The time has come for this Harpy to begin her summer courses as she reaches slowly but surely for her college degree, and so it was with great eagerness that I went to my first summer class two days ago. The course material looks wonderful and challenging, and the professor has set a rigorous pace at which I’ll be expected to learn about the course’s focus: Greek tragedies written by Sophocles, Euripides, and Aeschylus. Despite the fact that the syllabus calls for the midterm exam to be on my birthday next month, everything seemed to be going really well during the two-hour class.
Then the professor started talking about Athenian democracy and how everyone was allowed to participate. Except that’s not the way it was. I raised my hand and politely asked, “were women able to vote?” The professor told me that was a good question and he didn’t know. After checking it when I got home, it turned out my supposition was right and that women indeed were not allowed to vote. Upon reflection, it really bothered me that my professor immediately said everyone was able to participate in Athenian democracy when he candidly admitted a moment later that he was unsure if that included women.
It might appear to be such a little thing, just a minor oversight. But it felt a bit more significant than that for me. I have the class again tonight and I’m planning to tell my professor that, in fact, the universal nature of Athenian democracy was not so universal after all, as it excluded half the city-state’s population. Maybe he won’t really think it to be that important; maybe he will. Either way, it’s these “minor oversights” that are sometimes the most irksome of all.
agreed, although I’m sort of stunned that he, as a Professor, didn’t know that as it’s a pretty well known fact about Athenian society – it says rather a lot about what people can take for granted.
Is it a little thing? Yes. But is it a little thing worth noting and pointing out? Yes.
Instead of just dismissing it, your prof should be looking in to why women couldn’t vote– is it because its assumed that a married couple is one unit, and all women were married off before the age of voting even kicked in? Or is it because women were considered less than men, and if so, in what specific ways? These ideas are worth exploring and talking about, especially in a culture that is so emulated and idealized by our own.
Also, slaves? And children of foreign men and Athenian non-alien resident women? I mean, great, direct democracy, but “everyone” is not the word to use in this context. I guess “everyone” means privileged men to this particular privileged (at least in terms of education; you haven’t mentioned any other characteristics but I’m imagining he’s privileged in other ways, given this remark) man. Surprise!
Unfortunately, summer classes tend not to be taught by the best and brightest in the department. I remember a world religions class (required for all religion majors) in which the professor taught that Christianity was the truest of religions (um, Establishment Clause violation? Definitely, as I went to a state school) and was astonishingly misinformed about the other four “major” world religions. His understanding of Islam was particularly woeful. I hope your class gets better, but I’m not optimistic given my experience.
I don’t think this is a minor issue at all. Maybe each separate case in isolation but the problem is it happens all the time.
I recently took a course for young faculty at my uni. We were about 65% women. The d00d giving a session about leadership used examples of good leadership, both historic and contemporary. 100 % of the examples were – of course – about male leaders. When I pointed that out to him after the lecture he said he hadn’t even thought about it, was thoroughly embarrassed and happy that I mentioned it.
Last night was the start of my own summer class, and I too was bothered by a “little thing.”
The teacher (can’t be older than I am) constantly uses male pronouns to refer to non-human things (like line segments, exponents, etc.), in addition to words like “guy” and “fellow.”
i.e. “Is this fellow a function?”
“This guy has the coordinates (2,1).”
And when he uses people’s names to represent things, the names are exclusively male.
He didn’t know that? Even I know that women couldn’t vote in ancient Athens, and I’m not teaching a class on Athenian literature. Typical male establishment privilege.
Reminds me of when my aunt went to a conference where Pulitzer-winning historian David McCullough was the guest speaker. A woman in the audience asked him why he didn’t write about any of the women in colonial America and he replied, “There weren’t any women’s stories that were really significant to the founding of our country.” My aunt wanted to throttle him. But same thing–white male establishment privilege. If it’s not about powerful white males, it can’t possibly be significant.
@kithkin: This professor is actually part of the standing faculty, not solely a summer term professor. Except for that bit, he seems in excellent command of the literary material.
@emilyanne: When I asked the question, two of my female classmates shot me grateful looks, like they had been wondering the same thing. And I remember learning about the “universal” nature of Athenian democracy in ninth grade! I just asked because I wondered if maybe I was remembering wrong. Turns out I wasn’t.
@SarahMC: Language matters!
Ouch. The least he could have done was read the Wikipedia page on ancient Athens half an hour before class.
Weird, I remember a discussion in middle school about whether it was better to be a woman in ancient Athens or ancient Sparta. It was pretty much split along the lines of budding feminists for Sparta and Athens for the the remainder.
We start classes on Monday, and I cannot wait!! I’ve been going to school soooo long that I get a little crazy when there is no school to go to.
Oh my god SarahMC, out of the frying pan into the fire with that econ dept. These are the wages of entering a male dominated field. Stay strong!
