Spartan women owned more land than Athenian women could dream of
In classical Athens a woman could not even sign a contract worth more than a measure of barley. A few days' walk away in Sparta, women ran estates while men were at war, and after the long conflicts of the fourth century BC they owned roughly 35 to 40 percent of all land and property.
The ancient world offered no single pattern. In Sumer women could buy, sell and inherit property, trade and testify in court, though husbands could divorce them for minor faults. The earliest poet known by name, Enheduanna, was a priestess of the goddess Inanna. Egyptian law granted women the same legal rights as men, with class still mattering; landed property passed from mother to daughter, and women could make contracts, act as executors, go to court and adopt children.
Babylonian codes generally let husbands divorce freely, provided they returned the wife's property, while wives seeking divorce could be punished as harshly as adulterers, though a few codes allowed them the same right on the same terms. In early Vedic India, the grammarians Patanjali and Katyayana suggest women were educated, and verses of the Rigveda indicate they married at a mature age and may often have chosen their own husbands.
Athens was among the most restrictive. Women had no legal personhood; each lived under a male guardian, called a kyrios, first her father and then her husband, who handled legal matters and could dispose of her property. Freed slaves could become citizens, but no woman ever did. Aristotle argued women should be kept apart in separate quarters, and most girls learned only household skills like spinning and weaving. Elsewhere in Greece, records from places such as Delphi and Gortyn show women owning land before later laws enforced stricter segregation.
Sparta's wealthy women stood out, yet they remained as shut out of politics as their Athenian counterparts. Modern campaigns that began in the nineteenth century grew from the claim that women face a long-standing bias in exercising rights, pressing for the vote, property, education, equal pay and control over their own bodies.
Source: Women's rights
