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“Rulers ruled by women”: an economic analysis of the rise and fall of women’s rights in ancient Sparta

Content Provider	Springer Nature Link
Author	Fleck, Robert K. Hanssen, F. Andrew
Copyright Year	2009
Abstract	Until modern times, most women possessed relatively few formal rights. The women of ancient Sparta were a striking exception. Although they could not vote, Spartan women reportedly owned 40 percent of Sparta’s agricultural land, and enjoyed other rights that were equally extraordinary. We offer a simple economic explanation for the Spartan anomaly. The defining moment for Sparta was its conquest of a neighboring land and people, which fundamentally changed the marginal products of Spartan men’s and Spartan women’s labor. To exploit the potential gains from a reallocation of labor—specifically, to provide the appropriate incentives and the proper human capital formation—men granted women property (and other) rights. Consistent with our explanation for the rise of women’s rights, when Sparta lost the conquered land several centuries later, the rights for women disappeared. Two conclusions emerge that may help explain why women’s rights have been so rare for most of history. First, in contrast to the historical norm, the optimal (from the men’s perspective) division of labor among Spartans involved women in work that was not easily monitored by men. Second, the rights held by Spartan women may have been part of an unstable equilibrium, which contained the seeds of its own destruction.
Starting Page	221
Ending Page	245
Page Count	25
File Format	PDF
ISSN	14356104
Journal	Economics of Governance
Volume Number	10
Issue Number	3
e-ISSN	14358131
Language	English
Publisher	Springer-Verlag
Publisher Date	2009-03-20
Publisher Place	Berlin, Heidelberg
Access Restriction	One Nation One Subscription (ONOS)
Subject Keyword	Greece Institutions Property rights Sparta Women’s rights Political Science Public Finance & Economics Economics general
Content Type	Text
Resource Type	Article
Subject	Business and International Management Economics, Econometrics and Finance

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