"Byzantium has a reputation for misogyny and is often dubbed a patriarchal state. Certainly there were misogynists in Byzantium and they were in a position to be heard at the time and to leave behind evidence of their opinions. As members of the educated clergy or literate ascetics, they were respected for their holiness by their contemporaries and their writings were collected and copied for the benefit of the next generation. They survive for historians to study because they were important in their own time. But the prevalence of unflattering opinions or prescriptive denouncements on women signals several things. As in the case of all frequently voiced material, whether it is a law or a sermon, its very frequency often betrays that its demands are not being obeyed. It has been said that the perennial problem of a patriarchal society is that women are absolutely crucial to its continuance but they must never be allowed to realise their importance or act on it. Byzantium recognised the importance of women in economic terms and in terms of their function as child-bearers, particularly in law.
Divorce by consent was permitted until the sixth century. Thereafter there was a list of reasons for which divorce was allowed: adultery, impotence, madness, and treason. The church saw marriage as a union of two people intended by God to last until the death of one of the parties. The consequences of this development for women can be argued two ways. In one way, easy divorce disadvantaged women because their husbands could legally dispose of them in favour of a younger or prettier woman; alternatively, they themselves could also escape an unhappy marriage more easily. On the other hand, the church, while insisting that the union was indissoluble, also advocated choice in marriage, a novel development for a culture which had not previously consulted a woman’s preferences. However, the list of possible reasons for divorce was more comprehensive for men, including in some ages a wife displeasing her husband by staying out of the house for too long. Another new development was the licence allowed by the church if one of the parties wished to enter the monastic life. Either a husband or a wife could divorce their spouse to take holy vows: sometimes a virtuous couple separated to live in different monasteries after their children were grown up.
A woman’s rights over her dowry, the property a woman took from her family to a marriage, were vigorously defended. Because so much property was tied up in marriage, property disputes are one of the most common areas in which to see the law applied to women. The dowry belonged to the wife, although her husband could administer it. If he allowed it to diminish, the wife could administer it herself. The wife also had the full ownership and use of the nuptial gift from her husband, which was given at marriage and which was set at a percentage of the dowry. Of course both dowry and nuptial gift were intended to benefit the children of the marriage ultimately, and should the wife die before her husband, the children were next in line to inherit it before their father. When the man of the family died, his widow was the natural guardian of their children and the estate. As head of the family, she had all the responsibilities of a man and the legal authority to carry them out. On her shoulders rested estate administration, and the education, dowering and marriage of the children. This included the administration of the empire if the widow was an empress. Widowhood was the most powerful position that a woman could hold as far as legal rights went. On remarriage, the widow normally lost all control over her first family, and of the property of the family, except for her nuptial gift.
Remarriage was therefore a disabling option for women. This was not the only restriction on their activity. The emperor Leo VI (886–912) had forbidden women to appear as witnesses or to give testimony in court. He felt that it violated the natural order of things. Despite this law, many women did appear on their own behalf, especially well-born or rich women. There were other strange assumptions enshrined in the law which do not shine a favourable light on the morals of Byzantine men or the expected intelligence of Byzantine women. For example, women were unpunished in many cases because they could not be expected to understand the law or to know the difference between right and wrong, since they were women. The only crimes for which a woman was normally convicted were murder and adultery.
Byzantine women were not cloistered and they were not subject to constricting dress codes. But it was not usual to see many women on the streets, and it was usual for them to wear a veil. Often a contemporary historian will make a point of describing women in the streets or tearing their veils to emphasise how shocking an event was. The eleventh-century mumblings of the old general Kekaumenos about the wisdom of keeping your womenfolk from meeting strange men in your own house and the dangers that could result show that normally women were at large in their own homes. Although the empress had ‘women’s quarters’ in the palace these were only curtained off from the main receiving rooms and men were certainly allowed into them. There was a separate room, covered in purple, in which the empress spent her last days of pregnancy and gave birth. This gave rise to the epithet ‘purple-born’ or *porphyrogennitos which designated the legitimate children of the emperor. In these quarters in her last days of pregnancy she probably sewed clothes for the forthcoming child. Clothes-making was one of the most important activities of women of all social levels, although it was by no means their only commercial activity. Documents survive revealing women’s activities in retail trade, group exploitation of mines, production and sale of food, and investment in long-distance trade. The aristocratic widows mentioned above often managed the fortune of the family directly, not only the day-to-day running of the estate. This commercial activity necessitated contact with the world of men to an extent which seems at odds with the dominant ideology of female submission propounded by the early church fathers of Byzantium."
Imperial Women in Byzantium 1025-1204: Power, Patronage and Ideology, Barbara Hill
Gonna chill out the rest of May and then change my entire life in June. Possibly July if that doesn't work out. Certainly no later than September or October.
Three-knife hairpin 三刀簪 (one for the country, one for the family, and one for oneself) was a popular headpiece among women in the city of Fuzhou, Fujian province.
Also known as "Three Hairpins” it consists of three small swords worn like hairpins, mostly made out of silver or white copper, and engraved with patterns.
There are various theories about the origin of the Three-Knife hairpin. The most popular one claims that it evolved from small sharp weapons worn by women during the Ming Dynasty in order to defend themselves against Japanese pirates raiding China’s coastline, by killing their enemies, or even committing suicide.
In June 2024, the three knives were selected as an intangible cultural heritage of Fuzhou, and more people became aware of this traditional clothing culture.
just found out that if i stay in my room all the time my life will eventually shrink to the size of it and i will lose all memory of how to function as a person. shocked & upset
last year i reread thg for the first time in like a decade, and i honestly appreciated them even more rereading as an adult. it gave me brain worms so i read them again this year and here we are
im getting really fucking sick of all this “it gets better!” bullshit. im going to have depression for the rest of my life. it’s not going to “””get better””” fuck you
This woman is Dr. Grace Murray Hopper. She created the first computer language compiler tools to program the Harvard Mark I computer. This computer was used in WWII after 1944. John von Neumann initiated the computer's first program, but Hopper invented the codes
the scariest thing about the generative AI thing is how quickly people have accepted it as an indefinite, irrevocable part of their reality. people have genuinely convinced themselves that ChatGPT is the only solution to most tasks - tasks they did with their own brain without any large effort two years ago. like you know damn well all of us used to write emails ourselves why are we pretending like this is an impossible task to do with your own two hands. what's with the fucking. AI revisionism. i feel like i am going insane.
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