This chapter discusses Attic women’s friendships. It takes two contexts of female friendship – the neighbourhood, and female-dominated religious spaces and occasions – and shows how they offered women opportunities to encounter other women, spend time in their company, and construct and define their own spatial and social worlds. It demonstrates the importance of women’s friendships as a source of support, particularly when male relatives failed. It examines two cases in which women were commemorated by friends rather than kin, one of which provided an opportunity for the commemorating woman to discuss her relationship with and feelings about her friend. It concludes with a new examination of the language of female friendship, demonstrating its similarities to the verbal language of male friendship and the behavioural language of kinship. The chapter shows that women’s personal, affective relationships with non-relatives complemented and sometimes supplanted their kin relationships, and constituted a valuable support system.

This chapter’s new analysis of Athenian kinship shows how its multiformity and malleability enabled women to manipulate patriarchal-patrilineal kinship structures and use alternative kinship modes and expressions. The chapter demonstrates the importance of maternal kin as caregivers in a demographic context which left a large minority of children fatherless and without paternal relatives, challenging a patriarchal vision of the household. It considers changes to household composition not from a demographic perspective but from an affective perspective, considering the potential influence of individuals, including women. New readings of forensic speeches and comedies show women persuading husbands to foster children from former marriages and take in vulnerable adults; voluntarily caring for others’ children; and influencing legal inclusion of individuals into the family, nominally a male prerogative. It argues that stories about suppositious children reflect anxieties about female influence on kinship as well as female sexuality.

Beginning from Lysias 1 and Xenophon’s Oeconomicus, this chapter looks at how women shaped the institution of slavery on an interpersonal level, using enslaved household members to construct and secure their own positions by establishing and maintaining a hierarchy of labour, sexuality, and dignity. It analyses the cross-generic trope of free women colluding with enslaved women and argues that it ‘refracts’ of a reality of close (though forced) interaction and cooperation in the context of profoundly unequal power relations. Similarly, portrayals of enslaved women in the sepulchral iconography of their enslavers express and reflect a complex interaction between intimacy and hierarchy. Monuments erected for enslaved nurses by their enslavers, however, emphasise inclusion rather than distinction. The chapter argues that free Athenian women’s relationships with women they kept in slavery loomed large on their emotional landscapes and were characterised by an uneasy forced intimacy which was exploited by the enslaving women.

The story of Diognete, a late fifth-century Athenian woman, provides a lens for thinking about how to write the history of women in classical Athens. The introduction considers the value of biographical approaches and other tools which treat women as individual subjects rather than members of categories. It explains the author’s decision to assign names to women whose names are lost or suppressed in the evidence, repositioning them as subjects of their own lives. It argues that the texts on inscribed dedications and gravestones commissioned by women were determined by the women themselves, leaving us with myriad female-authored texts. These texts inform the book’s experiential approach, which focuses on women’s own experiences of their lives.

This chapter draws biographies of women out of sources chiefly concerned with their male relatives, beginning with analysis of the parallel lives of Diognete (Lysias 32) and Nikarete (Demosthenes 57). The diachronic, biographical approach illustrates how factors including age, wealth, and social status shaped these women’s relationships and their experiences of marriage, separation, widowhood, and remarriage. Bringing further women into the picture demonstrates women’s ability to construct, maintain, and make use of networks spanning the households in which they had lived, including the ability to maintain relationships with ex-husbands’ relatives after remarriage and to form help-networks including non-relatives. It shows how out of necessity, women’s social strategies differed from men’s, tending to diversification rather than consolidation. The chapter argues that a woman’s social identity was not exclusively tied to her immediate circumstances or her kyrios, but could be rich and cumulative, reflecting a lifetime of experiences and relationships.

This chapter shows how income-generating work gave women a new axis and language of self-evaluation and enabled them to form relationships beyond their kin and neighbourhoods. It analyses expressions of women’s attitudes to their employment in religious dedications. It examines the social lives and networks of women in the commercial textile economy and considers how women’s remunerated labour affected household dynamics. It highlights the commercial relationships entailed by women’s involvement in supply chains of Attic sanctuaries and considers women’s interactions with clients and colleagues in markets and shops. It uses curse tablets aimed at women retailers and joint dedications made by colleagues as evidence for women acting as workers within commercial networks rather than family members in kinship networks. It concludes with two monuments connected with the doctor Phanostrate which attest to the possibility that relationships arising from work could take on the character of and even displace kin relationships.

The conclusion summarises the book’s key findings: women could create and exploit diverse, cumulative networks as they moved through their lives; the instability of Attic family life led to a diversity of family structures, which women could construct in dialogue with patriarchal legal frameworks; women shaped the institution of slavery at the most intimate level; income-generating work saw women embrace new forms of self-value, expand their networks, and shape Athens’ economy and materiality; beyond the male institutions of the deme and phratry, women counter-normatively defined their own identities and relationships through their own institutions. It offers suggestions for future directions in scholarship and education. It reflects on how the study of ancient women centred around women’s engagement with other women, rather than their relationships to men, reveals the richness and dynamism of women’s social lives and their remarkable capacity to shape Athenian society and history.