Dotes para “las hijas y hermanas de los pobres”: preocupación cívica e iniciativa privada en la antigua Grecia

Fernández Prieto, Aida ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5894-0869 (2023) Dotes para “las hijas y hermanas de los pobres”: preocupación cívica e iniciativa privada en la antigua Grecia. In: (In)visibilidad, vulnerabilidad y agencia: visiones antiguas y modernas de las mujeres de la antigua Grecia. Universidad de Sevilla, Sevilla. (In Press)

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Abstract

The difficulties of endowing - or adequately endowing - young women from poor households in the Greek world would have demographic and political implications for the survival and stability of the civic body, considering women's role as 'generators' of future citizens. The latter explains that in certain parts of the Greek world, 'public' and 'private' initiatives were implemented to secure or provide dowries for poor women, thus enabling them to fulfil their civic role. This chapter, then, focuses on such endowing initiatives during the Classical and early Hellenistic period (5th-3rd centuries BC), as well as their possible motivations. It also highlights how the lack or scarcity of dowry contributed to making visible, as well as reinforcing, the socio-economic vulnerability of these poor women by maintaining and even aggravating the 'cycle of poverty' in which these households were embedded. At the same time, the implementation of initiatives aimed at securing dowry for the many poor women would highlight the capacity for "agency" of other individuals, including "powerful" women, who would make "helping the daughters (and sisters) of the poor" an essential element in the construction of their real legitimacy, thus seeking to increase their visibility and prestige in the community.