Women in Aristophanes

1. Women in Aristophanes A DIFFERENT APPROACH

2. Women in Comedy • Women in Comedy are presented as lively, sexual, fun-loving, intelligent, cunning, sometimes devious, and much more interesting and complex than the caricatures which serious literature has created. • Thus, comedy probably preserves a more realistic image of the Athenian woman • This image has often been dismissed as fantasy • The view that women could not have been the drunk-and devious sex maniacs of comedy is a modern perspective incapable of reconciling respectability with vivacity, good humor and unashamed sexuality.

3. Women’s plays • Lysistate • (Women from all of Greece come together to make the men stop the war) • Thesmophoriazousai • (Women conspire to take revenge because Euripides has been presenting them as bad in his plays) • Ecclesiazousai • (Women come together and take over the city with peaceful means) • Many plays are named after courtesans, and the plots of many plays have women, courtesans and later on slaves.

4. Ecclesiazousai • Women set to take over the city, because they are frustrated with the war effort of the men. • 392: The Corinthian War: • Defeated Athens allied herself with the dissatisfied allies of Sparta Corinth and Thebes against Sparta • An inconclusive conflict went on for a while, wearing down the already exhausted Greek States • For Athens the war was tough to pay for without the resources of the empire, and the whole city felt the financial impact.

5. How the women plan to take over the city • Not by force as in Lysistrata, but by disguising themselves as men, going early in the assembly and taking all the seats (the assembly could only sit 6500 people, out of 35000 eligible citizens). Thus they would have majority and vote passing power over to women. • During the process they need to change their faces, with beards, body color (with tans), voice, mannerisms and what they say. • This effort outlines perceived differences between men and women

6. Women in Power • The trick succeeds and women gain control of government. • They fundamentally change Athens in some surprising ways: • First, instead of creating a reverse image of male administration, they opt for a fair and egalitarian communist society. Everyone works and contributes and everyone equally shares in the wealth • The laws of the women are meant to remove inequalities in society, and cure some of its ills • Women’s administration is a utopia, which to the average Athenian would seem no less of a fantasy that a city of birds built in mid air.