CHAPTER NINETEEN
Women, Religion, and the Home
Janett Morgan
for it is the custom for all women especially...to dedicate whatever is near and to
vow sacrifices and to promise shrines for the gods and daemons and children of the
gods...And they fill all the houses and all the towns with altars and shrines, setting them
up both in open spaces and wherever these happenings occur
(Plato,Laws909e–910a)Uncovering evidence of private female lives is a notoriously difficult task. The subjects
of ‘‘women’’ and ‘‘home’’ are not of enormous interest to ancient authors. As a
result, the views that texts offer us are tantalizingly incomplete. Who are the women
referred to by Plato in the passage above? What form did their domestic shrines take?
Textual narratives raise more questions than they answer. Yet if we turn to material
sources for enlightenment, we face a similar wall of invisibility. We can view the
detritus of life, including religious artifacts, in the wells and on the floors of houses,
but we cannot link artifacts to female users or identify specific patterns of female
behavior in the material record. Similarly, whilst domestic excavations have unearthed
an array of female images in the form of statuettes or on vases, many of which show
women performing religious acts, we cannot use this evidence to ask or answer
specific questions. We do not know whether the scenes are set in a house or temple.
We cannot understand what meaning the images had for the householder. We cannot
say what type of woman, free or slave, respectable or marginal, is performing the acts.
The images are generic, showing exempla of female behavior, not realities (S. Lewis
2002). We are left with a tangled web of images and ideas. How do we begin to
unravel the relationship between women, religion, and the home?
Controlling Women
Our evidence for female private lives is fragmentary: sources offer us only broken
artifacts spread across decaying houses and small snippets of information gleaned
from wider narratives. It is no surprise that most modern investigations into women
and religion take a wide ambit. Dillon’s studyGirls and Women in Classical Greek
Religionoffers an invaluable collection of information on female religious practices
viewed across a wide spectrum of communities and chronological periods (Dillon