Women in Athens and Afghanistan

 Can we compare the status of women in Classical Athens to that of women in Afghanistan?

Yes—and the comparison is surprisingly revealing, because Classical Athens was restrictive in ways that can look quite familiar to modern observers, but the nature and degree of the restrictions were different from those imposed by the Taliban in Afghanistan.

If by Classical Athens we mean roughly the fifth and fourth centuries BCE, an Athenian woman of respectable family was largely confined to a domestic and reproductive role. She did not vote, hold political office, participate in the Assembly, or serve as a juror. Her legal and economic independence was limited, and important legal transactions were generally conducted through a male guardian (kyrios). Marriage was normally arranged by the families, and producing legitimate children—particularly sons—was a central expectation.

But there is an important qualification: Athens was not simply a society in which women were universally shut away from public life. Women went to religious festivals and participated extensively in religious life; religion actually provided some of their most important public roles. They could own or inherit certain property, although their capacity to dispose of it independently was restricted. Women also appeared in the marketplace and could work, particularly women of poorer households. And the famous Athenian ideal of female seclusion was probably considerably more aspirational than literal.

Afghanistan under the Taliban is different in both scope and enforcement. Women and girls have been progressively excluded from secondary and higher education, many forms of employment, public life, and freedom of movement. Restrictions on dress and movement are backed by an apparatus capable of enforcing them. The exclusion isn't merely "women don't participate in politics"; it reaches deeply into education, employment, travel, public space, and personal autonomy.

There is nevertheless an interesting structural similarity: both systems make the household the principal legitimate sphere for women and political/public citizenship overwhelmingly male. In both cases, this is connected with a conception of social order in which men exercise authority and women are expected to be protected and controlled within family structures.

But I would resist saying that an Athenian woman was simply the equivalent of an Afghan woman under the Taliban. The Athenian system was principally a system of political exclusion and patriarchal family law. The Taliban system is a much more comprehensive system of institutional exclusion from education, employment, mobility, and public existence.

There is also a delicious historical irony here: Athens called itself the birthplace of democracy while excluding roughly half its population from citizenship. The democracy was extraordinarily radical among male citizens and extraordinarily undemocratic toward women, slaves, and resident foreigners.

And this gets particularly interesting if we compare Athenian women with Spartan women. Sparta gave women considerably more property rights, education, physical training, economic independence, and public visibility than Athens did. So even within ancient Greece, "the status of women" wasn't one thing.

Yes—that gets surprisingly close to the Spartan bargain, although with a bit of compression.

The Spartan system essentially said: men and women have different jobs, and both jobs serve the polis. Men were supposed to become soldiers and accept the possibility of death in battle. Women were supposed to produce and raise the next generation of soldiers—and were therefore given considerably more freedom and property than Athenian women.

The famous Spartan attitude toward motherhood was remarkably unsentimental. A mother could supposedly tell her son to return “with his shield or on it”—meaning victorious, or dead. Whether every such anecdote is historically authentic is another question, but it captures the ideal beautifully.

And there is a rather interesting symmetry in it. Sparta did not say, "Women are inferior, therefore keep them out of public life." Its logic was closer to:

    Your sex determines your duty; your importance follows from performing that duty well.

Consequently Spartan women could own substantial property, exercise publicly, manage estates while men were away, and speak with considerably more freedom than respectable Athenian women. Aristotle was actually rather scandalized by the amount of property and influence women had in Sparta.

But the bargain had a dark side. A woman's considerable autonomy was not granted because Sparta believed in individual equality. It was granted because Sparta was a militarized society that needed women to perform their particular function efficiently.

So your formulation gets at something important: Spartan feminism, if one wants to call it that, was profoundly functionalist. The state needed mothers producing future warriors, just as it needed warriors defending the state.

Which makes Sparta an interesting counterexample to the assumption that greater freedom for women necessarily arose from a doctrine of equal individual rights. Sometimes it arose because society had decided that women had an important job to do—and wanted them sufficiently free and capable to do it.

Birth mortality was not much different from battle mortality.

Exactly. And that makes the Spartan symmetry considerably less rhetorical.

If we imagine the risks over a lifetime rather than comparing one childbirth with one battle, a Spartan man and woman could both face a serious probability of dying in the performance of the social role assigned to their sex. Battle killed men; pregnancy, childbirth, and the complications of repeated pregnancies killed women.

There is an important statistical wrinkle, though: maternal mortality is usually measured per pregnancy or per live birth, whereas battle mortality is measured per campaign, battle, or period of military service. So "birth mortality was comparable to battle mortality" needs some care.

But the underlying point is sound. In a premodern society without antibiotics, blood transfusion, modern obstetrics, or effective treatment of hemorrhage and infection, childbirth was a genuinely dangerous occupation. A woman who had many pregnancies accumulated substantial lifetime risk.

And that makes the Spartan arrangement rather stark:

Man: your duty is to fight; you may die doing it.

Woman: your duty is to bear children; you may die doing it.

Neither was exactly being offered a modern conception of individual fulfillment. The remarkable thing is that Sparta could consequently regard women as important enough to give them property, education, physical training, and considerable practical independence.

In other words, Sparta didn't emancipate women from duty. It emancipated them partly in order that they could perform their duty. That's a much more interesting proposition than simply calling Sparta progressive or unprogressive.

The Islamic male attitude, and I've gotten this first hand from several, is that women are okay but generate evil thoughts in men.  Thoughts that lead to Hell.

Yes. That is a real strand of Islamic moral thinking, though I would distinguish it from saying that this is simply “the Islamic male attitude.” Islam has several quite different traditions concerning sexuality and gender.

The idea you're describing is essentially temptation theory: sexual attraction is a danger to men, women are understood as a particularly powerful source of that temptation, and therefore society should regulate women's appearance, movement, and interaction with men to protect male virtue.

There are interesting parallels in other traditions. In some Christian traditions, too, women were treated as occasions of male sexual temptation—hence elaborate rules about women's dress and separation of the sexes. Medieval Christian writers could be astonishingly preoccupied with this. The difference is that particular Islamic societies developed much more extensive and enduring institutional arrangements around the separation and veiling of the sexes.

And there is a peculiar moral inversion in the argument. The man's desire is treated as something for which the woman must bear responsibility. Instead of:

    “I experience an improper desire; therefore I must control myself,”

the logic can become:

    “You cause me to experience an improper desire; therefore you must conceal yourself or be restricted.”

That distinction matters enormously for women's freedom.

It also explains something that otherwise looks rather strange from outside: the woman need not be considered evil at all. She may be regarded as a perfectly respectable, honorable person—and simultaneously as dangerous because of the sexual thoughts she supposedly provokes in men. The restriction is then presented as protection of both sexes: protection of the man from sin and protection of the woman from men's sexual attention.

And, as you imply from your firsthand conversations, this can be a sincerely held psychological belief rather than merely a convenient excuse for male dominance.

The really interesting question is whether the premise is accepted: Why should another person's involuntary sexual attraction constitute a moral offense by the person who provokes it? Once you reject that premise, a great deal of the resulting system becomes difficult to justify.