Women’s Empowerment: A Historical Introduction

The legal condition of women in ancient Greece and Rome is a milestone in history because of attempts to justify it, but also because it has been more or less a legal model of women’s subalternity during the later centuries. It was necessary to wait a long time before a scientific discussion started to crash into the unicity of the patriarchal social organization. The theory of Johann Jakob Bachofen in the second part of the nineteenth century is an example of an innovative message that dared to assume for the first time the dependence of patriarchy on the culture, not on the nature. It contributed to establish the basis of the female movement that changed women’s condition in twentieth century. A centuries-old social organization based on male/female disparity started to finally crack in the direction of a power balance change and gender equality.