ABSTRACT
Tsakiropoulou-Summers studies Solon’s legislation in the sixth century BC as the instigator of the concept of inferior female. In his effort to remedy the Athenian social and financial crisis, Solon instituted a set of laws that directly affected the perception of women: he banned the dowry, regulated women’s appearance at festivals and public spaces, changed mourning practices, restricted public expressions of grief, and limited the number of women at funerals. The office of the ‘Supervisor of Women’ (gynaikonomos), established in the middle of the fourth century BC to oversee women’s cooperation with laws, suggests that women often tried to evade them. The implication of Solon’s laws, Tsakiropoulou-Summers argues, is that they suggested the idea that women are generally unruly and incapable of self-control, which instigated ancient thinkers to develop an ideological system that justified women’s exclusion from political life on the basis of their incompatibility with state ideology and organization. And although women were able to evade in real life a number of legal restrictions, they were not able to undercut the erroneous assumptions of the dominant ideology about their gender.
