WOMEN IN GREEK THEATRE

After watching a video about women in Greek Theatre: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lM3SxO0Erq8 I managed to gather a lot of notes about the subject:

• Women were seen but not heard, they were seen as being in the low pecking order
• There are so much more women being portrayed in Theatre now
• The plays were written by men and performed by men for men to watch, women weren't allowed to have anything to do with it
• They lived in a society where women were seen as the underclass
• Antigone was very different to how other women were seen, she had a huge personality and great intelligence, so many people thought it was strange. There were also many powerful Goddesses in the Greek world
• Some ancient scripts say women are annoying, "It's better to bury a woman then marry her."
• Some people, however, recognised how important women were. They may not have had a political voice or have been let out of the house, but they were very useful in the Ancient Greece society. They created new life/children and they ran all of the main religious festivals
• In tragedies, the tension between recognising women's importance and the need to control and subdue them worked really well
• They always dealt with issues of sexism through theatre rather than real life because it was safer, as it made everything seem quite unreal/fantasy
• Antigone wanted to bury her brother, and she was so passionate about it because a burial of someone is a religious offering to the Gods, and women were very devoted to their religion
• It seems that in Athenian times, if you weren't a white male who's over 30 and is more wealthy than the average citizen, you had a much easier time being heard politics-wise
• In the plays, the women were always the characters doing the most extreme deeds, and this allowed the audience to relate more to them as they gave off more strong/extreme emotion