Literature and gender issues in the past

[SBE]

I always associated the Murderess with gender issues, not with poverty.

Which makes me think that what I perceive as normal might be perceived as poverty when seen from the outside. I'm not saying that Papadiamantis did not make it explicit that he was describing poor people, but that it made little difference to me reading about them, as almost every villager I knew lived like that and they never complained they were poor or we did not describe them as poor.

In the Murderess one of the problems of having daughters is their dowry, which depends on what the family can afford. On the other hand, even daughters of wealthy families had similar problems- in order to marry well, they needed a good dowry otherwise they married beneath them (although by the time of my parents' generation all this had become more fluid).
In the Murderess, Frangoyannou felt she was a good and obedient daughter, but her father did not give her a worthy dowry and he tricked his son-in-law by giving him a piece of land that flooded with the tide. As a result of her father's ingratitude, not only did she have to marry a very poor man, her status in the marriage was worse than usual, etc etc etc.

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Παραφυάδα από το νήμα Queries about the translation of Zorba.

 

[Theseus]

SBE, your perspective always provides different insights. Because I am not a Greek, I tend to read literature from my own standpoint & it is always difficult to avoid bias. The moral is, i suppose, is that one has to read as widely as possible from all the world's literature of all times & ages. Even that, involves a certain measure of bias. Gender is one of the most important issues of our time but many men & women have no real interest in the topic, even though they pay lip service to it & the carry on as usual. The wife of a well-known British politician, when our MPs expenses scandal hit the news, had allegedly charged the nation for her husband's porn films.
The issues that gender studies seeks to raise are complex. For feminism see http://www.pellebilling.com/2009/03/men’s-reactions-towards-feminism/
& for an excellent critique of gender see http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/james-hetterley/a-critique-of-modern-gend_b_1157948.html.
What light is cast on the subject of gender by the huge increase in porn films, that (largely male) children as young as seven can now easily access & in tandem with this, the increased interest in period drama?
Is the present state of debate at an impasse? Is the following self-evident?
"'The question that gender academics should be asking is not “What is man” or “What is woman”, but “What is it to be human, and how does our genitalia affect our perception to society?” For at base level, all genders are first defined by stereotypes of sex. Although in society males are dominant, in the academic world we still have not even theorised the definition for what “man” is unless we define him by his genitalia - and if that is so then women must also be defined by their genitalia, and if genitalia really is the only distinguishing force, then gender studies has no use.":twit::mellow:

 

[SBE]

Thanks, Theseus.
I think I know what you mean, I have realised that my British friends have a very different view of the Eastern Mediterranean in the 19th and early 20th century than I do.

I'm not saying that the Murderess is exclusively about gender, but gender and injustice are the driving factors behind the murders- the heroine feels sorry for the little girls and tries to alleviate what she thinks will be their future suffering, based on her own experience.

 

[Palavra]

Exactly; not only the little girls' suffering, I would add, but their mothers' and fathers' suffering as well, since the family would have to provide the girls with dowries in order to get rid of them (sorry for that, but that's exactly what marrying a daughter off is shown as in the book).

I would also like to add to what SBE said above that family law changed only recently in Greece, in the early '80s. Before that, the practice of dowry was very much followed and contributed to great inequalities at the expense of women. It also added great burdens for families (mainly for the parents and, strangely, the brothers), who had to provide the girls with what would correspond to small fortunes in order to marry them.

 

[Theseus]

Thanks. Palavra. It is interesting to reflect how men also suffered from the dowry system. In the critique of feminism that I referred to above, the point is made that 'Feminism will not see or acknowledge that gender roles developed organically, as a functional fit to external circumstances.
Feminism will only deal with male privilege and female suffering, not female privilege and male suffering. A splendid example is talking about male privilege in the workplace, while forgetting female privilege in the home and male suffering in dangerous workplaces.'
The prevalence of Sharia law in Britain (though illegal) is still accepted by many Muslims as is the niqah contract under which the husband agrees to pay the wife a dowry. Such are the matters that arise from what looked like a simple query.

