The picture of women in history is often faint and foggy, and because of the fact that this is the sort of thing that could potentially end up harming women’s rights in the modern day it is important to look harder into history to see what their story is. You might think that women were always submissive and devoid of rights throughout history, but the idea of empowered women is actually not as new as you might end up thinking based on your own limited knowledge of the way the world might have worked before.
For example, women in Spartan history are actually quite empowered. While there was still a lot of segregation in society and they weren’t exactly considered equal to men, there were two important areas where you could notice how much more empowered they were in other city states such as Athens. The first is somewhat minor on the surface but it has a deeper meaning to it and it involves sports. Girls were expected to play sports just as much as boys, and this indicated a more integrated society than you would have expected for this particular time period.
The other far more important area was marriage. In city states like Athens, it was customary for girls to be married off very young often at the age of thirteen or fourteen and usually to men who were nearly twice their age if not older. In Sparta, girls were married off later at around eighteen or nineteen and usually to boys who were not that much older than them. This is very important and it shows that such concepts are not as new as some would like you to believe.