Rebecca Kennedy - Immigrant Women in Athens: Gender, Ethnicity, and Citizenship in the Classical City

Many of the women whose names are known to history from classical Athens were metic s or immigrants, linked in the literature with assumptions of being sexually exploitable. Despite recent scholarship on women in Athens beyond notions of the citizen wife and the common prostitute, the scholarship on women, both citizen and foreign, is focused almost exclusively on women in the reproductive and sexual economy of the city. This book examines the position of metic women in classical Athens, to understand the social and economic role of metic women in the city, beyond the sexual labor market.

This book contributes to two important aspects of the history of life in fifth-century Athens: it explores our knowledge of metics , a little-researched group, and contributes to the study of women in antiquity, which has traditionally divided women socially between citizen-wives and everyone else. This tradition has wrongly situated metic women, because they could not legally be wives, as some variety of whores. Author Rebecca Futo Kennedy critiques the traditional approach to the study of women through an examination of primary literature on non-citizen women in the classical period. She then constructs new approaches to the study of metic women in classical Athens that fit the evidence and open up further paths for exploration. This leading-edge volume advances the study of women beyond their sexual status and breaks down the ideological constraints that both Victorians and feminist scholars reacting to them have historically relied upon throughout the study of women in antiquity.

Rebecca Futo Kennedy is Assistant Professor in the Department of Classics at Denison University, USA. She is author of Athenas Justice: Athena, Athens, and the Concept of Justice in Greek Tragedy (2009) and co-author of Race and Ethnicity in the Classical World: An Anthology of Primary Sources in Translation (2013).

Routledge Studies in Ancient History

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Charles Matson Odahl

2 Ancient Graffiti in Context
Edited by Jennifer Baird and Claire Taylor

3 Roman Elections in the Age of Cicero
Society, Government, and Voting
Rachel Feig Vishnia

4 Time in Roman Religion
One Thousand Years of Religious History
Gary Forsythe

5 Banishment in the Later Roman Empire, 284476 CE
Daniel A. Washburn

6 Immigrant Women in Athens
Gender, Ethnicity, and Citizenship in the Classical City
Rebecca Futo Kennedy

Gender, Ethnicity, and Citizenship in the Classical City

Rebecca Futo Kennedy

First published 2014
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Kennedy, Rebecca Futo, 1974

Immigrant women in Athens: gender, ethnicity, and citizenship in the classical city / by Rebecca Futo Kennedy.

pages cm. (Routledge studies in ancient history; 6)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

1. WomenGreeceAthensHistoryTo 1500. 2. Women immigrantsGreeceAthensHistoryTo 1500. 3. Women immigrantsGreeceAthensSocial conditions. 4. Women immigrants GreeceAthensEconomic conditions. 5. Sex roleGreeceAthens HistoryTo 1500. 6. EthnicityGreeceAthensHistoryTo 1500. 7. CitizenshipGreeceAthensHistoryTo 1500. 8. Athens (Greece)History. 9. Athens (Greece)Social conditions. 10. Greece HistoryTo 146 B.C. I. Title.

HQ1134.K46 2014
305.40938'5dc23
2014001043

ISBN: 978-0-415-73786-9 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-315-81777-4 (ebk)

Typeset in Sabon
by Apex CoVantage, LLC

For Elly
The most frustrating and most rewarding thing I have ever produced