Abstract

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Birth, Death and Motherhood in Classical GreeceCynthia PattersonNancy Demand. Birth, Death and Motherhood in Classical Greece. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994. xx + 276 pp.Motherhood appears in the title of this book, but inasmuch as motherhood is more than simply giving birth the book does not in fact have much to do with motherhood. The experience of giving birth and the likelihood of dying while doing so are important topics for understanding women’s lives in antiquity, but they are neither all there is to motherhood nor all there is to the historical record of ancient Greek women’s lives. Believing, however, that it is “anachronistic” and the result of “modern preconceptions” to look for ways in which women’s lives and women’s social roles were valued in ancient Greek society, Demand begins with the assertion that “[Greek] women’s central role was as childbearers and little other evidence exists for them” (1) and ends with the sweeping conclusion that in its anxiety to control female sexuality and reproduction, the male Greek polis “fostered methods of control over women’s reproductivity that prejudiced their success in the primary role that the culture assigned to them, that of childbearing” and thus “the Greek polis was detrimental to the interests of both women and polis” (154). In brief, the argument is that the development of the medical discipline, and particularly the field of gynecology, in the fifth century served more the need of Greek males to control female sexuality than that of Greek females for physical well-being.Although the sources Demand makes use of are often non-Athenian in origin (e.g., the Hippocratic corpus itself) “the situation of women” in classical Athens is taken as her story’s low point and the connection between Athenian citizenship law and control of women is the highlight of her thesis: “The increasingly restrictive definition of citizenship status that went with the development of the [Athenian] polis thus brought with it suspicions that haunted male lives and fed men’s obsession with the control of their womenfolk” (151). To read the Periclean law of 451/50 requiring that citizens have both citizen father and citizen mother, however, as motivating an increasingly oppressive control of Athenian wives makes little sense. The need to guarantee the paternity of a woman’s child was as much present before as after 451. Demand takes it as given that Athenian women were subject to increasing control in the latter part of the fifth century, an assumption for which she offers no supporting evidence. Here and elsewhere in the book Demand’s unquestioning adherence to the “hypothesis of a connection between state formation and the subordination of women” (xx) produces forced and so unconvincing interpretations of important and complex texts and evidence. For those interested in ancient Greek scientific and medical views on human reproduction I would still recommend G. E. R. Lloyd, Science, Folklore and Ideology (Cambridge 1983) and now Lesley Dean-Jones, Women’s Bodies in Classical Greek Science (Oxford 1994).Birth, Death and Motherhood begins with a description of “The Lives of Greek Women” (Ch. 1) centering on the oikos (household), “the cultural context [End Page 323] for reproduction for all women” (2). The topics are the standard ones: the prevalence of female infanticide, arranged marriages, and pressure to produce male offspring; and the life described is one that Demand clearly thinks Greek women themselves found oppressive. For example, she speaks of the Thesmophoria as the “most widely celebrated of the occasions that allowed women a temporary respite from the routines of the oikos,” and comments that the “newfound freedom” of women who were beyond the childbearing years “must have been welcome” despite the fact the “male community accorded them less value” (24 and 28). Although Demand recognizes that women’s religious responsibilities were significant—and “offered women the most socially acceptable opportunities to venture outside the home”—she insists that “to seek to find ways in which women functioned in public space, and to attribute a positive value to them, is basically anachronistic” (25). How so? It seems potentially much more anachronistic to insist, as Demand does, that the...