Women in ancient Egyptian society

 Raherka and Meresankh Giza, at Louvre ,.

Women did not form a homogeneous group within the hierarchy of Egyptian society, because their status depended on that of their father and, after marriage, of their husband. But this did not mean that they were without individual rights. In some other ancient societies, women were legally inferior to men and could not go to court without a man to act for them. Egyptian women, on the older hand, were not only equal with men before the law, but were also entitled to attend court, unaccompanied, as plaintiff, defendant or witness. They were responsible for their own actions and actions and answerable for them to the court.
Because women could own or rent property in their own right, not all of them were economically dependent on their husbands. Unless a will specified otherwise, all children received an equal share of an inheritance, and a daughter could  acquire a substantial income on her parent's deaths.
Wives, too, could inherit wealth. One late Middle Kingdom papyrus, discovered at the pyramid town of Kahun , contains the will of a priest called Wah, in which he bequeaths his property to his wife and family: "I am creating a transfer deed for my wife……she herself shall pass it on to any children that she shall bear me, as she chooses. I give her the three Asiatics (slaves) given to me by my brother, Ankhreni… She may give them to any of her children that she wishes".
A women controlled a third of any property that she held in common with her husband, and could dispose of all her personal property as she wished, A certain Naunakhte, who lived during the Twentieth Dynasty at Dier el-Medina ,left a will in which she disinherited four of her eight children on the grounds that they had not looked after her property in her old age. However, Naunakhte’s will  explicitly states that all eight would still share the property that was due from their father.
Egyptian women were able to engage in business, and they often traded surplus goods, such as cloth and vegetables, produced by their households. As Wah’s will shows, they could also own slaves, whose service could be hired out for profit.
Papyri and monuments were produced for the elite and say little about less privileged Egyptians. Peasant women probably looked after their husbands needs, raised children and worked on the land when necessary Elite families also hired them as servants, musicians and dancers. In ancient Egyptian society, men and women fulfilled very different roles, and rarely overlap. Men of the elite held positions in the bureaucracy that administered the country. Elite women, on the other hand, were excluded from the bureaucracy, and  were active in the domestic sphere. They were responsible for raising children, running the household and overseeing servants. In general, men enjoyed greater access to wealth than women because they were paid a government salary This economic disparity is demonstrated by the far greater number of monuments – tomb chapels, statues, stelae and so on – erected by men than by women. It was rare for a woman to have the most expensive type of monument, a deco-rated tomb chapel; ownership of such chapels was mostly limited to high-ranking officials, and may have been one of the rewards of high office.
 

 a woman kneading bread, Saqqara

The different social roles of elite men and women are also reflected in the imagery used in ancient Egyptian art. People are not shown as individuals but made to conform to certain ideals. For women, the ideal was a youthful beauty with the emphasis on the hips and breasts, the areas of the body connected with childbearing. Pregnancy itself, and the fuller figure of the older woman who has borne a number of children, are seldom shown. Mature female images were probably avoided as negative, suggesting a stage of life too old for childbearing. As a result, For men, how-ever, maturity had a different connotation, and male figures conformed to on of two ideals. The first was a man in the prime of youth, while the second was a mature, fuller figure with rolls of fat. This latter image rep-resented the successful bureaucrat who had juniors to do the active work, and whose salary paid for him to eat well .
   Couples are frequently depicted in both tow- and three-dimensional art. In many cases, the woman places her arm around her husband's shoulder or waist , and in statues of the New Kingdom the gesture is often reciprocal, each partner embracing the other. Although ancient Egyptian society was male-dominated, the frequency with which the elite women were depicted alongside their husbands and sons shows that they were recognized as playing an important role within society.
   The roles of non-elite men and women, and the division of labour between them, are less easily understood. Funerary monuments depict activities in the large households and estates of the elite, where poorer women are often shown carrying out household tasks such as grinding grain, baking bread and brewing beer. Although some women are depicted working in the fields, especially gathering the cut grain at harvest time, most of the outdoor labourers shown are men. It is not certain whether this reflects the actual division of labour or rather an ideal among the elite that women worked mostly indoors and men outdoors.