Gender Roles Theme Analysis

Though Athens was a democracy, male citizens held all of the political power, and women enjoyed relatively few rights and privileges. Athenian women could not hold political office, for example, or participate in democratic elections, votes, or debates, nor could they serve on juries or bring lawsuits. Furthermore, the economic activity of Athenian women was also limited (although they did budget the household accounts, as Lysistrata says), and so was their freedom of movement. Their education and responsibilities centered on domesticities like weaving cloth and raising children. The most powerful women in Athens tended to be the priestesses of the tutelary wisdom goddess Athena, as well as the hetairai, courtesans or prostitutes who were of a lower social status than citizens’ wives but who were compensated with more privileges.

We must have some understanding of these cultural features in Classical Athens to understand what Aristophanes is up to in Lysistrata, because it is a play that both reflects and plays with the gender roles of its time and place. On the one hand, the women in the play, other than Lysistrata herself, tend to be stereotypes: superficial, flighty, and coy. Even they themselves are skeptical about their power to effect peace in Greece: women are lazy, they say, unwise, and talented only in glamorously painting their faces and primping. The Athenian men, both in and out of the play, perhaps, would agree: women are unfit for rational discourse, they say, deceptive, sly, and immoral as they are. The men of Athens, however, are stubborn, paranoid, and so entangled in their mismanagement of the state that they have lost sight of basic human needs.

Consequently, the grand, intelligent, and alluring Lysistrata—whose character, scholars argue, Aristophanes modeled after both a contemporary priestess of Athena named Lysimache as well as the figure of the courtesan—arrives at the conclusion that a reversal of gender roles is necessary if Athens is to be at peace. So it is that she and her women storm the Acropolis—a great citadel that served as the political and religious center of Athens, and also home to the Athenian war treasury—thereby usurping, albeit temporarily, their men’s political power. The women justify their loving plot with unanswerable simplicity: the Female Koryphaios announces, “I hold stock in Athens—stock I paid for in sons.” In place of political madness, the women propose common sense. Indeed, Lysistrata suggests that women’s domestic work cultivates in them a common sense that men tend to problematically lack, particularly in the world of the play, where the male characters are presented as hopelessly inept. This point is eloquently made when Lysistrata compares Athens to “fleece, recently shorn,” and gives her solution to political problems by extending this metaphor of domestic work. As fleece needs to be scrubbed, beaten so as to rid it of vermin, combed of its lumps and knots and snarls, and expertly woven, so too does Athens need to be cleansed of filth, rid of incompetent parasites, and politically reunified if it is to properly fit the Athenian spirit. This is homespun political sanity at its best.

Still, Aristophanes is no feminist, and Lysistrata is no proto-feminist tract. The women take control only to restore their men to sanity, after which, the play suggests, the men will and should once again pilot the ship of state. To complicate the matter even more, only men performed on the Classical Athenian stage, a fact which Aristophanes milks by giving some of his female characters masculine qualities, like the brawny Spartan Lampito as well as the take-charge and severe Lysistrata herself. Moreover, scholars are not in agreement as to whether or not women in Classical Athens would have attended dramatic festivals at all—Lysistrata may well be a play written by a man, performed by men, and performed for men alone.