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.

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.

"Over the years, millions of people from around the world left their homes in search of a better life in the United States of America. Most studies of this life-altering experience have focused on its meaning and effects for men. Walking Common Ground reveals the surprising contrasts which show up in this story when the focus shifts to women." "Comparing women's accounts of nineteenth century immigration taken from letters, diaries and autobiographies with extensive in-depths interviews of twentieth century women from every corner of the globe, Kristine Leach uncovers an unexpected commonality of experience for immigrant women, in spite of enormous differences in time, place and circumstance. Going beyond the recitation of immigration statistics, Leach explores the problems of child rearing in a culture with different standards of behavior, the adjustments to new freedoms and responsibilities and the orientation to new types of housing, food, customs and morals. She develops her account through the words and life of the women under study, placing her theoretical account in its concrete reality."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

"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.

The Greek diaspora is one of the paradigmatic historical diasporas. Though some trace its origins to ancient Greek colonies, it is really a more modern phenomenon. Diaspora, exile and immigration represent three successive phases in Modern Greek history and they are useful vantage points from which to analyse changes in Greek society, politics and culture over the last three centuries. Embracing a wide range of case studies, this volume charts the role of territorial displacements as social and cultural agents from the eighteenth century to the present day and examines their impact on communities, politics, institutional attitudes and culture. By studying migratory trends the aim is to map out the transformation of Greece from a largely homogenous society with a high proportion of emigrants to a more diverse society inundated by immigrants after the end of the Cold War. The originality of this book lies in the bringing together of diaspora, exile and immigration and its focus on developments both inside and outside Greece.