Katherine Harrington (Emory University)
One of the many devasting effects of the Covid-19 pandemic was the startlingly higher rates at which women left the workforce than men. The biggest increase in women leaving the workforce occurred in September 2020, when 863,000 women left the workforce, compared to 168,000 men (Casella). This disparity brought to public attention some of the gendered disparities in labor that still persist in American society; in September 2020, the primary driver was childcare and online schooling. Even before the pandemic, studies had noted the comparatively higher rates at which women who were partnered with men were responsible for housework, childcare, care for elderly relatives, and various other forms of unpaid labor in domestic settings (e.g., Ruppanner and Maume; Treas and Tsuio). Few modern models of the economy take into account this unpaid labor, however.
Because scholarship on the ancient economy is heavily influenced by work on the modern economy, similar blind spots exist in our approaches to the ancient Greek world. Women’s work, in most accounts of the ancient Greek world, consisted largely of domestic activities such as childcare, weaving, and food preparation. Such labor, done without pay and at home, has typically been treated as mere background noise, economically unimportant and largely unworthy of analysis. Similarly, women’s labor for the market economy has been undervalued and often ignored. Although in the literary and epigraphic record, women of various social statuses worked in numerous professions, including retail, foodservice, midwifery, and tavern keeping, synthetic accounts of the ancient Greek economy often group women’s labor into a single section, while men’s labor is curiously unmarked by gender.
This paper argues for a reconceptualization of how we think about the ancient economy, inspired by the work of Whittle, who has argued that women’s unpaid labor must be considered economically important, even if it does not generate income. When women in the household complete tasks which would otherwise need to be hired out, this saves the household money. Further, most accounts of the ancient economy ignore the ways in which women’s domestic labor can be scaled up or hired out as necessary in times of economic necessity or in an entrepreneurial fashion. Ultimately, I argue that archaeological evidence can provide vital evidence of how women’s labor functioned. I will explore this argument using a case study of the textile industry in the Classical and early Hellenistic periods in mainland Greece and Crete, with a special focus on Athens, Olynthos, and Nisi-Eleutherna.