How would an all-female Amazon community sustain itself past a single generation?
This question didn’t really interest the ancient Greeks, but insofar as it did, they had an answer. For one month every year, ancient Greek stories said, the Amazons would go up into the mountains to consort with males from surrounding villages, and nine months after that, they would drop off all the male babies to their fathers’ villages, keeping only the girls.
So far, this sounds like an ancient Greek male fantasy of sex without personal consequences, with the added cultural value of depicting Amazons as disruptors of ancient Greek gender norms. Ancient Greek women were expected to stay at home, accept the husband chosen for them with neither resistance nor desire, and produce children for a male-headed family. Amazons left their homes, mated with the men they wanted, formed no permanent bond with them, and reproduced to suit themselves.
This was the most benign story. Another story said that the Amazons exposed the male babies on the nearest hillside. The horrifying detail, to the ancient Greeks, was that it was male babies the Amazons exposed. The ancient Greeks routinely exposed unwanted babies, which were, in ancient Greek communities, much more often female than male.
According to another ancient Greek story, the Amazons neither returned the male infants, nor left them on a hillside to die, but enslaved them, maimed them so they couldn’t run away, and forced them to perform all the domestic labour the Amazons themselves had no desire to do. This story was also a reversal of the standard ancient Greek practice of confining women in the house, to perform all the domestic labour that maintained the household. The shocking thing was that the Amazons were forcing males to do all the household tasks demeaning to the dignity of free men. This story also tells us something about the ancient Greek storytellers’ uneasy knowledge that their treatment of women in their own communities kept them as little better than slaves.
One medical writer contributed the detail that Amazons burned off one of their breasts — hence the name “A-mazon”, “Without (a) breast”, either because it interfered with archery, or because they only needed one breast because they were only nursing their female infants. This story makes clear not only that the ancient Greek storytellers were all male, and that they had never seen a woman nursing a baby — it doesn’t work that way — but that they were in denial about their own custom of frequent exposure of female infants. This story primarily depicts the Amazons as not nurturing towards male infants, the primary function of women in ancient Greek families.
So far, ancient Greek stories about Amazons are transparently constructed to depict them as terrifyingly different from what women “should be”. They tell us nothing about how an all-female Amazon society, if one had ever existed — and there is no evidence that one ever did — could survive and reproduce itself from one generation to the next. How, exactly, would such a society survive and maintain itself?
Click here for Part 2, “Amazon Reproductive Economy: By the Numbers”
