Have We Misunderstood the Women of Ancient Athens? | Katherine Backler on Their Forgotten Lives
Were women in ancient Athens simply wives and mothers, largely confined to the home? Or does the surviving evidence reveal a much richer picture?
In this episode of Classical Wisdom Speaks, Anya Leonard speaks with ancient historian Katherine Backler, author of Athena’s Sisters: Reclaiming the Women of Classical Athens, to uncover the lives, work, friendships and identities of women too often missing from our picture of ancient Athens.
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Through inscriptions, tombstones, legal cases, dedications and even ancient curse tablets, we encounter individual women whose lives would otherwise have disappeared: craftspeople and traders, a working mother proud of what she had earned, women running businesses, and a midwife and doctor remembered by those whose lives she touched.
We also explore something fundamental but frequently overlooked: female friendship. In a society where marriage was not necessarily expected to provide emotional companionship, relationships between women could be built on trust, affection, shared experience and mutual support. One extraordinary tombstone even preserves a woman defining herself not as someone's wife or daughter, but as another woman's friend.
What emerges is a far more complex picture of the women of Classical Athens—and a reminder that ancient lives rarely fit neatly into the categories history gives them.
Key Topics:
What do we actually know about women in ancient Athens?
The traditional image of the Athenian wife
Marriage, motherhood and citizenship
Citizen, immigrant and enslaved women
Recovering ordinary women from ancient inscriptions
Working women in the Athenian economy
Female doctors, midwives, traders and craftspeople
How women helped build and maintain Athens
Ancient curse tablets and women's social networks
Friendship between women
Why friendship mattered in a gender-segregated society
Aristotle and different forms of friendship
Neighborhoods and women's communities
How relationships shaped ancient identity
What ancient Athens can reveal about our own relationships
Timestamps:
00:00 Meet Katherine Backler
00:48 What do we know about Athenian women?
02:30 A more complicated reality
04:10 Citizens, immigrants & enslaved women
07:36 Recovering ordinary women's lives
09:04 A working mother's own words
10:17 Women at work in Athens
11:59 The female doctor Phanestrati
16:03 Women, pubs & curse tablets
18:02 Why female friendship mattered
20:35 Friendship in ancient Athens
25:38 Aristotle & types of friendship
27:45 Women & neighborhood networks
32:12 Relationships, identity & belonging
36:06 Rethinking Athenian women
37:09 Final thoughts
If our understanding of ancient Athens comes overwhelmingly through male voices, what changes when we start looking for the women themselves?
Let us know what surprised you most in the comments.
About Katherine Backler
Katherine Backler is a lecturer in Ancient History at the University of Leeds and author of Athena’s Sisters: Reclaiming the Women of Classical Athens. Her work explores the lives and relationships of women in ancient Athens, using evidence including inscriptions to recover experiences that traditional historical narratives can easily overlook.