Greece - Korina Miller [36]
Old attitudes towards the ‘proper role’ for women have changed dramatically since the 1980s, when dowry laws were abolished, legal equality of the sexes established and divorce made easier.
While there have been many benefits for mothers in the public sector (such as leaving work earlier to pick up school children and earlier retirement for women with school-age children), Greek women generally do it tough in the male-dominated workplace. Women are significantly under-represented in the workforce compared with their EU or international counterparts, often earning less than men and struggling to even find the corporate ladder.
There are capable women in prominent positions in business and government, though more often than not they also happen to be the wives or daughters of prominent or wealthy men. Women – who did not even vote in national elections until 1952 – hold only 16% of seats in parliament.
In conservative provincial towns and villages, women still maintain traditional roles, though women’s agricultural cooperatives play a leading role in regional economies and in the preservation of culinary and cultural heritage. On the domestic front, Greek women (at least the older generation) are famously house-proud and take great pride in their culinary skills. It’s still relatively rare for men to be involved in housework or cooking, and boys are waited on hand and foot. Girls are involved in domestic chores from an early age, though the new generation of bleached-blonde Athenian women are more likely to be found in the gym or beauty salon than in the kitchen.
Politics & the Media Circus
Greeks love their newspapers and gorge on news and politics. You will often see men standing outside periptera (street kiosks) reading the day’s juicy front-page headlines from the gallery of daily papers on display. Greece has a disproportionate number of newspapers and TV stations given its population – 30 national dailies (including 10 sports dailies) and seven national TV networks. Newspapers, like most Greeks, are mostly openly partisan, with papers representing the gamut of political views from conservative to communist. The line between news and opinion is often blurred, with more reams dedicated to commentators and diatribe than straight news coverage.
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In 2009, Lesbians from the island of Lesvos lost a bid in the Greek courts to stop the world’s lesbians monopolising the term, which stems from the island’s famous poet (and lesbian icon), Sappho.
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Newspaper readership has, however, dramatically declined since the advent of private TV and radio in 1989. Papers and magazines have fought back with gimmicks, competitions, magazine inserts and free DVDs and gifts, but the poor industry outlook claimed its first victim in 2009, when daily Eleftheros Typos closed down after 26 years.
With the exception of the more straight-shooting public broadcasters, TV news is highly sensationalist and parochial, dominated by domestic news and society scandals. Dramatic music, repetitive footage and multiple screens with talking heads (usually shouting at the same time) are a key feature.
Given the partisan nature of newspapers and the sensationalist TV news coverage, the country’s media owners play an extremely influential role in shaping public opinion. Media ownership is spread among a handful of major players, while the contentious entangled relationship between media owners, journalists, big business and the government, coined diaplekomena (intertwined), regularly raises its head.
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ARTS
Theatre
Drama in Greece dates back to the contests staged at the Ancient Theatre of Dionysos in Athens during the 6th century BC for the annual Dionysia festival. During one of these competitions, Thespis left the ensemble and did a solo performance which is regarded as the first true dramatic performance – thus the term ‘thespian’.
Aeschylus (c 525–456 BC) is the so-called ‘father of tragedy’; his best-known