freedom in the late fifth century - a rather desperate expedient since we have almost no evidence before the last quarter of the century.
More recently, Gould and Humphreys acknowledge the contradiction, but Humphreys rather unsatisfactorily explains that
"This contradictoriness must be to some extent a product of the nature of our sources, which are heavily dominated by cultural themes in which women are seen through a grid designed to fit men."
Gould, on the other hand, relates the contradiction to profound cultural conflicts concerning women and their sexuality, conflicts expressed with particular force in myth. These conflicts arise out of a central cultural ambiguity about women and sexuality, based upon a dynamic of dependence and hatred, desire and fear, which, it will be argued below, is typical of Mediterranean societies.
A satisfactory explanation, however, must go beyond the realm of myth, important as that may be, and attempt to explain these contradictions in terms of what Giddens calls the "structural properties" of social systems.
Looking at similar difficulties that have arisen in describing the social role of women in the contemporary Mediterranean world may prove helpful in addressing this task.
Anthropologists, predominantly male, had long formulated a view of Mediterranean women as secluded, powerless, and isolated from the life of their society.
A later generation of researchers, however, challenged this widely accepted thesis.
Clark, for example, in her social anthropological study of a modern Greek village, acutely formulates the contrast between these different interpretations of the role of women in traditional Mediterranean societies:
When we began our field study at Methane it was soon evident that characterizations of Greek women in some of the ethnographic accounts did not fit the women we were encountering. While we had read about powerless, submissive females who considered themselves morally inferior to men, we found physically and socially strong women who had a great deal to say about what took place in the village. The social and economic affairs of several households were actually dominated by older women, including the house of village officials.
Clark's explanation of this contradiction focuses on the way in which the gender and marital status of the researcher largely determine the information to which he or she has access.
A significant body of recent research has confirmed these findings, revealing how conceptualizations of the role of women vary according to the perspective of the informant and the rhetorical nature of the context in which the view is expressed.
Both perspectives exist within this social context, and both reflect the values and norms of the society. What is misguided is to try to identify one as "correct," on the assumption that such norms and values must form a coherent "system," free of ambiguity, ambivalence, or conflict.
In assessing the status of women, as well as related questions like seclusion, classical scholars have perhaps often fallen prey to the same trap, failing to distinguish between ideology and (sometimes conflicting) normative ideals on the one hand, and social practices on the other.
Too often normative ideals are taken as objective structures which determine behavior rather than as what Bourdieu calls "official representations of practices," which are manipulated according to the strategic exigencies of particular practical contexts.
Women in Myth and Literature
The two Athenian authors who were most acutely aware of the problems of women in their society, Aristophanes and Euripides, were also fully cognizant of such contradictions: that is, the contradiction between conflicting normative idealizations of woman: desire and fear, dependence and hatred, Medea and Andromache, and the further conflict between these positive and negative ideals on the one hand, and the life of the society on the other.
In Melanippe, a play noted in antiquity for its collection of antithetical characterizations of women, one character thus exclaims "The worst plague is the hated race of women." "Except for my mother I hate the whole female sex."
On the other hand, in the same play a woman asserts that “How then can it be just that the female sex should be abused ? Shall not men cease their foolish reproaches, cease to blame all women alike if they meet one who is bad?”
The way in which Euripides repeatedly plays upon the conflicts inherent in these views, stereotypes, and ideals should have indicated to classical scholars that great caution is required in evaluating the portrayal of women in Athenian sources.
He depicts a society whose values reflect profound ambivalence about women and their sexuality, and his conscious dramatic manipulation of ideologically determined stances shows the way in which neither Andromache's speech, nor nominally non-fictional accounts like that in Xenophon's Oeconomicus, can be taken at face value as reflecting "how it really was”
In Lysistrata, Ecclesiazusae, and Thesmophoriazusae much of the sexual humor derives from the way in which he exploits the contradictions between the cultural ideal and real life, between woman as men think she should be, woman as men fear she is, and the mothers, maidens, wives, and widows of everyday existence
Scholars like Zeitlin, King, Segal, and Loraux have explored such contradictions by looking to myth and literature as symbolic expressions of the cultural organization of gender.
Charles Segal for example emphasizes the ambivalent image of women in Greek myth and literature in terms very similar to those employed by modern Mediterranean anthropologists:
As the one who bears and cares for children and tends house and hearth, she is at the center of what is secure, nurturing, life-giving; but in her passionate and emotional nature and the violence of her sexual instincts which she is felt as little able to control, she is regarded as irrational, unstable, dangerous. Hence she is seen as an integral part of the civic structure on the one hand, but also regarded as a threat to that structure on the other... She has her place within the sheltered inner domain of the house, but also has affinities with the wild, savage world of beasts outside the limits of the city walls.
Such analyses, based upon tragedies like Medea, Bacchae, and Agamemnon, have greatly contributed to our understanding of those plays, and of the ideological conceptualization of women's sexuality.
