Spartan Women Rant

spartan women were not typical. they owned 40% of the land, went to school, married their husbands who were around the same age, were the primary, and often, sole care-givers of their sons, and were encouraged to exercise as often as possible. the spartan citizen male mostly lived at the barracks and so the woman had complete control over her household including their helots. spartan women were sometimes shared between brothers, so that the will would stay in possession of the family, and when the elders died, the women were granted half of any male sibling by law, you could not write out a woman in a will. their corinthian, cretian, thracian and athenian counterparts were not NOT at all in the same boat. i would have to say that if you ever think of a strong-willed woman, think of a spartan woman.


and as for the picture of the woman not being accurate, might i say that the "Average" greek today is not the average greek then. today, the skin tone in greece hovers around von luschan's tones 15-20 but the minoan greeks and the mycenae greeks of prehistory were also in great transport and all of greece remained highly mobile due to their sea-faring ways. the area that the minoans lived in were especially mobile. sparta, the most specifically non-naval of all the greek cultures, probably had a more stable tone (between 18-23), but it is not outside of logic to understand that the tone balance of all of ancient greece could have ranged between tones 18-26.