Women and the Ancient Economy: Past, Present, and Future

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.

In Aristophanes’ Lysistrata (411 BCE), the titular character rallies the σπερμαγοραιολεκιθολαχανοπώλιδες, encompassing in one word the women who sold grain, pulses, and vegetables in the Athenian agora (Ar. Lys. 457). Female produce vendors appear in Old Comedy as interlocutors and instigators, and while such depictions played for laughs rather than accuracy, these women appear to have been a fixture of the classical marketplace (Ar. Ach. 478; Wasps 497-9; Thesm. 387, 456).

This paper argues that 1) women working in domestic settings were predominantly responsible for the manufacture of the textiles and clothing traded and sold commercially for consumer use in classical Greek cities, including luxury products.

Epigraphic and papyrological evidence demonstrates that women could hold a wide variety of labor roles within the Roman economy. However, their monetary compensation for this work has been widely debated and overshadowed by regional differences. Papyrological texts from Roman Egypt provide the best evidence for real wage rates from the 1st-3rd centuries C.E. but their references to working women are largely limited to contracts for wet nurses.

Feminist approaches to the economy, in the words of Katherine Gibson and Julie Graham, have “focused on the legitimate contribution to economic life made by nonmarket and alternative market transaction, unpaid labor, and noncapitalist economic sites” (Gibson-Graham 2006, 75). I argue that one such type of economic activity—emotional or affective labor—existed in antiquity, and explore its use by sex workers.

There is no shortage of literary evidence concerning the gendered division of labor in the Roman world, with women working primarily inside the home. This naturally excludes them from most discussions of agricultural labor, both in antiquity and today. It is true that, within the already small body of evidence concerning agricultural labor, we have particularly little evidence of the role of women in this field; Scheidel (1995; 1996) rightly refers to the women who worked in ancient agriculture as “The Most Silent Women of Greece and Rome”.