Women as Home: Rites of Transition
Women also become visible in our sources at religious rites that change the compos-
ition of the family, at births, deaths, and marriages. Women can be central to the rites
as bride, mother, or deceased. They can also assist the passage of others through the
transition: by bringing a child to birth, marking the passage of the bride across
the city, from natal hearth to marital hearth, and by lamenting the dead (Garland
1990:61; Oakley and Sinos 1993:26; Stears 1998). Life-cycle transitions rupture the
normal harmony of life. The world becomes a dangerous place: the dead mix with
the living, the future of the household is placed in jeopardy as the wife risks death in
childbirth and the vulnerable bride, neither girl nor yet wife, walks the streets of the
city. Women’s religious behavior on these occasions is concerned with restoring
harmony: their actions remove the ritual pollution and danger associated with rites
of transition. They heal both family and community.
Birth, death, and marriage are intensely private occasions yet they are also of vital
importance to the community. Political communities and families both need a supply
of babies and they both need order to be restored on death to ensure their survival.
This mutual need dissolves the separation between private and public, between house
and city. Women must become visible. The body and movements of the citizen wife
on these occasions articulates the changes taking place within the family; they also
bring those changes into the community and integrate them into the social and ritual
landscape. Rituals at birth, death, and marriage therefore follow a similar process,
which acknowledges the dependency of household and community while allowing
changes in status to occur.
Rites of transition begin in the public sphere. As the symbol of their household,
citizen women move out into the community, and their behavior advertises the
commencement of the ritual process by bringing private rituals to public attention.
At childbirth and before marriage, women come out of the house to make offerings,
propitiating deities and seeking a successful resolution to the life-cycle change that
they or a family member are approaching (Demand 1994:87, 89; Llewellyn-Jones
2003:219). At birth and marriage women seek to propitiate Artemis for fear of
incurring her wrath (Cole 1998). The dependency of household and city on female
fertility is reflected in the geopolitical landscape of Athens where the community
provided the sanctuary in which the family placed its gifts (Linders 1972; Travlos
1971). The goddess had to be appeased and the ritual conducted appropriately; the
consequences could be infertility, death, or infant mortality, and both household and
community would fail.
The second stage of life-cycle rites sees the women move back into the house as the
family withdraws from the social and religious life of the city. Yet neither the women
nor the house becomes invisible. Instead, the home is marked in a manner that
advertises the changes taking place within. At weddings, the house is decorated
with ribbons and foliage (Llewellyn-Jones 2003: fig. 153). It stands out from the
other houses in the city. At funerals, a pot of water is placed at the door (Aristophanes,
Ecclesiazusae1032–3; Euripides,Alcestis98–104; Menander,Shield225–9). While it
is possible that this is for visitors to wipe away pollution, it mirrors the placement of
water vessels at the boundaries of sanctuaries and shrines. At births and deaths the
306 Janett Morgan