Immigrant Women in Athens

Rebecca Kennedy is Assistant Professor in the Department of Classics at Denison University, USA. She is author of Athena's Justice: Athena, Athens, and the Concept of Justice in Greek Tragedy (2009) and co-author of Race and Ethnicity in the Classical World: An Anthology of Primary Sources in Translation (2013).

Many of the women whose names are known to history from Classical Athens were metics or immigrants, linked in the literature with assumptions of being 'sexually exploitable.' Despite recent scholarship on women in Athens beyond notions of the 'citizen wife' and the 'common prostitute,' the scholarship on women, both citizen and foreign, is focused almost exclusively on women in the reproductive and sexual economy of the city. This book contributes to two important aspects of the history of life in 5th century Athens: it explores our knowledge of metics, a little-researched group, and contributes to the study if women in antiquity, which has traditionally divided women socially between citizen-wives and everyone else. Author Rebecca Kennedy critiques the traditional approach to the study of women through an examination of primary literature on non-citizen women in the Classical period. This leading-edge volume advances the study of women beyond their sexual status and breaks down the ideological constraints that both Victorians and feminist scholars reacting to them have historically relied upon throughout the study of women in antiquity.

Introduction 1. Metic Women, Citizenship, and Marriage in Athenian Law 2. The Ideology of the Metic Woman 3. Aspasia, Athenian Citizen Elites, and the Myth of the Courtesan 4. The Dangers of the Big City 5. Working Women, not 'Working Girls'