Content warning: references to sexual abuse, infertility, pregnancy loss, baby loss, body shape and size
I’m currently re-drafting my Ancient Gender and Sexuality classes, making sure I am keeping up with current approaches to the topic, and I’ve also been thinking a fair bit about some of these issues since coming back from maternity leave. I wanted to put some of these thoughts out there now as I continue to prepare the teaching material, and welcome feedback from colleagues on how I’m approaching this topic.
Be warned – this is a long post! If you want the TL:DR it’s this:
I theorise that the physical facts of attempting biological reproduction for people identified as female at birth in the Greek and Roman worlds made a substantial contribution to the development of women’s clothing and fashions, as well as contributing to the development of other gender stereotypes and gender norms.
I had a brief look to see if anyone has published anything proper and peer-reviewed on this. I feel sure someone must have done, but if so, I couldn’t find it – please send me references to any relevant literature in the comments below!
I am focusing here on reasonably well off women from the middle and upper classes. This is not because I don’t think the lives of people born into slavery or poverty are important; it’s just because I’m focusing on my own area of knowledge (which tends towards the middle and upper classes because I tend to focus on textual evidence), and because I’m talking about clothing and fashion for people with some level of choice in terms of how they clothed their bodies.
I am also going to use the shorthand ‘woman/women/female’ to refer to people identified as female at birth, and ‘man/men/male’ for people identified as male at birth. This is not intended to erase trans people, nonbinary people and others from history. Transgender people, genderfluid people, nonbinary people and others have all existed throughout history and historians are working on recovering that history right now.
However, the languages of the ancient world only recognise two genders – male and female. The ancients were, of course, aware of intersex people, but their attitude towards them was often unpleasant. Terms for people who crossed gender boundaries, including ‘hermaphrodite’ for intersex people, various words for eunuchs, and ‘kinaidos’ (effeminate man) do not exactly correspond with modern English terms and often carry pejorative overtones. So I will use woman/man and female/male because that is closer to the language the Greeks and Romans themselves used.
My theory is based on the assumption that the majority of the women I am talking about were in heterosexual marriages, and a majority of those women were pregnant for a not insubstantial proportion of their adult lives. Let me unpack those two statements.
First, marriage. There must always have been some women who had the means and the will not to get married. In the late Roman world, St Macrina insisted that when her fiancée died, it made her a widow, and therefore (in order to fulfil the Roman Christian ideal of being married only once) she should never get married. Macrina was rich, and was born into a very devout family with at least two brothers who were members of the clergy, so she was able to achieve her goal. From my limited knowledge of the 19th century, the concept of a ‘spinster’ and the lives of Jane Austen and Louisa May Alcott would seem to imply that some women in later periods were also able to make the choice not to get married.
However, in the Greek and Roman world, very few middle and upper class women were in a position to make that choice. Women were married between the ages of about 12 and 15, so that not too much time passed between the onset of menstruation and marriage. Their fathers arranged the marriage. There was no recognised role for well-off women outside of marriage. When we see unmarried women in ancient texts, they are usually prostitutes. In the city of Rome, some wealthy girls were chosen to be Vestal Virgins, but there were only six of these at any one time. Poor widows might make money by selling garlands in the marketplace, or live on charity.
Of course, some women may have lived as men or found other unconventional ways to support themselves. A late fourth century monk called Bessarion, for example, recorded that when he and a fellow monk went to bury the body of a Desert Father who had died, they found that the body was female (Bessarion 4). We can assume that some trans men, lesbian women and other people identified as female at birth who chose not to marry or have children for whatever reason, lived in different ways, and are not recorded in the texts left to us by writers who are primarily cisgender men. And of course, many women became prostitutes, musicians, dancers and so on, though considering the unreliability of contraception and abortion they must have been frequently pregnant too. (Whether midwives were married and/or mothers or not, I’m not sure, and my text on the subject of midwives is in the office – let me know in the comments!). However, considering middle and upper class women were ordered to get married in their early teens, we can also assume that those choosing and pursuing a different life were in the minority, due to the sheer financial difficulty involved for anyone identified as female at birth to support themselves.
Women’s primary role as wives was to produce legitimate children; to quote an ancient Athenian speech from a court case prosecuting a woman for prostitution, ‘Hetaerae [companions, courtesans] we keep for pleasure, concubines for attendance upon our person, but wives for the procreation of legitimate children and to be the faithful guardians of our households’ (Demosthenes 59.122, Against Neaira).
The vast majority of women, therefore, would be actively trying to get pregnant. Presumably a small number of men with no attraction to women might have declined to have sex with their wives, but most would at least make the attempt in order to produce legitimate heirs even if they weren’t particularly enthusiastic about it. There was no concept of marital rape in the ancient world, so, as unpleasant as it is to think about it this way, the choice was entirely the husband’s. Contraception and abortificants existed, but they were unreliable and sometimes dangerous.
Of these, the majority would experience multiple pregnancies. Some would be unable to get pregnant due to infertility in either the husband or the wife (which the ancients would assume was infertility on the part of the wife) but the majority would, at some point, get pregnant. Assuming they survived the first pregnancy, and that they continued to be able to conceive, they would then experience multiple pregnancies over the next number of years.
The number of pregnancies an ancient woman would experience is unknown, but it is safe to say that most women (if they survived) would experience more pregnancies than the number of surviving children they eventually had. One in four pregnancies today ends in miscarriage (currently medically defined as pregnancy loss before 24 weeks of pregnancy). That modern statistic has remained unchanged for a very long time. In the ancient world, the rates of stillbirth and infant mortality (as well as maternal mortality) would also have been higher than in the modern industrialised world.
