ABSTRACT
This essay presents a fresh look at women in Athenian associations, focusing particularly on the direct evidence for involvement that comes from mentions of women in inscriptions. I find that most of the evidence listing women as members of associations comes, not from the period of the democracy (508/7–321 bc), but from the period of its decline (after 321 bc), the Hellenistic Period. This may simply be because, for whatever reason, we have been left with fewer inscriptions mentioning women from the classical period (479–323 bc) than from the Hellenistic (323–30 bc). But I argue that this is not the case, and that there really were more women involved in associations after the democracy had started to decline. I argue that this is due to the fact that, with the democracy in decline, male citizens had increasingly less motivation to keep outsiders (women and alien residents) out of social groups that played a role in conferring citizenship, which in turn granted the right to take part in politics.