SOALG, I am absolutely shocked that a classics professor wouldn’t have this rudimentary understanding of Greek culture! Thank god you pointed it out to him, maybe he’ll realize he has to prepare slightly better for class.
Math department with this one, JD. Same dif.
It’s too bad you’re class isn’t reading Lysistrata, which would at least require minimal knowledge of sexual disparities in Ancient Greece on the part of your professor. If you haven’t read it, I highly recommend it. Especially once you’re enmeshed in other Athenian dramas.
I hope the rest of the class goes well, though. I loved my classics courses.
Oh, it also bothers me when people talk about ‘direct democracy’ in Athens… or that the concept of democracy started in Athens, when clearly, women, slaves, and foreigners were excluded. It also bothers me when people talk about the Founding Fathers being all for equality and freedom. If you think about it, we didn’t start to have real democracy in the USA before the civil rights movement in the 60s. Only 40+ years. *sigh*
Sarah of a lesser, that’s good to know. I imagine in new york, fewer professors take off for warmer climes in the summer, since NYC is such a good place to live (so I’m told).
That bit about Daniel McCullough is disgraceful. He’s papakithkin’s favorite author, so I was thinking of buying one of his books. No more!
I believe it was only free born Athenian men over 30 who were allowed to vote. I am shocked that a professor doesn’t know something that significant!
@Becky: Oh, that is so dispiriting to hear about McCullough because I really do love his books! Ugh. Trust no one.
@vertigo: Yeah, it’s one of those things we look at through rose-colored glasses. America’s “founding fathers” looked to Athenian democracy as an inspiration, ergo it must be completely awesome!
yeah, that totally isn’t a little thing, and I’m glad you spoke up.
the sad thing is that it’s not always the not-so-great professors who conveniently embrace sexist thinking…
I once took a brain & language class, in which the *official* term for how an adult talks to a child is Motherese. and my professor was brilliant AND a woman.
Another in agreement here… this is NOT a little thing. “Everyone” is translated all too often as “Every (privileged) Man”. There is a huge difference between participation for all and participation for half. And when people point out slaves and foreigners, that number drops well below half!
I have to say though, it does sound like he felt a bit embarassed by his ignorance (and he should be!). He just needed a fearless harpy to call him on his crap, and hopefully he won’t make the same mistake again. Way to go, SOALG!!
@s.o.l.a.g & kithkin: No kidding…I was so disillusioned when my aunt told me that about McCullough. I love his books and he always comes across as so charming and avuncular in interviews. But he is, after all, a man–and historian–of his generation, and those men simply never learned to see women or women’s experiences as important. I’d like to think that really smart people, by virtue of being really smart, are therefore also enlightened about gender issues, but, alas, not always.
I’ll echo everyone else’s sentiments about how that’s concerning both politically and in terms of this guy’s qualifications as a historian. The best history class I ever had was AP Euro in high school, where the bulk of the lectures were about what privileged white men were doing at a given time, but every few days we’d stop and look at everyone else. We read articles about home and family structure, relative cost of staples compared to income in different social classes, petitions from peasants to the king…I left that class feeling like I had learned something about the history of the people as well as the history of the ideas. I’ve never had another history course like it.
Wow, I learned that in grade 11 world history.
I teach freshman English, and the rhetoric section of our textbook, taken from “Ancient Rhetorics for Contemporary Students,” Fourth Edition by Sharon Crowley and Debra Hawhee, has this to say:
“In the Athenian political system, citizenship was determined by birthright and thus was awarded to any adult male who could establish his Athenian heritage, whether he was wealthy or not, aristocratic or not. These were very inclusive requirements for the time, even though they excluded the bulk of the population who were women, foreign-born men, or slaves.”
And later, “as many as five hundred or more citizens could be expected to attend and vote in the Assembly when it was in session.”
So, yes, it is a very important point, not minor at all. Only a small percentage of people were considered citizens in Athens, and only these people had a voice. Moreover, it would be worth looking into the daily lives of women, servants, and slaves as it correlates to the ability of Athenian men to sit around all day on hills wearing togas coming up with things like philosophy, democracy, and the mathematical proportions of beauty. The undervalued work of these lower-class people propped up the hierarchical system, much as it does today.
Googling for population statistics in ancient Athens gave this result:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/ancient/greeks/greekdemocracy_03.shtml
This might be a nice article to share with your class or other students, though the numbers are a bit different that what I presented above, claiming about 250,000 for total population, 30,000 as eligible citizens, and 5,000 for participating citizens.
Studying the ways these inequalities have changed and stayed the same is pretty fascinating to me. Great post–I’m so glad you spoke up!
