Page "Athenian democracy" Paragraph 67

* Likewise the status of women seems lower in Athens than in many Greek cities.

At Sparta women competed in public exercise — so in Aristophanes ' Lysistrata the Athenian women admire the tanned, muscular bodies of their Spartan counterparts — and women could own property in their own right, as they could not at Athens.

Misogyny was by no means an Athenian invention, but it has been claimed that in regard to gender democracy generalised a harsher set of values derived, again, from the common people.

Democracy may well have been impossible without the contribution of women's labour ( Hansen 1987: 318 ).