Untimely Women: “Clock Time” and Gender Stereotypes in the Greco-Roman World

In Satire 6, Juvenal’s catalog of negative female stereotypes, an interesting pattern emerges: women are consistently portrayed as “doing time wrong.” They stay out too late, perform tasks too slowly, or become unhealthily attached to their astrological calendars. Timekeeping and temporal regulation are depicted, instead, as a man’s game. Despite the satire’s exaggerations, it captures an idea that people in power have continued to propagate (e.g., in modern-day discussions of “black time” vs. “white time”): namely, that subalterns, including women, are in various ways “untimely” or out of sync with members of the dominant class, who are the true architects and custodians of time.

This paper will critically examine the specific stereotype, recently articulated by Sofie Remijsen,1 that “clock time”—as told in hours by sundials or water clocks—was often coded in Greek- and Latin-speaking environments as distinctly “masculine.” Remijsen’s work focuses on the letters, legal documents, and dinner party invitations included in our extant corpora of Greco- Egyptian documentary papyri. This paper, however, will investigate another source of evidence: references in Greek and Latin literature and private ritual (i.e., “magical”) papyri to female sex workers who use clock time to manage their own work schedules and/or to interfere in the success of their rivals. The paper will contextualize these references by placing them in dialogue with scholarship on the “masculinization” of female sex workers in antiquity, on the connections between clock time and political and intellectual imperialism, and on the problems and complexities that arise from assuming, in any time period, that quantitative modes of timekeeping are inherently “masculine” while qualitative modes are inherently “feminine” or “queer.” As such, this paper engages closely with feminist, queer, post-colonial, and subaltern theories and raises important questions about the roles that clock time can play in constructing, reinforcing, or challenging stereotypes.