Immigrant Women In Athens

Many of the women whose names are known to history from Classical Athens were metics or immigrants, linked in the literature with assumptions of being ‘sexually exploitable.’ Despite recent scholarship on women in Athens beyond notions of the ‘citizen wife’ and the ‘common prostitute,’ the scholarship on women, both citizen and foreign, is focused almost exclusively on women in the reproductive and sexual economy of the city. This book examines the position of metic women in Classical Athens, to understand the social and economic role of metic women in the city, beyond the sexual labor market. This book contributes to two important aspects of the history of life in 5th century Athens: it explores our knowledge of metics, a little-researched group, and contributes to the study if women in antiquity, which has traditionally divided women socially between citizen-wives and everyone else. This tradition has wrongly situated metic women, because they could not legally be wives, as some variety of whores. Author Rebecca Kennedy critiques the traditional approach to the study of women through an examination of primary literature on non-citizen women in the Classical period. She then constructs new approaches to the study of metic women in Classical Athens that fit the evidence and open up further paths for exploration. This leading-edge volume advances the study of women beyond their sexual status and breaks down the ideological constraints that both Victorians and feminist scholars reacting to them have historically relied upon throughout the study of women in antiquity.

Argues that immigration politics is a central - but overlooked - object of inquiry in the democratic thought of classical Athens. Thinkers criticized democracy's strategic investments in nativism, the shifting boundaries of citizenship, and the precarious membership that a blood-based order effects for those eligible and ineligible to claim it.

The important role women play in the process of migration to the Western bloc — and in particular to Southern Europe where they often find jobs in the domestic service, tourist or sex industries — has been increasingly recognized. This timely book provides essential new insights into the forms of migration and the impact of gender relations on the migration and accommodation process, and also raises general conceptual issues about ways of understanding migration in a global context. At a time when all the member states of the European Union have called for a reduction in immigration in response to its steady growth, the urgency of the topic is apparent. Contributors examine the possible legal, social and economic problems that increased immigration may produce, including: - female migration and its relation to changing gender relations in the country of migration; - different forms of exclusion faced by male and female migrants; working conditions and status; - migrant networks; - and women's role in reproducing and maintaining ethnic culture. This book will be essential reading for courses in migration, nationalism, Mediterranean and area studies, gender studies and a range of social science courses. It will also be of use to policy makers and those interested in European developments.

This volume explores three trials conducted in Athens in the fourth century BCE; the defendants were all women charged with undertaking ritual activities, but much of the evidence remains a mystery. The author reveals how these trials provide a vivid glimpse of the socio-political environment of Athens during the early-mid fourth century BCE.

Feminism and Migration: Cross-Cultural Engagements is a rich, original, and diverse collection on the intersections of feminism and migration in western and non-western contexts. This book explores the question: does migration empower women? Through wide-ranging topics on theorizing feminism in migration, contesting identities and agency, resistance and social justice, and religion for change, well-known and emerging scholars provide in-depth analysis of how social, cultural, political, and economic forces shape new modalities and perspectives among women upon migration. It highlights the centrality of the various meanings and interpretations of feminism(s) in the lives of immigrant and migrant women in Australia, Belgium, Brazil, Eastern Europe, France, Greece, Japan, Italy, Mexico, Morocco, Papua New Guinea, Spain, and the United States. The well-researched chapters explore the ways in which feminism and migration across cultures relate to women’s experiences in host societies --- as women, wives, mothers, exiles, nuns, and workers---and the avenues of interactions for change. Cross-cultural engagements point to the convergence and even disjunctures between (im)migrant and non-immigrant women that remain unrecognized in contemporary mainstream discourses on migration and feminism.

"The very ubiquity of race and racial discussions encourages the general public to accept the power it exerts as natural and to allow the process by which it has assumed such authority to remain unquestioned. In this study, Denise McCoskey explains the position of race today by unveiling its relation to structures of thought and practice in classical antiquity. This study thus attempts both to account for the role of race in the classical world and also to trace the intricate ways Greek and Roman racial ideologies continue to resonate in modern life. McCoskey uncovers the assorted frameworks that organized and classified human diversity more fundamentally in antiquity. Along the way, she highlights the noteworthy intersections of race with other important social structures, such as gender and class. Underlining the role of race in shaping the ancient world, she ultimately turns to the influence of ancient racial formation on the modern world as well, an influence mediated by the receptions and appropriations of classical antiquity, borrowings that serve to shore up modernity and its continuing, albeit complex, juxtapositions of past and present. In this deft study, McCoskey provides a touchstone for thinking more critically about race's many sites of operation in both ancient and modern eras."--Publisher's description.

As Athenians of the classical era became increasingly aware of their own collective identity, they sought to define themselves and exclude others. They created a formal legal status to designate the free noncitizens living among them, calling them metics and calling their status metoikia. When Aeschylus dramatized the mythical flight of the Danaids from Egypt in his play Suppliant Women, he did so in light of his own time and place. Throughout the play, directly and indirectly, he casts the newcomers as metics and their stay in Greece as metoikia. Bakewell maps the manifold anxieties that metics created in classical Athens, showing that although citizens benefited from the many immigrants in their midst, they also feared the effects of immigration in political, sexual, and economic realms. Bakewell finds metoikia was a deeply flawed solution to the problem of large-scale immigration.

As Europe struggles to control immigration, the EU's southern flank is perceived as the weak flank of 'Fortress Europe'. This book examines the many facets of Southern Europe's new immigration: the diverse roles played by immigrants in the labour market, issues of social exclusion and wider strategic concerns of security and geopolitics.