The only women, who were experienced in all secular matters and able to communicate were heteras, cultivated courtesans and it was not suitable for a polite woman to look like them. Such a woman should not look from window. Athenians were boasting, that their wives were never in the window, "even the word never was appropriate for them and for a town" /Lykurgos:Anti Leokrates, page 40. and they criticized those who encouraged to go out in the evening after the fight of their husbands. They asked about the fate of their relatives. Socially, it was not acceptable for a woman to have visits of other women because "even a wise woman learns from other woman only bad things." /Euripides: Andromacha, page 925/.
This essay about a possible misbehavior, where you have to keep someone in his place, will be further discussed, when we talk of Greek misogyny.
One passage in Plutarches introduces to us with ignorance in which women lived in classical Greece and how they lived in solitude. One of the enemies of the King Hieron mocks him for his bad breath. The ruler comes to the palace furious and reproaches his wife for not telling him that he has a bad breath. She answers him with the most innocent voice: "I thought all men smell like this."
Of course, fully uneducated woman, accustomed to distaff and gossips was excluded from the spiritual cultural educating, what created gap, which separated her from her husband, because he kept up with the time and civilization.
A man had to deal with politics, it was a duty of each good citizen, and to be informed all the time about the serious welfare matters, he had to attend the square- agora- town club under the blue sky, where it was discussed about governing the town. Of course, we have to suppose that women, often more intelligent than their husbands, influenced voting and so they mediately took part in the town government. The husband and wife spent time together only in the bedroom and dining room.
A woman got out from the subjugation of a father /or brother or her guardian/, into the subjugation of her husband, and if she divorced, her guard became the man who was responsible for her as the last one. Even a widow could not freely get married to the one, who was appointed by her late husband, it was usually his friend, or who was chosen by he oldest son, father or guardian. Women got into the lifelong prison before they were adult. There also existed public officials, who were supposed to take care of them. They were called gynaikonomio.
But it was not like this all the time. It seems that among the first Greeks, in Aegean and Mycenaenan period /era of pre -Greek culture/ in the period of Homer epics, women enjoyed freedom. Such a conclusion is logically drawn from literature, not from arheological knowledge, which are so controversial as the findings of the seeming creta joy girls, who show breasts. They could possibly be the weepers at funerals, because at Mediterranean countries, women scratched their breast as the sign of their sorrow.
It is sure that a freedom of women in archaic period was th and considerable but from then, maybe from 7th and 8th century BC, a woman was step by step excluded from public life, until she remained closed at home. At least it was like this in Athens - a town that we have the most news about.
We are a little bit astonished, by the fact that a woman exclusion from public life timely corresponds with founding town city state -polis as a political unit, a real moving force of Greek society in the period which we call classical. Explanation of this reactionism in treating a woman offers a lot of hypothesis. Some people think that a city state, always threatened by neighbours, overestimated the male element which should be able to protect it with a gun, so a fighter, to the detriment of a woman. The biological function of a woman was not considered to be important in politically- social hierarchy of the town.