Working evidence: change and continuity of women’s work in Archaic to Hellenistic Athens

Recent scholarship has paid increasing attention to work and professions in the ancient Greek world. However, women have not been considered serious participants in economic activities. Their contributions to domestic work are acknowledged and now more frequently highlighted in museum contexts - yet in research, both the economic value of domestic work, and women’s non-domestic work and craft activities have remained less researched than that of their male counterparts.

This paper will collect and analyse material evidence from workshops to sanctuaries and tombs, as well as the sparse literary and epigraphic texts regarding women’s work, in particular in the context of manufacture in ancient Athens, with some excursions to other parts of the Greek world and comparisons with men's working lives. This evidence allows for an exploration of the pathways of work in women’s lives from the Archaic to the Hellenistic periods, and the changes that occurred in these over time. More important, however, is the impact of their activities on the status of women who worked, and vice versa, how their status may have determined what work they could, or had to, take on.

Through comparisons with other time periods in which women’s work fulfilled major roles in their lives, both socio-economically and in their self-identification, this paper will reexamine the scope and impact of women’s work in Athenian society from the Archaic to the Hellenistic periods.