What has all this to do with clothing?, you may be wondering. Well, this may seem like an extremely obvious statement to make, but pregnancy changes a woman’s body shape and size. While most women don’t “show” until about 12-14 weeks in, the changes to the body start straight away. Some of us end up experiencing so much bloating and water weight gain that we start looking pregnant much earlier – friends had guessed I was pregnant by about 7-8 weeks in, and at 10 weeks a woman in the supermarket noted it was obvious when I mentioned I was pregnant and asked how far along I was. When I said “10 weeks” she said, “Oh, 10 weeks to go?” I’m not entirely sure she actually believed I was only 10 weeks pregnant! (Luckily when all your work is on Zoom, most people can’t tell…).
So, regardless of whether or not an ancient woman was able to carry pregnancies to full term and have children who survived, if she was able to conceive, she was getting pregnant, and her body shape and size was in constant flux. (For some of us, our body shape fluctuates with our monthly menstrual cycle anyway, so even some women who weren’t able to get pregnant would experience this). For women who were able to carry a pregnancy to full term, their shape and size would change substantially. The weight gain for most women is not restricted to the abdomen, but includes face, hips, chest, and even shoe size can change.
These changes do not always disappear within six weeks of giving birth, either. It can take a long time to lose pregnancy weight, and some women’s hips expand and do not ever return to their pre-pregnancy shape. The so-called “mummy tummy” (urgh I hate that phrase!) is often caused by a condition called diastasis recti, in which the abdominal muscles expand and don’t come back together again, so the woman continues to look pregnant or have a bump for a long time. Nowadays people have developed exercises that can help to bring the muscles back together, but general exercise and diet will do nothing to change it, and in the past, the condition was not understood well enough and women had no idea which particular exercises they should be doing. My grandmother had a large abdominal swelling for the rest of her life after having her second child; in the 1950s, no one knew how to treat it.
If a woman chooses to breastfeed, her body shape continues to fluctuate for many more months or even years. In the ancient world as in the modern world, this was a choice for those who were able to do it (some women are unable to breastfeed) and would be different for different women – some would use wet-nurses, some would breastfeed their children, some would use animal milks if unable to either breastfeed or hire a wet-nurse. Some women lose weight while breastfeeding, others do not, or even gain it (my body, as far as I can tell, is very concerned that there might be a famine and the baby will need milk, and stubbornly refuses to lose weight until I stop breastfeeding no matter what I eat or how much I exercise). For ancient women, they would quite possibly be pregnant again before they stopped breastfeeding (breastfeeding being another notoriously unreliable form of contraception).
All of this means that in the modern world, we spend an absolute fortune on clothing because our clothes are designed to be completely unforgiving to a changing body shape. I have had to buy an entirely new wardrobe at least three times in past 18 months and I suspect I’m not done yet.
It is no wonder, then, that women’s fashion in the ancient world tends towards long, loose dresses. If something is loose-fitting and tied with a belt, that belt can be adjusted to take into account a changing body shape. Wearing a long dress means that it doesn’t matter if the length of the dress shifts slightly around the ankles with a changing size and/or swelling abdomen. Short dresses suddenly become much too short if the hips and/or belly grow a lot – with long dresses, it’s harder to tell the difference.* Bonus points if the dress can be easily taken down from the top or pushed aside to release the breasts for feeding. These clothes are designed to allow women to clothe constantly changing body shapes, and if needed to feed their babies, without having to buy entire new wardrobes every few months.
While thinking about the physical impact of pregnancy, I also want briefly to mention some of the other impacts it may have had. Pregnancy, as anyone who ever watched a sitcom will be aware, does things to a woman’s hormones, to her mental wellbeing, and to her brain. Hormonal changes can led to mood swings, while “baby brain” is most likely the result of intense sleep deprivation as newborn babies need to feed every 2-4 hours day and night. This is on top of not having had a proper night’s sleep for months beforehand, due to the need to go to the toilet several times a night because of pressure on the bladder, and the impossibility of finding a comfortable sleeping position. The hormonal crash after giving birth frequently leads to crying fits (I think my longest was about 3 hours, and that was 3 months postpartum!) and the pressure of looking after a new baby causes intense stress.
Consider all that, and now consider that in the ancient world, 30-year-old men married teenage girls (who are already stuffed full of raging hormones) and then got them pregnant as quickly as possible. It’s no wonder ancient men thought women were more irrational and emotional than men. If they’d been forcibly married and impregnated in their teens, gone through the intense physical ordeal of pregnancy and childbirth – an experience which gives some women PTSD and was even more terrifying in a world with higher rates of maternal mortality – and then suffered severe and prolonged sleep deprivation, only to do it all again within a year or two, they’d have been irrational and emotional as well.
I started thinking about all of this when I watched a You Tube video by dress historian Abby Cox on wearing Georgian clothing, in which she talked about how Georgian women’s clothing allowed women to “never have a fat day” because you can lace the stays more loosely or more tightly depending on the day (and the fashionable shape of the clothing remains the same). That got me thinking about how, before the advent of both reliable contraception and social changes making it possible for more people identified as female at birth to choose not to have children in the twentieth century, women’s clothing fashions must have been heavily influenced by the needs of constantly changing, frequently pregnant and/or nursing bodies, in ways that I haven’t seen talked about much. But again, if there’s work on this I’m missing, please let me know because I want to share the references with my students!
*Ancient Spartan women did wear short dresses, because they were encouraged to exercise and these were more practical. They may also have been pregnant less often, for cultural reasons I don’t have space to go into because this post is long enough already!
Juliette Harrisson 
