Essay on Mythological Gender Profiling and the Women of Greece

Throughout the course of history, society had stereotyped women, making it merely impossible for a woman to achieve her goals and desires in life. This had weighed them not as equals, and for this, they were given different standards by which to live. At this day and age, and during the ancient Greek times, women have always been treated as second best by biased men, although today’s society has started to understand this inequality better as time progresses further into the future. Even with society becoming more equal for women, females are still treated similar as to time of the ancient Greeks. Women still don’t have as much power as men, are still “blamed” for wrongdoings and thought as untrustworthy, and are still used as “currency”

Women are a very prominent part of the Greek society. Their role has influenced and shaped the Greek society to a very large extent. Women have been shown in many different lights in the Greek works of Odyssey and Iliad which we have covered in our class. The works that I will be citing in this essay, namely Homer’s poems Odyssey and Iliad talk about many prominent women such as Helen of Troy, Penelope and also many other Goddesses. Homer’s poems talk about the various traits of Greek women and portray their characteristics by describing their traits and the events they were involved in. Through this essay, I would like to illustrate how women were treated as objects of desire for

In all of the books that we have read since the beginning of this course most all of them contain the theme, in some fashion, of the degradation and abuse of women. The notion that women are treated unfairly and face cruel conditions is not a new idea and never has been, by looking through these works one can almost put a date to the starting point to the oppression of women. In texts such as The Iliad and Metamorphoses women are used as a means to the male satisfaction, in The Iliad Paris’s mother, Aphrodite gave Paris Helen as a reward. In Metamorphoses Apollo takes Daphne’s transformation and makes it his symbol. The Metamorphoses is a prime example of how in the tales of ancient Greek women having their lives ruined by men.

This nonfiction selection demonstrated and gave an abundance of information on the women of Ancient Greece. The treatment of women at the time varied. I found it engrossing and informative. In the book, it describes how women and men contrasted as well.

To say that Greek mythology subscribes to traditional gender roles would be an understatement. With Greek mythology shaping so much of western literature and society, it is easy to connect the dots between todays perception of femininity and masculinity and that of the Greeks. In Greek society, men and women played separate, but important, roles in the community. Men would go from youth, to warrior, to an old man. In their earliest two stages, they would give their labor and fury to their people, allowing civilizations to thrive. With the life of an adult male being so dangerous, many men never make it to the stage of an old man. For those men who do, they offered little to the society at large.

The epic poem the Iliad by Homer recounts the events the stories of the heroes in the Trojan War and also reveals the views of women in the ancient Greek society. In Homer’s Iliad mortal women are restricted to the domestic sphere, are treated as objects and depicted as destitute without men, women, goddesses especially, are shown as mischievous and cunning.

In the days of ancient Greece there were two types of women, they consisted of mortals and goddesses, there was a big difference between the roles that they would play and how they were viewed by the Greeks and the Gods. The stories and myths that are associated with women tell us a lot more about the preoccupations of Greek men than they do the about the opinions and imaginations of Greek women. Women were the givers of life in an age when the processes of conception, fertility and childbirth were still deeply mysterious and little understood. As a result, many of the mythical stories about women manifest signs of a deep male anxiety about feminine power.

To set the tone for how women were perceived in ancient Greece, we first turn to the Greek

The Odyssey begins by describing Odysseus, a “man of twists and turns” (Homer 1996: 1) showing that this book is focused on the men, rather than the women. Shortly after, the first description of any womanly figure is “bewitching” (Homer 1996: 2), which shows that as the epic progresses, the description of most female adversaries would be negative. In Hippolytus, Aphrodite begins by saying that she “treats well who revere her power” but “trips up those who are proud (averse) to her” (Euripides 2001: 2). This starts the play by painting women as vengeful and emotional. The focus on the men rather than the women, shows Ancient Greece’s view of women as subordinate and of lesser importance, due to their unpredictability and seduction. This theme of submission to men gives insight on how Ancient Greek Society treated women. In this essay I will argue that the theme of commitment plays an influential role in decision-making processes, both rational and irrational, leading to the premise of women being only sexual objects in Ancient Greece, rather than companions for life. Ultimately, I will show how the protection of the husband’s reputation, is a task that women owe to the man. Taking this into account, the monsters, mortals or Gods, that made their appearances in the texts, were primarily women, which shows the Greek’s view of women to be the seducers and the troublemakers, rather than always pure beings with good intentions. Thus I will prove, that in Ancient Greece, women’s

A variety of online articles, web-books, and print books discuss either Greek mythology or Egyptian mythology, but out of the sources only one focuses on the actual roles that women play in Greek mythology, but not Egyptian mythology. Also, none of the other sources compared the two mythologies. This paper explains that Greek mythology and Egyptian mythology share similarities and differences because the different gender roles of their myths.

Misogynistic is how we can describe the thought of early Western civilized culture. We find this evident in literatures from ancient history. However, ancient culture did not set their practice of misogyny into stone. There are some exceptional cases in the famous epic poems, the Epic of Gilgamesh of the Sumerians and Akkadians and the Odyssey from Homer of the Greeks. We all can agree that these epic poems or at most the authors did not view women with our modern perspective – equality among gender. However, we cannot deny that female characters helped set the path of the epic heroes’ journey to their goals. In these epic poems, women are portrayed as figures and themes of knowledge, motherhood, seduction. These themes and figures are shaped through interaction between women and heroes.

Is femininity in mythology? Yes because there is a division between men and women in mythology. Biology tells us that we are two different people. Men and women see the world in different ways. Women are passive, intuitive, submissive, and subjective. Women value love, communication, beauty, and relationships. Men are aggressive, rational, dominant, and objective and they value power, competency, efficiency, and achievement. The ways we see the world are different because we are either man or women. We are also similar as well as different. This paper will discuss the how women/goddess are viewed in the works of “Works and Days”, “Theogony” and “Hymn to Demeter.” And see that these women/goddess similar to real life women.

Homer’s The Iliad encapsulates the contradictory presentations of the female archetype, while also demonstrating their effect on the male gender. Many factors fuel the male thirst for glory and honor, which also contributes to the notion of women accessorizing these qualities. Although the majority of the women shown in the poem are regarded as weak and servile characters, Hera defies this label and uses her power of seduction to establish control. However, in the mortal world this is not common, and women are traded as war prizes. Homer exemplifies this concept through Chryseis and Briseis, and thus displays the powerless side of women. Through Hera, and the importance of war prizes in the poem, women are depicted as objects of ruin,

Written thousands of years ago, Homer’s The Iliad provides extensive insight into the way the world worked in ancient Greek society. Including mortal men, mortal women, and immortal Greek gods, The Iliad depicts a male-controlled society in which the mortal women are viewed as nothing more than possessions. Women are most commonly seen as wives, mothers, and homemaker, whereas men take the role as husband, father, earner, and guardian. There are very few mortal women portrayed as significant however, the female goddesses appear to have greater supremacy than some male characters.

Athenian women were the subjects of bias in day-to-day life. A women’s property was controlled by her father until she entered an arranged marriage, usually at the age of fourteen. Her husband would then “supervise” her and that was because it was “believed that a woman could not act independently”(