An arduous citizenship for women

Abstract

SUMMARY In this article, Maria Teresa Guerra Medici examines the historical and philosophical arguments advanced for the exclusion of women from exercising rights of citizenship in European society. This exclusion can be traced back to the beginnings of the formation of urban communities, as illustrated in the mythology about the founding of Athens. All the traditional sources have a powerful mysogynist content, suggesting that women, by their nature, not only lack the capacities needed for participating in public affairs, but, in the Pandora myths, were actually responsible for many of the negative forces at work in society. The goddess Athena herself is ascribed masculine qualities related to her creation out of the head of Zeus. Greek culture came to distinguish the difference between nature and culture, in which females were relegated to the former and culture was exclusively masculine. The article then traces how these attitudes developed and were modified in Roman and then Christian culture. Rome did recognize the historical contribution of some outstanding women, but still excluded them by law from public life as the weaker sex, and confined them to a domestic role within the family, under a patriarchal head. In the Christian era, the role of Eve, held responsible for the fall from Grace of mankind, and the emphasis on all females being properly kept under male guardianship in a patriarchal social order were used to justify the continued denial of rights of participation to females, and continued their limitation to the domestic sphere. Even the potentially egalitarian implications of the transition of citizens into subjects of the emerging monarchial states were largely negated by the continuing patriarchal model of lawful authority, in which women were represented by their appropriate male guardian in public matters.