Ideology and ‘the status of women’ in ancient Greece

Is a ‘History of Women’ possible? Does Woman exist? The first of these provocative questions was the title of a 1984 collection of essays by French feminists;1 the second was addressed by the British feminist, Denise Riley.2 With some exceptions, such challenges to the category of research have not disrupted the smooth surface of the study of women in antiquity, which, as Marilyn Skinner observed in 1986,3 was incorporated readily into the field of classics and defined according to existing parameters of scholarly investigation.4