ABSTRACT
This chapter examines aspects of the relationship of urban Greek women to their immediate physical environment through investigating the house, its interior arrangement and its immediate surroundings. The house is obviously an appropriate focus for the analysis of female activities and spatial organisation - the ‘woman-environment’ relationship - for the domestic locus of Mediterranean women in general has become a truism. Most houses are thus shared between several households related through women, or have been in the past, and they are characteristically overcrowded. In the wider context of social life the fundamental dichotomy of the ‘house’ and the ‘road’, the inner and outer realms, is the point of orientation for interaction between women in the neighbourhood. The subdivision of the houses for several households and the continual pressure on living space must be understood as a response to the custom of providing daughters with dowry on marriage.