 

[Palavra]

There was no priviledge in the dowry system; women had no right whatsoever on the dowry property. The property was administered by their husbands, who collected all the benefits. If I am not mistaken, in the system that Papadiamantis describes, the husband acquired all title over the dowry assets. In more recent times in Greece, the husband could do whatever he liked to the assets but sell them without his wife's signature (and, if memory serves, this only applied to real property).

And yes, in some parts of Greece the boys had to work hard for their sisters' dowries, but then they got married themselves.

 

[SBE]

I had written a bit on dowry which I removed because I though it was out of context, but Palavra says it more or less: In the early 1980s the relevant law changed, reflecting social change, to include sons, as well as daughters, and dowry was renamed "parental wedding gift".
In theory, the dowry was a gift to help the new couple and was usually ringfenced for the children that would ensue from the marriage, but sometimes potential husbands demanded- and got- personal gifts of property and cash, which were theirs to do as they pleased. The better the social status or social potential a man had, the more he could hope to get out of his in-laws, however going for more or trying to blackmail your way to more, would label you a προικοθήρας, a gold-digger, which was a very bad thing for a man. Ι suppose the worst things people could be were προικοθήρας and άπροικη (of course the two would never meet).
In ye olden days, dowries included personal effects and clothes, not only the trousseau put together for the bride, but the actual everyday items used by her, hence an expression my grandmother loved "την πήρε μόνο με το βρακί που φορούσε", he married her with just the clothes on her back, about a man who did not care for a dowry (a sign of romantic love).
In the later days, when married women did not stop work after marriage, dowries began to be replaced by earnings potential. So a poor family who managed somehow to help their daughter through school and to help her find a job in the civil service would expect her to marry well without further expense, because of her elevated social status and earnings potential. That was quite an incentive for many parents, as supporting a daughter through free state education is more economical.
When my parents got married in the early 1960s dowries were still around, and were still a burden for some families, including, in the absence of a father, a burden for brothers. But I also have a lot of aunts and uncles who married in the early '70s and who met at university, at work etc and a dowry was not a big issue for them. I also remember vaguely that in the 70s all discussions on dowry were discrete. It was expected that there would be some give and take, but it was too vulgar to discuss it openly, for fear of being labelled a προικοθήρας or an insensitive parent.

Of course centuries of traditions don't go away overnight. They have instead been replaced by a complex system of social norms that is passed on to the next generation as "the right thing to do" to achieve an equitable marriage. There was a small window somewhere in the 70s-80s where it all appeared to fade away a little, only to resurface as the country became more prosperous. Less well-off families, who benefited from the decline of the dowry, found themselves with money, property and a new perceived social status and the issue of who gets what when started concerning them again. A sociologist friend has observed that marriage in Greece nowadays is a match of family and individual statuses, but I think it always was that.

But of course these are 21st century middle class problems, not early 20th c. peasant problems.

 

[SBE]

I wrote the above before seeing Palavra's answer.
If I remember well, there were two types of gifts men would receive that were considered dowry. One was a direct gift, where the future husband would be given property directly from his in-laws, and the other was the dowry that remained the property of the woman, administered by her husband. I don't think that it could be sold without her agreement, but of course that could be coerced.
A προικοθήρας would demand να του γράψουνε something (to give him deeds of ownership) instead of να είναι προικώο (to be part of a dowry).
I think this became more common in the post-war era, when divorce became a possibility, albeit a distant one. For the προικοθήρας it was κάλλιο πέντε και στο χέρι.

Edit: my grandfather, born in 1913, was the only child of his parents. His mother, who died at childbirth, was the second wife of his father who had two more children from his first marriage. She must have been either an older bride or a poor one, to marry a widower. In any case, she had some property. My grandfather inherited his mother's dowry, which was managed by his father and older brothers until his majority. He also inherited a third of his father's estate, but nothing that belonged to his father's first wife (that was divided equally between her two children).

 

[Theseus]

Thanks so much for all this information. A last question. What happened to unmarried males, if there were such?

