Household and Gender

doi:10.1017/CHOL9780521780537.005

4 - Household and Gender

from Part I - Determinants of Economic Performance

Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 March 2008

Edited by

Ian Morris and

Richard Saller: Affiliation:
Stanford University
Walter Scheidel: Affiliation:
Stanford University, California
Ian Morris: Affiliation:
Stanford University, California
Richard P. Saller: Affiliation:
Stanford University, California

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Summary

introduction

In the Greco-Roman world the household was the basic unit of production as well as consumption. This truism makes it imperative to understand how the household functioned through its life cycle, how property rights and labor participation were configured by gender and age. Too often in the past economic historians of antiquity have written with the implicit assumption that property owners and laborers were adult males. Even a rough understanding of ancient Mediterranean demography suggests that such an assumption is unwarranted: women and children were important potential sources of labor and, in some legal regimes, substantial property owners.

The centrality of the household and family in the ancient economy is reflected in the most influential Greco-Roman work on the “economy,” Xenophon’s Oeconomicus. Written by an Athenian in the fourth century bc, this treatise of advice on estate management was read and cited as a source of wisdom for more than two millennia. The work has been set aside as “not modern economics” (which it is not), and has been characterized as moral ideology (which it is). But neither point should obscure the fact that its basic theme, the gendered division of labor, was fundamental in household production and consumption.

Keywords

household organization economic growth children's labor classical Athens property ownership Roman Italy women's labor

Type: Chapter
Information: The Cambridge Economic History of the Greco-Roman World , pp. 87 - 112

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CHOL9780521780537.005 [Opens in a new window]

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Print publication year: 2007

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4 - Household and Gender

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