'Women's religious festivals in Greece and Rome gave women a real chance to escape male control.'
How far do you agree with this statement? Use evidence from both Greece and Rome to support your answer.
Model answer
Women's festivals did give Greek and Roman women some of the very few occasions when they acted together, outside the home and without men. But in both cultures these escapes were temporary and permitted by men, and they usually celebrated the roles men expected women to play.
The Thesmophoria is the strongest Greek evidence. For three days married citizen women camped together in the sanctuary of Demeter, chose their own officials, fasted and performed secret rites from which men were completely excluded. For an Athenian wife, normally expected to stay indoors, this was extraordinary. The worship of Dionysus went further: the Maenad Cup shows a maenad in ecstasy with a leopard and a snake, and in Euripides' Bacchae the women leave their looms for the mountains. In Rome the Bona Dea rites, as Plutarch describes them, meant that the consul or praetor and 'every male' had to leave his own house while his wife ran an all-night festival with music and games.
However, these escapes were carefully contained. The Thesmophoria was a state festival on a fixed date, and Isaeus shows that a husband was expected to pay for the women's feast; the rites themselves were about the fertility of crops and the bearing of children, exactly what society wanted from wives. The Panathenaia gave girls honoured roles, such as weaving the peplos and carrying baskets, but on the Parthenon frieze the maidens are received by male marshals, and Thucydides tells how Hipparchus humiliated Harmodius' sister by rejecting her as a basket-carrier. The Bona Dea rites were held in a magistrate's house for the good of the state and led by respectable matronae and the Vestals, so they reinforced the social order.
Men were also deeply suspicious whenever women's religion seemed to escape their control. Aristophanes imagines the women at the Thesmophoria plotting against Euripides; Clodius' intrusion into the Bona Dea rites in 62 BC became a political scandal, and Caesar divorced his wife because she had to be 'above suspicion'. Most strikingly, Livy says the Bacchic rites were originally for women in daylight, but when they became night-time and mixed, the Senate suppressed them in 186 BC, arresting thousands. The Pudicitia cults show religion being used to control women: only univirae, women married once, could worship, and Verginia founded Plebeian Pudicitia to show plebeian wives were just as chaste.
In conclusion, I disagree with the statement to a large extent. Festivals gave women real experiences of independence - gathering, leading rites, excluding men - which they had nowhere else, especially in Athens. But these were permitted, time-limited breaks that celebrated chastity, fertility and motherhood, and when women's worship seemed truly uncontrolled, as with the Bacchanalia, men stepped in at once. They were a safety valve rather than a real escape.
Explanation
Strong answers balance the genuine independence of festivals such as the Thesmophoria and the Bona Dea against the ways they were permitted, funded, timed and policed by men, and use the Bacchanalia or Clodius' scandal to show male suspicion. The Pudicitia cults are a good example of religion reinforcing male values. Describing festivals without evaluating 'escape' or 'control' keeps an answer in Levels 2-3.
