Latin and Feminism

I recently came across an interesting article written by Alice Garrett, an high school Latin teacher, dealing with the growing relationship between the the field of Classics and Feminist studies. Last semester I happened across a collection of Feminist essays dealing with gender and sexuality in Antiquity, to which I was surprised to find a great amount of scholarship. Mind you, these articles were not written by leading Classical scholars nor were the authors Classics-focused scholars. Giving leniency to the fact that: a) I, as a reader and undergrad, am not as well-versed as I should be concerning Antiquity and b) these were not Classically raised writers who spent far too much time working with dead languages, I was surprised at how well most of them were written. There were a couple of articles which I felt had no solid basis (if only I had the collection in front of me!), but for the most part each added something new to something familiar (especially seeing Ovid from a Feminist point of view).

It was this surprise at such a combination that garnered my attention to read Garrett's article. To my surprise on the very first page she brought up a personal experience of which I too have gone through, and perhaps, as she says, most students of Classics have:

My teachers presented me with an intellectual, historical, cultural, and literary world which was exciting and lived in by men only. There were female characters, women created in the imaginations of men, but real women were conspicuously absent. No one seemed to think that this was astounding, so neither did I.

I always assumed that the lack of female voice in Antiquity came form the general lack of female authors during the time period. What I failed to see, was that the reason there is such a lack of female authorship, is that the history-makers--the scribes and officials who kept records of events--either deliberately or unconsciously kept female voice out of the annals of history. As Garrett aptly puts it:

[T]he problem is not the past itself, but what we decide has been important about the past, since history-making is an act of selection, an act of deciding what is important. The past itself is not male-centered. Women have never been excluded from life. They have been involved in every human venture. What they have been kept from is the writing of history, the act of deciding what is important and what is not.

She proposes looking at the contributions of women in the society of the time based on archaeological evidence, and the evidence we see in the masculine authorship, with writers such as Ovid and Pliny. This is a topic I have only lightly touched, and thankfully so, due to my interest in the voices of the everyday people of Roman and Greek society. For I found myself confronted with the writing of the intellegentia yet not the writings of the vulgus.

Garrett identifies the lack of little more than cursory notation of women in some of the more popular textbooks in use today, and discusses the weaknesses realized therein due to the inability of the student to empathize or identify with a female character. She does however like the amount of feminine perspective used in the more obscure Ecce Romani series of books, with which I was taught Latin in high school.

I recommend giving it a read. Here you can see the article for yourself.