Stereotypes In Medea

Women in Classical Athens (508 – 322 BCE) are usually portrayed as submissive and secluded to the house. Most of the evidence to support this theory is from writing. However, the issue is that most of the writing of the time was by men, who were usually biased against women. Most of them have a very negative attitude towards them. Euripides, Xenophon, and Aristophanes wrote about women, usually portraying them as submissive, housewives with little freedom.
Euripides was a play write during the 5th century. In his play Medea, Medea, after learning that Jason, her husband, is going to marry the princess of Corinth, complains to the chorus about what she and other women have to deal with. She describes women as “the most miserable.” Women have to buy a …show more content…
Women, according to her, have no agency of their own; they need to rely on a man, who they have to buy. The dowry acts as a payment to the husband for having to take on this burdensome woman. Women do not get to choose their husband and are stuck with whatever husband, whether bad or good, accepts her dowry. Women’s lives were also dangerous, and pregnancy and birth seem to be especially fatal, according to Medea. Andromache, another character of myth that Euripides writes a play about, also gives insight on how women were viewed. She “put aside my desire [for going out], and remained within the house” because that was what a respectable woman did. She had “a silent tongue and a calm appearance.” Andromache demonstrates that seclusion was what respectable rich Athenian women were expected to have. Also, she describes a quiet, submissive wife who supports her husband. Andromache, who is taken by Neoptolemus and gives him a son, also admonishes Hermione, the wife of Neoptolemus, about why her husband does not love her. She tells Hermoine that a wife “must love her husband, even when she has been married to an insignificant man, and not provoked a contest of pride.” A wife