ABSTRACT
The title of this paper is intended to encapsulate one of the main questions that has recently been asked about women in Greek society, and one which is eminently suited to investigation using archaeological data: to what extent were the women of this period confined to specific parts of the household, and was any such practice simply a matter of convenience based on the need to supervise household chores, or was it, as suggested by some commentators (for example, Walker 1983:81-2) a rigorously enforced cultural requirement for social respectability? The aim of this paper is to build upon previous work that has examined the archaeological material, through the use of an ethnographic parallel. Such a device can obviously not re-create in every respect the society of ancient Greece. Nevertheless, it may help us to break away from some of the constraints imposed by the fragmentary nature of much of our evidence, allowing us to build a more coherent picture of the way in which different factors within a society may interrelate, and the possible consequences of one particular form of social organization in terms of both the household organization and adjustments that are made in other spheres of life. Thus, the parallel used here is intended to suggest possibilities rather than to set up a rigid model that can simply be transplanted into the ancient context.
