Aegean+Gender+New+Page

Brainstorming: Module 7

possible focus areas: snake goddess, priestesses, land ownership, matrilineal, class.

Within the broader topic of Aegean Gender, I want to focus on the gender roles specific to the Minoan and Mycenaean societies as compared to Classical Greece and Rome. I'll focus on the general view of women (through religion, art, etc.), the laws and customs regarding women, and the roles of men and women in these societies. I want to discuss the change and progression of gender roles from the earlier societies to the later ones.

Modules 10 & 11:

Minoan and Mycenaean cultures probably had fundamentally different ways of viewing gender. In Mycenaean cultures, there are figurines of mothers and children called kourotrophoi. These figurines may be grave offerings, fertility figures, or children's playthings. There are no such depictions of mothers and children anywhere in Minoan culture. This suggests that the role of women as a domestic or a mother was not so strongly emphasized in Minoan society as it was in Mycenaean society. Minoan depictions instead focus on women in assemblies, participating in dancing or conversation, or in religious ceremonies. Specifically, there are frescoes of "bull-leaping," in which archaeologists believe that some of the people depicted are indeed women (Dougherty 203). In these depictions, women are wearing clothes traditionally worn by men, and men are often depicted in frescoes as wearing traditionally female clothing (203). This may suggest that there was a general blending and lack of boundaries between genders in Minoan society, and women were not necessarily confined to their role as a mother and domestic (203). In Mycenaean-ruled Crete, there are surprisingly a lack of depictions involving motherhood, possibly suggesting that the Minoans' culture had somewhat of an impact on Mycenaean society. All of this calls into question the widely-believed notion of the "Minoan mother goddess" in Minoan religion, since there does not seem to be any kind of celebration of motherhood among Minoans. The problem with understanding the "goddesses" of Minoan culture is that there is no linear evidence to back up the theories; everything we suspect about them is really an interpretation of their art (Dougherty 198). From the frescoes to the statues, all anthropologists can do is use these sources to speculate as to how life might have been in Minoan society. Therefore, there is a distinct possibility that the religious depictions of women have a much different meaning than previously hypothesized.



Sources: Dougherty, P. Sean. "A Meditation on Minoan Civilization." // Ungendering Civilization //. New York: Routledge, 2004. Print.

Olsen, Barbara A. "Women, Children and the Family in the Late Aegean Bronze Age: Differences in Minoan and Mycenaean Constructions of Gender." // World Archaeology // 29.3 (1998): 380-92.// JSTOR //. Web. 


 * Module 12:**

This is the ancient palace at Knossos, built in the time of the Minoans.



This map shows Crete in relation to Mycenae. The two were close enough that they did share some ideas, especially in Mycenaean Crete. But they were also far enough away

that they had distinctly different ideas about some things, probably including gender.


 * Module 13: **

Household, Gender and Property in Classical Athens Author(s): Lin FoxhallSource: The Classical Quarterly, New Series, Vol. 39, No. 1 (1989), pp. 22-44Published by: Cambridge University Press on behalf of The Classical AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/639240

This article contains information about the role of women in Classical Greek culture. It includes information on property laws in Greece and the inability of women to inherit property from their male relatives. It also stresses the importance of urbanization in creating specific gender roles; in the household, men and women are together and more equal, but with public community life, there is an emphasis on males and females remaining separate in their roles. It also explores the notion of ownership and how it was not really possible for Greek women to dispose of property because they never really "owned" it in the first place. The desired social norm was for women to be as inconspicuous in public as possible, and her ability to "veto" decisions about her dowry outside of the pubic eye made that social norm easier to uphold while giving women at least some economic power.

Module 14:

Field, Priscilla. // Is Divinity a Gender Issue? The Case of the Minoan "Goddess" // Thesis. University of Oslo, 2007. Print.

This article explores whether gender has an effect on how individual in Minoan art are interpreted. The author wonders whether Arthur Evans, in his initial findings, jumped too soon to the conclusion that the women depicted in the art were religious, not political, figures. She goes on to say that the idea of a woman as a political leader might be more intimidating to modern men than a "goddess" might seem, and she thinks that it is wrong to suggest that women could only hold power and authority within a "religious framework." She provides evidence to support that certain scenes in Minoan art, like the one at Xeste 3, could have easily been secular scenes instead of religious ones. She suggests that women in other ancient civilizations were capable of holding day-to-day power, not just "spiritual" power, so Minoan civilization could have been the same way.