“Of all things with life and understanding, we women are the most unfortunate. First, we need a husband, someone we get for an excessive price. He then becomes the ruler of our bodies. And this misfortune adds still more troubles to the grief we have. Then comes the crucial struggle: this husband we’ve selected, is he good or bad? For a divorce loses women all respect, yet we can’t refuse to take a husband. Then, when she goes into her husband’s home, with its new rules and different customs, she needs a prophet’s skill to sort out the man whose bed she shares. She can’t learn that at home. Once we’ve worked hard at this, and with success, our husband accepts the marriage yoke and lives in peace—an enviable life. But if the marriage doesn’t work, then death is much to be preferred. When the man tires of the company he keeps at home, he leaves, seeking relief for his distress elsewhere, outside the home. He gets his satisfaction with some male friend or someone his own age. We women have to look at just one man. Men tell us we live safe and secure at home, while they must go to battle with their spears. How stupid they are! I’d rather stand there three times in battle holding up my shield than give birth once.”
Euripides, Medea, 431 BCE (trans. Ian Johnston). No matter how much one knows about Classical Athenian misogyny and its brutal depths, no matter how many times one side-eyes Euripides for the things he does to women and has women do, there’s nothing in classical literature, full stop, that’s anything like this speech, in which Medea - a woman given voice by a man, a male playwright, a male actor - lays out with shattering clarity the double-binds that structure a woman’s existence in a society where she is a token, stripped of agency, stretched in Procrustean fashion between father’s house and husband’s house. Euripides’ Medea ghosts Gayle Rubin’s Traffic in Women.
In some manifestations of the tradition, Medea is an irredeemable evil witch, associated with the uncanny and the divine. Euripides’ Medea is penetratingly human. Of course, Athenian women’s lives were variegated; not everyone was an aristocrat, not everyone *could* become a token, there were untold masses whose comings and goings and affairs and marriages and loves and losses and griefs and desires are forever lost, because they didn’t matter to the literary record, with its skewings, its biases, its generic categories. But despite the complexity of the context, one senses some faint hint of a ghost of a dream of rebellion brewing at the edges of these words.