 

[Palavra]

Elderly single men were usually seen with sympathy, with a slight dose of pity, if their status was not very elevated, e.g. they were not well-off. They would get invited to all family functions, but no serious societal repercussions.

Unmarried women were far less fortunate. To give you an example, my aunt got married in Rodos at 22, and she was looked upon like a spinster, because she was too old to marry (I am laughing out loud at this). If they did not marry at all, they were pitied by society, and unless they had lots of money, and they were also expected to be the family caretaker: look after elderly parents, take care of their nieces and nephews etc.

 

[Theseus]

This was a brutal system! It is hard to see what benefits such an age-old system ever had for women and why it was allowed to continue for so long. I suppose that people accept a system that is perceived as traditional and therefore works. Papadiamantis's Murderess, “torn by the claws of reality”, shows the acute moral dilemma of the dowry system and the terrible state and future fate of little girls.
But it is clear in the West at any rate that the industrial revolution and the rise of capitalism began to free women for employment. The outbreak of the First World War (and the second too) had a lasting impact on women’s lives. Women were actually already working outside the home before 1914, but they were mainly in textile manufacturing. WW1 is when women finally ventured out into other areas such as munitions factories because the State provided childcare. Without good childcare provision, there is no way that millions of women would have been able to work.
In the U.K., as far as women’s education is concerned, women did not begin attending college in equal numbers to men until as recently as 1980! But the most revolutionary liberator of women was female contraception. Marie Stopes’s reading on the subject prompted her first book “Married Love”, which was published in 1918 and attacked by the Church. Even until 1961, women’s lives were very different. Often married at an early age, most women were expected to stay at home and raise an expanding family while men went out to work. Nowadays, women can choose to have children, further education and a career on their own terms. The pill has changed all that but predictably it was the Churches which attacked with vitriol the availability of the pill.

 

[SBE]

More brutal systems:
My grandmother’s youngest sister, who died a couple of years ago aged 90+, was five when they were orphaned. She was soon sent off to a wealthy family in Patras as a maid. Then because there were rumours that she was not chaste*, nobody wanted to marry her. She then made a living working as a seamstress until she was in her late 30s when she inherited a substantial sum from an uncle in Canada with which she bought a house, stopped working, got a social circle etc. So she became a spinster with a dowry, which might have piqued the interest of some men, but her reputation was still a problem and I don’t think she wanted to marry, anyway. Which was not as unusual as we think today.

Another great aunt (my grandmother’s first cousin, born around 1910-1915), had a good dowry but married at 39, after turning down several offers. I have seen a letter to my grandmother in which she is complaining that the latest προξενειό (the man she eventually married) was red-haired and she did not like that. My grandmother said that at the same time as that letter she got another letter from the brother of the reluctant bride, begging her to help change his sister’s mind, because he was getting desperate*. My grandmother obliged by writing back to her cousin that she knew of the young man, and that he was a kind person. In reality, she had never heard of him, but it turned out she was right and they had a long and happy life. For about a year we lived next door to them and he was my favourite grown up.

*He was getting desperate because he was the head of the family (their father had died) and it was expected that he should find husbands for his sisters before he himself could marry. A cruel custom, but at least it ensured that unmarried sisters would not end up being second class family members at their brother's household.

 

[Theseus]

These narratives are precious because the world they describe has nearly gone. The most harrowing story that I can tell of that world was, when I, then an Anglican priest, was called to the local crematorium to take a service for a 'female pauper'. The man in charge of the ovens, an Irishman called Paddy, explained that there were no mourners. So l took the funeral service with no-one there, except us & a pauper's coffin. I had found out that the woman in it was herself Irish & as a result of having given birth to a 'bastard child' had been sent to a mental hospital in England, while the child was raised in Ireland by nuns to be a good Catholic. She had spent sixty years in various mental hospitals, partly because the loss of her child had unhinged her & partly because the stigma attached to such mothers had led to her being ostracised by the Church & thus a disgrace to her kith & kin. At the end of the service, Paddy put his hand on the coffin & said 'Goodbye, old girl' as she made her last journey 'to be consumed by fire'.