Such an approach, however, possesses only a limited capacity for relating the conflicts and ambiguities it uncovers to concrete questions concerning the social practices which instantiate the regulation of sexuality, the social and legal position of women, etc.
one must look beyond literature to the realm of practices and the normative structures implicit within them.
A multi-dimensional approach requires the exploration of the relationship between the realm of symbolism and ideology, as expressed in literature, and myth, and the politics of gender and reputation constituted by the individual and collective conduct which makes up the life of the society.
Female Sexuality and Ideology
The crucial point here is that the honor of men is, in large part, defined through the chastity of the women to whom they are related.
Male honor receives the active role of defending that purity. A man's honor is therefore involved with the sexual purity of his mother, sisters, wife and daughters - of him chastity is not required.
The vigilance of men is necessitated therefore by the free play which social norms give to the expression of masculinity through the seduction of the women of others, and also by the view of female sexuality which posits that women need to be protected from themselves as well.
Closely associated with these beliefs is the fear of unbridled female sexuality, which only the force of social convention and male vigilance can restrain.
Because the "bride's virginity and the wife's fidelity are the basic moral assumptions on which the family is built," the expression of this sexuality in illicit ways may bring humiliation and dishonor to a family and lineage
Such beliefs serve to connect an ideology of gender to a politics of reputation by means of a dark conceptualization of women's sexuality that serves as the connecting link. Women are thought to embody a seething sexuality that can ignite an uncontrollable response in men.
To preserve the social order, this potentially destructive force must be controlled and mediated through the institution of the family, which, when properly contained and channeled, it serves to reproduce.
Fear, anxiety, and hostility result from this social and ideological dynamic. Anxiety, for example, is manifested in extreme concern about paternity.
The nexus of honor, shame, and sexuality informs, for example, the passages from Euripides quoted above, such as "Many a man, proud of his wealth and birth, has been disgraced by his wanton wife."
Indeed, the code of honor and shame is enshrined in the law of homicide, which allows a man to kill anyone found having inter course with his wife, mother, sister, daughter, or legal concubine.
As in modern Mediterranean societies, in Athens men's perception of female sexuality complicated the task of guarding the honor of a family. Greek literature abounds with references to men's view of the dangers of women's sexuality.
To begin with, women are associated with the left, darkness, cold, and evil; men with the right, good, hot, and light.44 According to Aristotle, malakia (softness, weakness, lack of self-control) afflicts women's nature (N.E. Ii5obi2-i6, H.A. 6o8a35ff.).
Thus the good wife has been taught by her family to be self-controlled, restrained (sophron; Xenophon, Oec. 7.14).45 When Aristotle (H.A. 6o8a22-bi8) analyzes the differences between men and women, he concludes that women are more passionate, shameless, deceitful, and false of speech, etc.
Modern Scholarship
The debates about the viciousness or virtue of women in Euripides indicate the probable depth of this ideological conflict in Athenian society, and this evident ambivalence of attitudes has fueled controversy in the contemporary study of Athenian sexuality.
Most feminist scholarship has portrayed Athenian society as misogynistic in its very essence and has emphasised the central role of men’s fear of women
On the other hand, Mary Lefkowitz, one of the most important figures in this area, has rightly pointed up the inevitable exaggeration of many one-sided feminist accounts.
The underlying problem with such debates is that the conflicts which delimit the politics of gender at Athens can only be understood as part of a larger whole. Debates about Athenian misogyny ring hollow so long as they confine themselves to the world of literature and myth. - Arguably fear can be read into the laws. What is the purpose of the laws if not to organise the responses to misogynistic ideology that the literature and myth shows us exists, eg homicide and infidelity laws are there to allow men the rage/honour recovery that they feel they deserve within parameters that do not harm the wider community
Public vs Private Spheres
Now, to illuminate further these connections, the argument will focus in some detail on these important facets of the social roles connected with honor and shame, namely the sexual aspect of the antinomy of public and private spheres.
It may be helpful to begin by contrasting ancient and modern views, and then move to consider some confusions in classical scholarship which comparative evidence can help to dispel.
Chapters 3 and 4 elaborated the general identification of the public sphere with men and the private sphere with women as characteristic of both traditional Mediterranean societies and classical Athens.
Xenophon and pseudo-Aristotle, for example, expound at length on how, by their very natures, men are suited for the outside, women for the inside. (Xenophon, Oeconomicus 7.17-40; [Aristotle], Oeconomica i343D25ff.)
The sexual differentiation of space operates within a framework of norms and values constructed around the poles of honor and shame. The house is the domain of secrecy, of intimate life.
Not only ought women to remain within, but they must also guard themselves from contact with any men who pass by or call for their husbands.
Thus, in Theophrastus (Char. 28.3), insulting a woman by saying she addresses those who pass by on the street, or that she answers the door herself, or that she talks with men, are all roughly equivalent to saying "This house is simply a brothel," or "They couple like dogs in the street."
