Women have long been marginalised in the world of ancient texts, but female scholars and translators are finally having their say If you look up the subject heading “female classicists” in the large research library catalogue at the university where I teach, a grand total of five books pop up – of which two are separate editions of _It’s a Don’s Life_ by Mary Beard. Next up, alphabetically, is “female cleaning personnel”, which has a larger number of volumes devoted to it: six, with no duplicates, none by Beard. Predictably, there are no entries for “male classicists”. Male classical scholars are represented by the heading “classicists” – which counts more than 200 volumes. Like “female scientists” (42 volumes, as opposed to 303 for “scientists”) or “male nurses” (three to 377), “female classicists” is a category that has been assumed not to exist. (In fact, a handful of women are buried among the “classicists”; one can find here several studies of Victorian classical scholar Jane Harrison, including a fine one by Beard.) For hundreds of years, the study of ancient Greece and Rome was largely the domain of elite white men and their bored sons. One might assume optimistically that things have changed. After all, women from a wide variety of backgrounds are now able to enrol at prestigious universities and colleges and learn Latin and Greek from scratch; knowledge of the ancient languages is no longer open only to men. But the legacy of male domination is still with us – inside the discipline of classics itself and in how non-specialist general readers gain access to the history and literature of the ancient world. Continue reading...
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