Athenian Women Working Wool on an Attic Red-Figure Cup
Women spinning and folding wool, painted on an Attic red-figure cup now in the Berlin Antikensammlung (F 2289). Scenes like this were made by men for a male drinking party, which is part of what makes them evidence: they show the place Athenian society assigned to women rather than the place women made for themselves.
Almost everything visual that survives of Athenian women was painted for men to look at. This cup shows the standard subject — wool-working, the household task that stood for female virtue in Athenian rhetoric — and it was made to be passed around at a symposium from which women of citizen families were absent. Read against the grain, that is exactly its value. The formal position of Athenian women was narrow and the images confirm it; the influence some of them exercised had to run through households, cults and marriages instead, and left far less pottery behind. See influence and intrigue in classical Athens.
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