“She is not fit for womanhood”: The Ideal Housewife According to Sumerian Literary Texts

When studying the role of women in work and society in pre-modern civilizations like Mesopotamia, scholars generally have to resort to an implicit presupposition, namely that, as a norm, their primary role in society was that of wives, and their work was mostly domestic. 1 Substantiating this–undoubtedly not altogether arbitrary–assumption with concrete data, however, tends to be rather difficult, since it is exactly the everyday domestic work that largely goes unnoticed by the textual record. Considering that it was absolutely unnecessary to draft administrative documents concerning basic daily activities, which were taken for granted, this hardly comes as a surprise. However, there is in fact a small group of Sumerian literary texts which specifically deal with typically female tasks, and present domestic work as a defining characteristic of the ideal woman.