• TranscendentalEmpire@lemm.ee
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    3 months ago

    But Spartan women weren’t that bad off, compared to other places in antiquity

    We also white wash Spartan history pretty dramatically. Yes, Spartan women who were citizens were better off than their Athenian counterparts. However, that’s not saying much when you consider spartan citizens were a fraction of the population of Sparta.

    The vast majority of women in Sparta were helots, and were subject to chattel slavery. I don’t think you can claim that Spartans cared about gender equality when they had an entire social class made up of the bastards produced by raping their slaves.

    • Dasus@lemmy.world
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      3 months ago

      Oh yeah, they weren’t like democratic utopias, lol.

      The point being that Sparta was as shit as anything in history, but they were a bit less discriminatory towards women. Probably because they weren’t really as posessive of them as many other cultures. For… some reason.

      On the night of the wedding, the bride would have her hair cut short and be dressed in a man’s cloak and sandals. The bride appeared dressed like a man or a young boy to be perceived as less threatening to her husband.

      In Sparta […] the cropping of the bride’s hair and transvestism likely aimed to transform her temporarily into an adolescent Spartan boy – a less threatening figure to the groom, who probably had made his own transition to adulthood via a close emotional and sexual relationship with an older male and was now in the position to sexually initiate other boys into Spartan society