The Commodification of Women in Sappho’s Poems and Fragments Anonymous College

Ancient Greek poet Sappho authored poems exploring various concepts of female sexuality and romantic experience. Many of her poems and the fragments of them that remain explore the theme and experience of marriage in women’s lives. While many readers would argue that the women in Sappho’s poems are honored and respected through marriage, this view fails to recognize that the marriage system exists within a social system that favors men, is deeply flawed, and contributes to the commodification of women in society. In her essay, “The Traffic in Women: Notes on the ‘Political Economy’ of Sex,” Gayle Rubin coins the term “the sex/gender system” in order to describe this dynamic. According to Rubin, the sex/gender system is “the set of arrangements by which a society transforms biological sexuality into products of human activity, and in which these transformed sexual needs are satisfied” (159). In our society specifically, it is the system in which women, sexual minorities, and other aspects of human personality are oppressed. Rubin argues for how this system creates a society in which women are exchanged by men through the institution of marriage and therefore commodified. Rubin’s ideas on kinship and marriage further reveal the...