Assembly Women is a satire (a silly story) written by Aristophanes, who was a comedic play-writer in Ancient Athens. The play follows a group of women who believe they can run the city better than men. This group of women plans to disguise themselves as women men and attend the Assembly. The Assembly was a group of people who had the right to share their ideas and vote on different rules or plans for the city. It's like when your family gathers to talk about what games to play or what to have for dinner, but on a much bigger scale and about the whole city!
In the play, there are some times when we can see the gender roles of men and women in this society. For example, in the play, one of the women says, “I oiled myself and stood in the sun all day getting a tan.” In this period, women’s jobs were to stay inside to clean the house, make the food, and do anything else to take care of the family. On the other hand, the men’s jobs were the harder jobs typically done outside, like farming and shopkeeping (store owner), making tans more manly.
The idea behind what this woman says is that women were paler than men because they spent most of their time inside doing their duties, so she put oil on her body to make her seem more manly. This is a funny story because the women in the play who dress up as male actors play men. This means that men are acting as women pretending to be men. Aristophanes wrote the play to make fun of and joke about how the government was run in Athens. However, he does this by speaking through the main female characters of the play. This means that what the women in the play say they believe and their thoughts and opinions about the government do not come from the women in this time. It is unknown what these women thought about the system. This is just one example of how writings and analyses of men can speak for women rather than coming from them.