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Example research essay topic: Roman Empire Indo European - 1,245 words

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... of reason and love (communication and expression with the male race). She had no formal education (female children were largely taught to read and write informally, in their homes and usually by their mothers or by slaves who acted as tutors) and, therefore, was considered inadequate for the training of new generations; this fell into the hands of the men. Greek women were married as young as 14 or 15 to a man as arranged by her family. He may be as old as 30 and could very well be dead by age 45. A widow was expected to remarry, particularly if she was still of childbearing age.

The Greeks also had an interesting ritual associated with marriage: on the night in which the marriage was consummated, the bride was dressed in a man's cloak and sandals and laid in an unlit room to wait for her new husband. This ritual is considered a transition period for a man from a homosexual world of the mess (a male aristocratic association) to heterosexuality. For the respectable women, the home was the center of private life and the focus of daily activity. To run the household was her foremost responsibility, second only to her duty to bear children. Because of the overwhelming desire for sons and the need for an heir, couples rarely kept more than one daughter.

The practice of exposing unwanted children was common to both cultures. The discarded babies were often picked up and raised as slaves or prostitutes. Later, laws were passed which rewarded women with three or more children in hopes of discouraging the exposure of babies. Upper class Athenian wives lived in near seclusion in the 'women's quarters' of their husbands' homes. They had next to no contact with the outside world. Their responsibilities were those of motherhood, spinning, weaving, and sewing for the making of the family's clothing, the gathering of vegetables, the harvesting of fruit, preparing and serving food, the supervision of the slaves and bathing and tending to guests.

Sexual and emotional intimacy between husband and wife was minimal. Sex in Greek culture was not an activity for women to enjoy, but rather only a means to create citizens. However, there is evidence of birth control: women mostly used crude pessaries or douches made up of honey and vinegar. Middle and lower class Athenian women led a less confined life. Their husbands had higher expectations of productivity for them because of the inability to afford idleness. This sector of women had a wider circle of friends and acquaintances.

Spartan women enjoyed a less restricted life than that of their Athenian sisters. Because their chief contribution to the state was producing future warriors, the Spartan women were better fed, married later, exercised and enjoyed a less restricted sex life. The Roman women shared a very similar life to that of their Greek counterparts. A woman's legal status was virtually entirely dependent upon the men in her life. She was essentially passed from father to husband, surrendering her dowry and any property she was to inherit to her husband. As she was considered property, it was rare she possessed property of her own or engaged in business, commerce or anything but a limited scope of frowned-upon professions.

Until the first century A. D. law did not require consent of the female for marriage. Emperor Augustus that issued a law which penalized unmarried and childless women between the ages of 20 and 50, including any divorcees and widows who didn't marry within 18 months of her divorce or two years after her husband's death.

A man who divorced his wife for reasons other than adultery, poisoning a child or tampering with the household keys was required to give his wife half of his property. Wives were not allowed to bring charges of adultery against their husband, or any other man. If she lent her house out to someone for the use of adultery, she was guilty for adultery as well. Once a woman was named an adulterer, she could not marry again. Adultery was considered a legal motive for murder. The only person who could charge a man with adultery was another man.

Slaves could never lawfully marry. They instead underwent quasi-marriages known as countubernium, which had no status under the law. Unmarried upper-class women, including widows, were forbidden to have sexual relations, but upper class men were entitled to have sex with prostitutes and other lower class women. While Roman women's lives focused mainly on domestic duties, they were not cut off from the events of the world outside their homes. Unlike the women of classical Greece, Roman women frequently attended social events and dined with the men in the family, thus hearing and participating in daily discussions of the problems of both family and community.

Roman women's primary importance was also bearing children. In the Roman Empire, a committed wife was expected to lie still during sexual intercourse because it was believed that this ensured conception. We come to wonder what exactly happened that brought the earlier strong and independent women to such submissiveness. Merlin Stone concluded, in his book "When God was a woman", that the end of the matriarchy was ultimately a result of ownership, paternity, and inheritance issues: 'Upon reading the Levite laws it became apparent that the sexual autonomy of women in the religion of the Goddess posed a continual threat. It undermined the far reaching goals of the men, perhaps led or influenced by Indo-European peoples, who viewed women as property and aimed at a society in which male kinship was the rule, as it had long been in Indo-European nations.

This in turn required that each woman be retained as the possession of one man, leaving no doubt as to the identity of the father of the children she might bear, especially her sons. But male kinship lines remained impossible as long as women were allowed to function as sexually independent people, continuing to bear children whose paternity was not known or considered to be of any importance. 's up porting the same idea, Evelyn Reed observes in her book "Woman's evolution from matriarchal clan to patriarchal family", that: "the most important feature of marriage from its very inception has gone largely unobserved: it was a new kind of union composed of husband and wife, distinctly different form the former clan union of sisters and brothers. The two were in fundamental antagonism to each other. Thus, although marriage was introduced by the mothers within the framework of the maternal clan structure, in the end marriage would undermine the matriarchy. " Therefore womankind gave up its most powerful weapon in maintaining its dominance in a world of "fatherless" children and brought about itself the torments of patriarchy, by institutionalizing marriage. Unfortunately, unlike the matriarchy, patriarchy has lasted to our present day.

Of course there has been major progress since the days of the Roman Empire, now it is illegal to consider women lower then men in any sense (at least in some countries), yet most of us still see the world through the patriarchal curtain that covers our eyes. Bibliography: "Women out of history: a history anthology" by Ann For freedom "The Underside of history" by Elise Building "Woman's evolution from matriarchal clan to patriarchal family" by Evelyn Reed "When God Was a Woman" by Merlin Stone < a href = ' web '> web < a href = ' web '> web


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Research essay sample on Roman Empire Indo European

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