ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the husband and wife who might well share the idea that certain economic functions should not be performed by the wife: this might help to make marriage seem an expensive business for which a dowry could reasonably be demanded. It recalls the orator of the fourth century who invited his all-male audience of Athenians to think how their womenfolk would react to their decision in a matter affecting female rights. The chapter examines that the apparently woman-proof structures of Athenian politics, it should be allowed after all for a form of female influence which, in being wholly indirect yet pervasive, is quite foreign to one's own experience. It imagines that if a woman did have recourse to complaining to her son in such matters she very probably had been frustrated in arguing directly to the husband.