 

[SBE]

An Eleanor Rigby.
On a similar but different note, after my ""unchaste" great aunt died we were told by someone that she had a baby when she was very very young and working as a maid. The baby was given away for adoption, with the help of some of her women relatives. We don't know if it is a true story because all the people involved died ages ago and obviously never talked about it. However I can imagine a group of women banding together to cover up a scandal. It's just that in my mind these women are never Irish nuns. Blame literature and cinema.

 

[Palavra]

SBE, you know, you could write a very good book with all the stories you've shared here. It's also really good that you know all about your relatives from your grandmother's time.

On the matter of dowry: my Cretan grandmother (born in the early 30s) had inherited some real property from her parents in Crete (for all who know anything about the island, "some" can mean quite a lot :) ) She then proceeded to give it all to her unmarried sister, because she was afraid her sister would die in poverty with no one to look after her. Well, it seems that other family members had taken similar steps, and as a result the sister got married in her fifties to a good man and lived happily ever after - which would have been impossible without the dowry, of course.

 

[SBE]

I'm not very good at writing.
However it is true that because I was brought up by my maternal grandmother I know a lot about her extended family. At say, 5-6 years old, she used to keep an eye on me doing my thing while she was chatting to her friends. I used to listen to everything. We recently realised that I know more about my grandmother than my mother does.
All I can say is that some things have not changed in 60-70 years.
Here's an example: Local transport in Patras is private and belongs to, essentially, one person, who was recently accused of driving off when there are university students at a bus stop, because he doesn't want to give them student discounts. The University is in our village, 6Km from central Patras.
Rewind 60 years. There was some law at the time about the free transport of students to their schools. The owners of the local buses (the father of the current owner) would not stop and pickup schoolkids from the bus stop in our village. As a result the children were missing out on school, as the nearest high school was 6 Km away in central Patras. The parents formed a committee, which included my grandfather, and tried to negotiate. My grandfather was furious, 40+ years later, at how badly they were treated by the owner of the bus company who more or less told them they should forget about educating their children at the expense of the taxpayer. Even though we ended up being neighbours in the 70s, he only barely greeted them in the street.

My father's family on the other hand is a bit of a mystery, I only know of a couple of ancestors who made it into the history books (not necessarily the glorious pages).

 

[drsiebenmal]

[...]it was expected that he should find husbands for his sisters before he himself could marry. A cruel custom, but at least it ensured that unmarried sisters would not end up being second class family members at their brother's household.

Is this the post where we share horror stories from our families' histories and more?

The family of my father's mother had in the last decades of the 1800s (as far as I know, since no one was eager to discuss earlier family business) at least five boys and two girls. The girls, my grandmother Kalliope and her sister Eleni, were the 5th and 6th child, respectively. My grandmother married in the late 1910s but her sister was unlucky. The post-1922 Greek society, the crisis and political turmoil of the 30s, the war, together with some family business accidents didn't help, so she never married.

All boys remained unmarried. The older, uncle Georgios, aged 60+, passed shortly after the war as my grandmother also did; some of the brothers had already died earlier. Uncle Dimitrios, boy #7, lived a life as "protector" of my great aunt until she passed in the late '70s; he passed later during the heat-wave disaster of 1987, aged 94.

These great uncles of mine were not the only boys in the wider family that remained unmarried. Some of their cousins had similar fate (some migrated even to the States or South Africa to provide for an ever growing dowry for ever aging unmarried sisters).

 

[SBE]

What I find most strange is how some of these customs were rejected by the postwar generations, but still persisted in various forms until recently.

A friend of a friend told us that when she was at university in Athens, sometime in the late 80s, her mother called and announced she was coming to Athens to "talk". Obviously it was something too important to discuss over the phone. It turned out that her younger sister, who was 19 at the time, was getting married to her boyfriend. The parents wanted to consult with the older sister, in case she was upset that they did not marry in birth order (another tradition).