Some scholars, however, have taken statements like those of Lysias as veracious descriptions of actual conduct, using them to support their portrayal of the isolated and secluded Athenian woman.
How, then, can one distinguish ideology and social practice in such passages ? The problem with the ancient evidence, as I noted above, is that it is like a jigsaw puzzle where most of the pieces are missing.
In recovering the missing "picture" to aid in reconstructing the "puzzle" of male-female relations in classical Athens, evidence from social anthropology can be of invaluable assistance in providing models of social systems.
Separation of spheres of activity does not imply physical sequestration, and consequently utter subjection, as does seclusion.
While it is undeniable that women did not operate in the public and political spheres in the way that men did, it does not necessarily follow that they did not have public, social, and economic spheres of their own, nor that these categories were not fluid and manipulable as opposed to rigid and eternally fixed.
In taking separation to imply seclusion, the prevailing view tends to ignore a considerable body of evidence which indicates that Athenian women participated in a wide range of activities which regularly took them out of their houses.
One particularly associates such expectations of seclusion with countries like Saudi Arabia or Iraq, but Altorki's recent study (1986: 23) advances the general thesis that women's freedom of movement varies directly with their contribution to the subsistence economy: "The demand for female labor outside the house lessens the restrictions on women's mobility."
Aristotle makes the same point with considerable force in the Politics, when he says that in a democracy it is impossible to prevent the women of the poor from going out to work (130034-9).
Athenian law, moreover, made it a delict to rebuke any citizen, male or female, with selling in the marketplace (Demosthenes 57.30-1).
In Athens, married and unmarried women often worked outside their homes because economic survival required it. - intersectionality: how much of our sources, literary and legal, represent the interests that only the wealthy could really hold to? This raises critical questions about the applicability of such sources to the experiences of poorer women, who may have faced different social constraints and economic realities.
there may be a wide discrepancy between economic realities and ideological statements about what sorts of things women ought to do
In Athens, women's activities which took them out of the house were not exclusively economic. They might include going to their favorite soothsayer (Theophrastus, Char. 11.9-10, 16.12), participating in a sacrifice (Aristophanes, Acharnians 253), or in religious festivals.
Women traveled to Eleusis to be initiated, and women alone arranged for major festivals like the Thesmophoria (Isaeus 8, 19-20; 3, 80; 6, 49), which required them to spend three days and nights outside of their house without any male intervention.
Indeed, historians have failed to explore the social implications of the fact that Athenian women's networks were organized enough to carry out the full range of activities associated with such an undertaking, including election of officials and a governing council, rehearsals, supplies, finances, etc.
In fact, Athenian priestesses were public officials, and were subject to the same public audits as male officials (Aeschines 3, 18).
This degree of organization and subjection to public scrutiny and accountability suggests that women were well able to cope with the demands of their sphere of public life.
Indeed, it is scarcely imaginable that any of this could take place if they were confined to the home and embarrassed to be seen by any men other than close relatives.
In Athenian society religion occupied an important place in civic life, and within it women played a central role.
Women in Lysistrata (3ooff.) talk about the difficulty in getting out to visit friends, not because of any prohibition, but rather the press of domestic responsibilities.
Indeed, the underlying assumption of the passage is that they can and do visit in this way.
This sort of evidence suggests that Athenian women, like their modern Mediterranean counterparts, participated in a variety of overlapping networks encompassing religious, economic, and social activities.
Of course, the barriers imposed by the politics of reputation and the values of honor and shame shaped the limits of such encounters. Indeed, they existed to do so.
The discussion of the sexual dimension of the intrusion of friends and neighbors into the private sphere of the family set out in Chapter 4 explores the context in which some Athenians, at least, perceived such encounters typically to take place.
Recall, for example, Aristotle's statement, that it is particularly easy to have an adulterous relation with the wife of a friend or neighbor (JV.E. U37a5; M.M. 1 i88bi7),87 or Demosthenes' assertion that Athenian law allows a man to kill even his friends if they commit hubris against or seduce the women of his family (23.53-6).
The association of adultery with neighbors is common enough in the ancient world, as the Commandment not to covet thy neighbor's wife makes clear.
Adultery served as a focus of obsessive sexual fears in the ancient and modern Mediterranean precisely because women regularly engaged in activities which brought them into some sort of contact with other men.
In "face-to-face" societies, those "moral communities where public opinion arbitrates reputation," this contact is most intimate, and most unavoidable, in the neighborhood.
It must have been even greater for those many Athenians who lived in small houses crowded close together or in tenement-like dwellings (see Thesmophoriazusae 273, Knights 1001; [Xen.] Ath. Pol. 1.17; Thucydides 3.74). Ehrenberg (1962: 214-15) aptly summarizes the intimacy of the neighborhood and deme: "Everybody knew everybody else, and the circumstances of all the families were known to everybody”