ng and rearing of children,
and to the hetaera for comradeship and intellectual sympathy. This evil
was the canker-worm which gnawed out the core of the social life of
Athens and caused the unhappiness of the female sex.

At the birth of a girl in Athens, woollen fillets were hung upon the
door of the house to indicate the sex of the child, the olive wreath
being used to proclaim the birth of a boy. This custom demonstrates the
relative importance of son and daughter in the eyes of the parents and
the public. The son was destined for all the victories that public life
and the prestige of the State can give; therefore, the olive, symbol of
victory, served to make known his advent. The daughter's life was to be
one of domestic duties, hence the band of wool, with its connotation of
spinning and weaving, was a fitting emblem of the career for which the
babe was destined. The plan of a Greek house indicates how secluded
woman's whole life was to be. In the interior part of the Greek mansion,
separated from the front of the building by a door, lay the
_gyncaeconitis_, or women's apartments, usually built around a court.
Here were bedrooms, dining-rooms, the nursery, the rooms for spinning
and weaving, where the lady of the house sat at her wheel. This was, in
brief, the feminine domain.

In the seclusion of the _gyncaeconitis_, the girl-child was reared by its
mother and nurse. Her playthings--dishes, toy spindles, and dolls--were
such as to cultivate her taste for domestic duties. No regular public
and systematized instruction was provided for a girl; no education was
deemed necessary, for her life was to be devoted to the household, away
from the world of affairs. But though there were no schools for maidens
to attend, reading and writing and the fundamentals of knowledge were
regularly imparted by a loving mother or a faithful nurse. The frescoed
walls made the girls acquainted with the stories of mythology, and music
and the recitation of poetry were frequent sources of instruction and
recreation in the homes of the well-to-do. The maidens were, above all,
made proficient in the strictly feminine arts of housekeeping, spinning,
weaving, and embroidery. They were rigidly excluded from any intercourse
with the other sex, and their contact with the outside world was
confined to participation in the religious festivals, which occupied so
large a part in the everyday life of the Greeks. "When I was seven years
of age," says