标题: 阅读背景知识共享：The most silent women of Greece and Rome [打印本页] 作者: s 时间: 2010-12-1 21:03 标题: 阅读背景知识共享：The most silent women of Greece and Rome
The most silent women of Greece and Rome: rural labourand women's life in the ancient world
Introduction
Over the lasttwenty years, the study of the women of the Greek and Roman world hasexperienced a boom that, if it is judged by the sheer output of relevantpublications, dwarfs any other recent innovations and redirections in the fieldof ancient history. In view of the ongoing proliferation of studies on thistopic, I can only hope that my present paper not only adds to the bulk but alsoa little to the stock (to heed Laurence Sterne's lament over the historian'sbusiness) in that it seeks to redress an imbalance that informs most previousresearch on women's life in classical antiquity. In short, the large majorityof studies in this particular field concentrate on urban environments and, as aconsequence, give undue prominence to a certain segment, actually a minoritygroup in terms of quantity, of ancient society. Needless to say, however, that,given the nature of our sources, anything else than this biased focus wouldhave been a big surprise and probably impossible to achieve. Even so, the busystudy of those layers of ancient society that produced, or caught the eye of,the authors of Greek and Roman literature, inscriptions, papyri, andcoin-legends, can be fully vindicated only when the more shadowy and obscureregions of ancient history are not allowed to be passed over in completesilence. The contribution of women to ancient agriculture is an issue thatfalls squarely within that latter, underprivileged category of subjects. In herintroduction to a collection of essays on new methodological approaches to thestudy of women in antiquity, Marilyn Skinner pointed out that 'Real women, likeother muted groups, are not to be found so much in the explicit text of thehistorical record as in its gaps and silences - a circumstance that requiresthe application of research methods based largely upon controlledinference'.(2) This procedure, if any, in combination with an assessment ofwhat little information can be gleaned from the ancient documentation itself,may constitute the only meaningful approach to the problem of women'sinvolvement in ancient agriculture. In the following, after a brief look atsome of the traditional references, I will try to set up a rough framework foran interpretation of both the comments and the silences of the ancient sourcesby putting this issue into a comparative perspective and by singling out someof the main factors that would have affected the work and life of women in thecountryside. A survey of the available ancient evidence will then form thesecond part of my paper.
Before that,however, it seems only fair not to dodge a very basic query: is it really worthtrying? As will soon become clear, this question is unfortunately neither asfacetious nor as redundant as it might at first appear. In her recent valiantattempt to study the daily life of the unfree, freed, and unprivileged freebornpopulace of the ancient city of Rome by means of the occupational inscriptions,Sandra Joshel treats her audience to an introductory chapter ominously entitled`Listening to Silence'.(3) In this, she sets out to tackle the complex of`problems in epistemology of muted groups', which, in essence, boils down tothe single problem of how to come up with anything meaningful about groups ofpeople that have hardly left any traces in the historical record outside thesombre realm of funerary epigraphy. In a way, trying to study women'sparticipation in ancient agriculture amounts to redoingJoshel's study withoutinscriptions. Moreover, any attempt to fill up the void with inferences derivedfrom comparative material immediately raises two vexing questions. What is theuse (and indeed the very nature) of comparisons when far too little is knownabout one of the two things to be compared? And on what criteria are we to baseour choice of comparative evidence and our judgement of its representativevalue? The failure to provide a satisfactory answer to the first of thesequestions virtually rules out the application of two of the three major typesof the comparative method, namely parallel demonstration, in which two or moresimilar cases are taken to validate a hypothesis, and also contrast ofcontexts, which can help to elucidate the peculiarities of each case.(4) Thesecond question will remind us of some critical issues of geographical andchronological homogeneity: can the Mediterranean be regarded as one single'culture area', and which changes may have occurred between antiquity and more recent,better documented periods?(5) Given the broad spectrum of topographical andclimatic conditions, settlement patterns, and social, political, and legalstructures in what is usually lumped together under the heading of`Graeco-Roman world', considerable diversity in women's employment in rurallabour as well as at least occasional long-term change must almost be taken forgranted. For this reason alone, any attempt at interpretation that goes beyondthe isolated spots in space and time on which our sources happen to throw somelight can only result in either banal truisms or unwarranted generalizations.Inevitably, all I can reasonably hope to do in the following sections is tomaintain an uneasy balance between these two equally unpalatable disappointments.
Thus, again,why should we stick to this subject? First of all, it is not only the annoyingneglect of this topic in previous scholarship that would eo ipso oblige us totake a closer look.(6) Rather, it is the fact that a very substantial part ofall the people who ever inhabited the ancient Mediterranean -- somewhere in theregion of twenty percent of the entire population (if we take infant and childmortality into account), or several hundreds of millions of individuals(7) --would have been adult women living on the land that should alert us to theintrinsic vastness of an issue that we generously allow ourselves to ignore.What is more, Ester Boserup and Jack Goody, among others, have argued thatcontrasts beween different types of agriculture, above all between hoe andplough culture, do not only bear on the extent to which the marrying of womenis controlled by their male kin but also correspond to significant variationsin the relative importance of women's participation in agriculture.(8) Sincethe economic role of women profoundly affects their status and what might becalled their personal freedom -- women bearing a large part of outdoor work inmore egalitarian communities based on hoe cultivation, but tending to be moresecluded in the home and largely occupied in the domestic sphere inenvironments characterized by male-dominated plough farming(9) -- the extent towhich Greek and Roman women were involved in field work and other outdoor tasksis, in principle at least, of considerable interest for any appraisal of theirgeneral position in the family and in society. Regardless of their actualcontribution to the household economy, the degree of visibility or invisibilityof women ensuing from the physical location of their daily work could likelyhave been a factor in shaping both their position within their own family andtheir relations with and access to the outer world. We may even go as far as tosuspect a link between the contribution of women to more readily acknowledgedand respected economic activities such as rural work out of doors, as opposedto domestic work and child rearing, and the amount of food and health careallocated to them. It is true that we have to make
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