Anna Henderson

2-19-02

Battle for Power

Typically in Athenian society, women took care of the things in the household while men, although still retaining the final say over matters of the household, focused most of their attention on the world outside the home. In the plays Assemblywomen and Lysistrata, Aristophanes explores roles of men and women in society, specifically what would happen if women were to take on the roles of men. Looking at these two plays about Athenian society as metaphors for marital life, it shows that men and women were incapable of having balanced power in their relationships. In both of these plays, the men were unable to keep their own sense of power when the women took over politics, and they eventually moved into the submissive role of women. In Lysistrata, the women used their seduction to gain power. Similarly, in Assemblywomen, the women came into power through deception and clever planning. This paper explores why women rarely stepped up to take power; how they would gain power when they would step up to claim it; and how the men would respond once confronted with a woman in power. This all serves to show that in Athens, a marriage of man and woman could not exist with mutuality of power – rather, one (typically the man) would dominate, while the other (typically the woman) took the submissive role.

Throughout both Lysistrata and Assemblywomen, both the men and women were convinced, to varying degrees, that the women were incapable of handling any kind of authority or challenging task. In fact, only the dominant, leader women (Lysistrata and Praxagora) of the two plays had enough confidence to handle a position of power. These women have been brought up in a society that tells them they are not good enough to do anything but serve a man. This message has been enforced in the minds of these women until they even preach the message to each other. The tone is set when Lysistrata tells her friend Kalonike about her plan to stop the war, “(My idea is) smart enough that the salvation of all Greece lies in the women’s hands!” to which Kalonike replies, “In the women’s hands? That’s hardly reassuring!” (Lysistrata, ln. 29-31). One of the first lines of a play primarily about women saving the city from war by cunning and supporting each other enforces the message that women aren’t capable. This doubt in their abilities continues also into Assemblywomen when a woman asks, “But how can a congregation of women, with women’s minds, expect to address the people?” (Assemblywomen, ln. 101-102). These women have been taught that they are most valuable for marriage as empty vessels, and are then to retain only what their husbands teach them. Women are not valued for themselves, but rather for the wives that they make for their husbands (Assemblywomen, ln. 490-491). It is no wonder that these women are so hesitant to step out and lead (in marriage as well as the polis), as they have been continually told that they are incapable.

Since the women must fight against such deep-seated voices of discouragement, when the women do take charge, it is truly an impressive operation. Lysistrata and Praxagora, the leaders of the two respective revolutions, call the women together with fool-proof plans that work just as expected. The most important theme of these plans is that the women come together as a group to accomplish them. Even though there is one primary leader, they all have a voice and are integrally important. For instance, in Assemblywomen, they would not have been able to pass the motion to have women in charge had not women from all different areas stolen their husband’s clothes and shown up early to flood the Assembly with voters in favor of their proposal. Similarly, in Lysistrata, the sex strike would not have succeeded had not all the women in both Athens and Sparta refrained from being with their husbands. Although the women didn’t want to refrain from sex, they honored the opinion of the two women in favor of it and followed them. This idea of community appeared in Athenian society in the Thesmophoria meetings. This is where the women were able to drink and enjoy themselves with each other – the counterpoint to the men’s Assembly. In contrast, nowhere does there seem to be a place for both men and women to come together as married couples and enjoy each other – it is even improper for women to go out socializing with their husbands. This lack of interaction between the two sexes must have only furthered the division between the dominant males and their submissive wives, who are only valuable when they’re indoors. In Lysistrata, Kinesias, one of the husbands, is angry at his wife saying, “You know you’e let our house, your things and mine, become an utter mess?” (Lysistrata, ln. 919-920). This indicates that the women were indeed in charge of caring for the household, however, in all things the women had to defer to their husbands ultimately. Therefore, this again supports the division of power in which the wife has token power over the house, yet the husband controls the wife and, by extension, the house she cares for as well as his world outside the home.

Once the women in the two plays do get control over the polis, the men are at a loss as to how to proceed. In Lysistrata specifically, they first try to regain power. When this attempt fails, however, they end up taking on the role of women themselves. Lysistrata shows the men at first trying to assert their position as men. They arrive at the Acropolis with flaming logs to burn down the doors, but cannot withstand the smoke and end up with tears streaming down their faces as their women douse their logs with pails of water. The men next attempt threats at violence and then actually exert violence. Finally, their desire for sex becomes so great that they move into the stereotypically female role at the time, namely that their insatiable sexual appetites make them unable to control themselves for want of sex. Incapable of withstanding their desire, the men come in droves to the Acropolis after less than a week begging for their wives to sleep with them. They are a pitiful group, described as bent over double from their unsatisfied desire (Lysistrata, ln. 1049). In this deplorable state, the men finally relinquish any affect of power in the situation as they say, “A woman’s harder to conquer than any beast, than fire, and no panther is quite so ferocious” (Lysistrata, ln. 1058-1059). From that point in the play on, the men fully defer to the women. Not soon after, the Spartans and Athenians decide to do whatever it takes to be able to have sex again, including make peace with each other. The first thing they suggest before beginning negotiations is to “invite Lysistrata to our meeting, since she’s the only one who can settle our differences” (Lysistrata, ln. 1147-1148). Here again, men have given up all ability to lead because the women have fully overcome them. Using this broader political picture as a metaphor for marriage, it shows that male-female relationships in Athens were designed for one of the two sexes to have full power over the other, and equality in power is virtually impossible in this society. This was indicated in the relationship between Myrrhine and Kinesias, a couple in Lysistrata. Although Kinesias assumedly had all the power in the relationship before the women’s uprising (as implied by his confident demand for it), the power Kinesias tries to exert when he first arrived at the Acropolis is completely stripped away as Myrrhine uses her seductiveness to drive him, panicked, to agree to anything she desires.

This imbalance of power between man and wife for the most part seems to have remained unchallenged in the typical Athenian household. The women took care of the house, while the men retained the upper hand over the wife, herself (and therefore the household that she took care of), and the business outside the house. Aristophanes’ plays brought this power imbalance to the open, however, by exploring what would happen if women took the initiative to claim the dominant rold in society. The women, when able to successfully overcome the men and take power in the city, left the men with no choice but to either fight to regain the power, as they attempted to do in Lysistrata, or succumb to the women’s plans, as they did in both Assemblywomen and, eventually, Lysistrata. In relinquishing their power to women, the men forfeited their masculinity and became stereotypically feminine while the women also forfeited their gender norms to stay in power. Athenian unions, therefore, subsisted on a constant inequality of power kept carefully balanced by each partner staying in their designated role in the marriage – the husband the strong moneymaker living outside of the house, the wife the submissive homemaker.