It is important to note that while there are many statues and reliefs of pregnant women and birthing scenes from ancient Egypt, very little artwork depicting pregnancy has been found dating back to Classical Greece. In the few instances that pregnancy was represented in art, it was mainly in relation to death. An Attic grave relief made of pentelic marble dating back to 330 BCE shows a woman dying in childbirth surrounded by a female mourner, an old nurse, and a servant (original version).
[xviii] The nurse holds the woman’s hand while the servant supports her weight as she leans on what appears to be a couch. The word “daughter” is inscribed above the dying women. It can be assumed that the purpose of this grave relief was to pay homage to this woman in her role as “daughter” not as an almost mother. While there is evidence of childbirth, the focus of the scene is on the sadness founded on the death of this daughter, not her unborn child. Although pregnancy is somewhat discussed in this piece, it is only because of its association with the dead; it is not honored or celebrated here or in most other Classical Greek art.
The lack of pregnancy-related artifacts suggests that Greeks might have viewed feminine health issues to be private and, much like women, as entities to be confined to the oikos. The restriction of women to the domestic sphere is evident in the requirement of a kurios and the barring of women from economic and political activities. This notion that women belonged exclusively to the home could have affected the Greek approach to women’s health: medical information concerning women was not to be shared outside immediate family and certainly not in a public place. These principles would have prevented artists from portraying parturition scenes, or, at the very least, prevented the distribution of such artworks. Although pregnancy afforded Greek women many freedoms, the limited representation of it in artwork is a reminder of the immense social constraint placed on women. It is probable that ancient Greek society reduced the number of references made to a woman’s ideological power through the forgoing of gynecologically themed artwork.
Ultimately, it can be concluded that pregnancy played a pivotal role in determining a woman’s access to ideological power in ancient Egypt and Greece. On the other hand, political, legal, and economic institutions controlled a non-pregnant woman’s access to power in these societies. In Egypt, the male-centric view on conception diminished a woman’s political, economic, and sexual power once she was pregnant. However, in Greece, due to the association of females with fertility, pregnancy increased a woman’s ideological power, thereby allowing women to gain social worth and status. From this, it can be determined that that the effect of pregnancy on women’s power in the ancient world is solely determined by cultural factors such as religious myths and customs.
Endnotes
[i] Mann Michael,
The Sources of Social Power (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 2.
[ii] Unknown, Instructions of Ptahhotep, in
Mistress of the House, Mistress of Heaven: Women in Ancient Egypt, ed. Anne Capel (New York: Hudson Hills Press, 1996), 175.
[v] Pritchard, David M, “THE POSITION OF ATTIC WOMEN IN DEMOCRATIC ATHENS,”
Greece and Rome 61, no. 2 (2014): 174–93.
[vi] Janet Johnson, “The legal status of women in ancient Egypt”, in
Mistress of the House, Mistress of Heaven: Women in Ancient Egypt, ed. Anne Capel (New York: Hudson Hills Press, 1996), 176.
[vii] Holt Parker,
Women Physicians in Greece, Rome, and the Byzantine Empire, in
Women Healers and Physicians: Climbing a Long Hill, ed. Lilian Furst (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1997), 132.
[ix] Plato,
Republic, Volume I: Books 1-5, ed. Christopher Jones (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2013).
[x] Hippocrates,
Diseases of Women, ed. Jeffrey Henderson (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2019).
[xi]Ann Roth, “Father Earth, Mother Sky: Ancient Egyptian Beliefs about Conception and Fertility”, in
Reading the Body: Representations and Remains in the Archaeological Record, ed. Alison Rautman (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999).
[xiv] Unknown, Instructions of Ptahhotep, 175.
[xvi] Unknown, Decorated Birth-Brick from South Abydos, in
Archaism and Innovation: Studies in the Culture of Middle Kingdom Egypt, ed. David Silverman (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009).
[xvii] Unknown, Instructions of Ptahhotep, 175.
[xviii] Unknown, Attic Grave Stele: Woman Dying in Childbirth. 330 BCE. Sculpture. Harvard Art Museums, Cambridge.
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