Book Review: Daughters of Gaia

Bryn Mawr Classical Review (Reviewed by Christina A. Clark)

Bella Vivante, Daughters of Gaia. Women in the Ancient Mediterranean World. Westport, CT: Praeger Press, 2007.

Table of Contents

In her preface to Daughters of Gaia, Vivante declares that this book is a labor of love. Clearly it is so; Vivante has published many articles and books dealing with the lives and experiences of women, both in ancient Greco-Roman cultures, and in other important world cultures such as China and India. This book is a thematic study of women's roles in the ancient Mediterranean world starting from the assumption that pre-state societies positively valued women and their contributions to culture and daily life, whereas later patriarchal societies consistently downgraded women's roles and contributions. Vivante has used information from modern American indigenous cultures to provide gynocentric models for framing her research questions, which, in her view, enable "a far greater understanding about ancient women's lives than conventional Western lenses allow" (xiii). Indeed this is the author's stated goal: "to gain meaningful appreciation of the fullness of women's lives in the ancient Mediterranean World" (xxii). She examines evidence spanning four thousand years from Egypt, Mesopotamia, Greece and Rome, employing a "feminist and multiethnic" analytical framework (xxiv). Topics addressed are those common to studies of women in antiquity: goddesses and women's roles in religion, daily life, health and medicine, women and economics, women with political power, women and war, and women writers (philosophers and poets, for the most part).

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