Strategies of Disenfranchisement

Abstract

Abstract Although women and children appear frequently in extant Athenian oratory, we rarely know more about them than what appears in the speech. This appearance is frequently taken at face value, as if the women were as represented: foreigners perpetrating illegal marriages, whores laying illegal claims to estates through fake marriages or illegitimate children, or nameless women and children of uncertain status. In inheritance disputes, these women and children can stand between speakers and the estates they claim; it is hardly surprising that speakers present a remarkably biased narrative about them. And yet these texts have traditionally been used to construct not only our working knowledge of laws for inheritance and heirs/heiresses but also the limited statuses that scholars believe women and children were able to occupy in classical Athens. In most cases, this procedure must ignore the biases of the texts and the strategies that the speakers are using to undermine the credibility and status of these women. This approach gives the speeches a level of credibility as evidence that is unwarranted, since we lack any control for their claims. Structural biases must be assessed, and these can be understood better by looking at the persistence of specific rhetorical strategies for disinheriting and, in some cases, disenfranchising women and children.