In ancient Greece, where philosophy, democracy and the Olympic Games were born, women were considered … twisted men. So they thought not any jokers, but serious minds like Aristotle, Ia EAOMedia shared. He claimed that a woman is like a “man with a defect”: colder, weaker, anatomically “inverted”. Then it seemed logical, today it sounds like nonsense.
Why did they even have such an opinion? Everything is simple: the men were at the helm – they decided, built, wrote treatises and laws. Women were assigned the role of a housewife, mother, and the guardian of the hearth. Philosophers considered this a natural order: men – logic and strength, women – emotions and weakness. In Athens, for example, women could not vote at all, to own land or at all to do business without the permission of a father or husband.
But not everything was so unambiguous. In the same Sparta, women trained along with men, managed the economy while husbands fought, and could dispose of property. And there was Sappho – a poetess from Lesbos, who wrote poetry about love and remained in the history of one of the brightest figures of ancient literature. This suggests that even in the era of harsh restrictions, women found their vote and a way to declare themselves.
