Spartan Women
Most of the information we have today about the women of ancient Greece was wrote by well educated, higher class men that were considered the experts of the time but naturally did not know what it was like to live as a woman. These men depicted the women as emotional, less rational, impulsive, and weaker than men, lacking knowledge of the world and dependent solely on them. But that idea did not hold true for the Greece city/state of Sparta. The freedom and greater respect for Spartan women began at birth with the fact that there were more girls than boys, because they were not victims of the state program of infanticide as was practiced in Athens. There were laws setup that required female infants and children to be given the same care and food as their brothers in contrast to other Greek cities where girls were frequently given less and lower quality food. The reason for this was because it was thought that if the girls had more food then their bodies would be better prepared for producing a healthy child for the Spartan society. These women unlike the women of Athens were expected to be able to protect themselves as well as learn reading and writing alongside the boys. In Athens
, the education of a girl involved spinning, weaving, and other domestic arts, for a Spartan woman such tasks were relegated to helots. Incidentally a Spartan woman, Cynisca, became the first woman to ever have an Olympic victory, by entering a chariot at the race. At the shrine of patriotism they immolated nature. This report reflects the autonomy of Spartan women acting not in secret, as might be necessary for an individual, but assertively as a group whose behavior attracted notice. Spartan women had a reputation for boldness that other Greeks found unseemly. According to Julia Sargent Murray, "The character of the Spartan women is marked with uncommon firmness. Without these women then there would have been no Sparta. A good example of this would be when a mother's love was replaced by a mother's pride in her son's bravery in battle and disgust with any sign of cowardice. Namely, they could own and control their own property. Evidence has been found that leads us to believe that women from Sparta could control when they would conceive and how often. It is believed that they might have competed in the nude before a mixed audience in many athletic competitions. This meant that property could be transferred through them to a male heir such as to her son from her father but the property would never be hers directly. Spartan women had many rights that other Greek women did not have. They were years ahead of the rest of the world because of the respect given to them by the men of their society.
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