Makes me appreciate my Western Civ class this past year. Most of my fellow students complained that we were reading “too much” about women and non-white people, but I was glad. I feel like everything else I read (especially since I’m an English major) is about the white male experience. Gimme some Mary Wollestoncraft and Aphra Behn any day!
@vegkitty: My lit professors at this school have been unfailingly awesome in presenting diverse writers to the students. My “history of the novel” course this spring had two books by Dead White Guys, two by women, one by an African-American author, and one by an Indian author. Last fall’s course included a post-colonial reinterpretation of Robinson Crusoe, as well as a book by Reinaldo Arenas who spent time in a Cuban prison for homosexuality.
Nerd alert – Ok, I’m a political theorist, not an historian, but wow, that is a pretty astonishing lacuna on the part of the professor.
That said, my impression is that until fairly recently, scholars’ knowledge of the actual institutions of Athenian democracy was pretty limited–a number of the most famous sources (e.g. Aristotle & Plato) were by authors who were quite *hostile* to democracy. Moreover, the institutions themselves changed both after restorations from tyranny and in the ordinary course of things.
That said, my understanding is that Mogen Hansen’s “Athenian Democracy in the Age of Demosthenes” represents the current gold standard; that’s what I was told to use, at any rate. Based on that, at least in the later period:
Approx. 30k eligible citizens (e.g. adult “native” or naturalized males); standards fluctuated as the population rose and fell.
The Assembly–actually more of an executive than legislative body, concerned mostly with specific decrees and foreign affairs, tho it had more power in earlier times–was open to citizens starting at age 20, after they’d completed the 2-years military service (but they were on “reserve” till almost 60), but only (the first) 6000 could take part on any given day.
The People’s Courts were staffed only by citizens age 30+ (~20k); these had tons of power, because they were in charge of overseeing the magistrates, and judging accusations of corruption, unconstitutionality, and the like. They were empaneled in large juries; 500-2000 for important cases.
The same pool of age 30+ citizens was drawn from, in similarly large panels, to decide on whether new laws would be passed.
The agenda-setting Council was picked by lot, from that same group of older citizens. Most magistrates, same, though all were thoroughly vetted by the Courts.
The American founders–and most political theorists of the Enlightenment–actually saw Athens as a *cautionary* example; “democracy” was a dirty word until the 19th century, associated with mob rule and demagogues. They preferred Rome and its elite-dominated “mixed constitution.”
Anyway. In a lot of ways, yes, Athens was more exclusionary than modern constitutional democracies–but it was also much *more* alert to the dangers of elite dominance. Hence selection by lot, mandatory review of magistrates’ performance, and an emphasis on participation by the poor (by paying them to). Think about how every current Senator (except maybe Clinton’s new replacement?–for now) is a multimillionaire; or Larry Bartels’ research on how representatives are responsive only to their more-wealthy constituents.
Ack ok need to actually get work done. But I do recommend the Hansen book; it’s dry in style but full of interesting stuff.
I find it shocking that he, as a classics professor, didn’t know that. And if I’m not mistaken, there were a lot of men (slaves) who couldn’t vote either.
Women are still shockingly marginalized in a lot of academic work, it drives me crazy.
@SarahMC: he uses the male pronoun to refer to COORDINATES??? How utterly odd…
@Endora: And when X ends up intersecting Y, you have a gay porn story.
This man is a moron. The hot new trend in classics is to study things from the perspective of the marginalized, particularly women. Any classicist worth his salt knows that Greek and Roman society was dripping with racism and misogyny. We don’t study the classics because we value this, but because we are in awe of the influence these cultures have had upon our own, both positive and negative. Analyses of gender roles and cultural interactions permeate the current scholarship. How this guy could manage to become a professor without being aware of this baffles me. He must live in a really deep hole.
Endora, he is possibly the dorkiest person I’ve ever come across. It’s basically three hours of being embarassed on his behalf.
OK, so we have this guy over here, right? And then this fella, the y, is over here… Now, would we call him a function?
The American founders–and most political theorists of the Enlightenment–actually saw Athens as a *cautionary* example; “democracy” was a dirty word until the 19th century, associated with mob rule and demagogues. They preferred Rome and its elite-dominated “mixed constitution.”
That is funny, as even after the US opened the floor to non-landowners, it followed the Roman system of getting the rabble drunk so they’d vote for you.
I’m a Classics major, and the thought of anyone teaching anything related to Classics not knowing that women (and slaves, and metics) couldn’t vote in Athens completely boggles my mind. But teaching Athenian tragedy in particular…I really don’t think it can be studied or understood without at least a passing acknowledgment of the social and political context. Medea, for example, has issues about social and political rights of women and foreigners all over it (or Electra, or as above, the Lysistrata, or, or, or…).
Please, please include the fact he didn’t know this in your course evaluation.
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Add me to the list of people who are totally shocked that a person could become a professor teaching about ancient Greece without knowing this.
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