Ancient Greece serves in Simone de Beauvoir’s history as a revealing contrast between different forms of women’s social position. Athenian wives were confined by law and household custom, while Sparta’s communal property and civic child-rearing permitted women freedoms unavailable elsewhere. Between these poles, the account considers prostitution and the hetaera, whose distance from family authority could bring unusual economic and intellectual independence without overturning the wider gender hierarchy.

Social Organization and Women’s Status

The Greek customs under discussion resemble those of the Orient but differ in their lack of formal polygamy. In the account, the concern to preserve family property and transmit it intact to male heirs helps explain the household hierarchy. A wife with property or a dowry could be treated as a person joined to her husband by an exclusive religious bond; yet a Greek citizen could still seek sexual relations outside marriage through prostitutes and household servants. The distinction between one recognized wife and men’s access to other women therefore did not amount to sexual equality.

Athens makes the legal structure particularly visible. A wife lived in the household’s women’s quarters and remained under a guardian’s authority, which might pass from her father to her husband, his heir, or, in default, public officials. The guardian controlled both her person and her property and could arrange her marriage or transfer her to another husband. A dowry provided a limited safeguard: it was meant to support her and had to be returned if the marriage ended. Greek law also allowed a woman to seek divorce in rare cases. These provisions qualified, but did not remove, her dependence; inheritance went to male children, and the dowry was treated as an obligation imposed on her guardian rather than as property fully at her disposal.

Sparta and the Civic Household

Sparta stands apart because communal property weakened the family’s role as the vehicle for preserving private inheritance. Girls were raised like boys, and wives were not confined to their husbands’ households. The husband’s visits were restricted to furtive encounters at night, while the account describes a marriage bond comparatively loose enough that another man could seek a union with a woman for eugenic purposes. With children belonging to the city, the disappearance of individual inheritance also weakened the rationale for guarding women as a man’s exclusive possession.

This arrangement did not mean that women escaped every demand: maternity remained a civic burden, set beside men’s obligation to fight. But beyond that duty, the text says, their freedom was not restrained in the same way as women’s in societies organized around household property and private descent. Sparta’s contrast with Athens makes the book’s causal argument concrete: women’s legal and domestic position could change with the institutions governing property, inheritance, and the family.

Prostitution and the Hetaera

The account distinguishes free women and enslaved women within households from the prostitutes found across Greek society. It describes older forms of hospitality and religious prostitution, including a Babylonian rite reported by Herodotus in which a woman gave herself to a stranger at the temple of Mylitta and contributed the coin she received to the temple. In Greece, religious establishments also benefited from sexual services offered to sailors and travelers. The text presents this sacred framework as one that could give way to commercial exploitation, with religious authorities profiting from the trade.

Solon is credited with institutionalizing prostitution in Athens by purchasing enslaved Asian women and confining them in dicterions near the port and the temple of Venus. An administrator managed the establishment’s finances; the women received wages, while the state took the net profit. Private establishments followed, and poor Greek women also entered the dicterions. Although the establishments were recognized as inviolable places of asylum, their residents were stigmatized, denied social rights, and required to wear distinctive clothing and dye their hair with saffron. The account also identifies three kinds of free courtesan: dicteriads, who were much like registered prostitutes; auletrids, who performed as dancers and flute players; and hetaeras, socially prominent companions of wealthy men.

The hetaera’s position could offer a striking, though exceptional, measure of autonomy. Some were educated, artistic, and able to manage their own money and lives outside family control. The account names Aspasia, Phryne, and Lais among women whose standing could appear to rival that of respectable wives and mothers. It later generalizes that the hetaera was among the freest women in ancient Greece: her economic independence and life at the margins of respectable family society could make her seem nearly the equal of men. Yet that freedom remained exceptional, dependent on a social role that made women’s desirability and company valuable to men.

Confinement, Misogyny, and Household Tensions

For most Greek women, the account describes a far narrower existence. In the classical period, wives were confined to the gynaeceum, and public opinion praised the woman of whom men spoke least. Plato is presented as an exception: he proposed a council of matrons in government and a liberal education for girls. The surrounding culture, however, treated women’s participation in public affairs as improper. In Aristophanes’ Lysistrata, a husband dismisses a woman’s question about public matters and orders her back to her weaving.

The philosophical and literary record reinforces that subordination. Aristotle describes women as deficient, weak, and powerless, and argues that they should remain at home under male authority. In Xenophon’s Oeconomicus, the wife’s prescribed work is domestic: she is to be prudent, attentive, economical, and efficiently organized. Greek writers also repeatedly depicted women as troublesome, wasteful, or difficult, even though these accusations targeted the very qualities women were expected to suppress. Marriage could constrain men as well: the text suggests that wives, despite having few recognized rights, may have exercised authority within the household through protest and resistance. Xanthippe became the embodiment of a Greek citizen’s complaints about a difficult wife and the trials of conjugal life.

Historical Significance

Ancient Greece does not furnish a simple story of either female freedom or uniform oppression. Athens displays the reach of guardianship and the limits of a dowry; Sparta shows how communal property and civic control of children could alter the marital household; prostitution reveals the ways institutions organized women’s sexuality for religious, public, or commercial benefit; and the hetaera marks a rare route to independence through economic means and life outside the family. Together, these examples support the book’s broader claim that women’s circumstances were shaped not by a timeless feminine nature but by social arrangements governing property, kinship, and public power.