Standing in their Place: The Exclusion of Women from the Judicial System in the First Decades of the Modern Greek State, 1821-1850

Among the many changes that the establishment of the modern Greek state in the 1830s instigated was the total transformation of the judicial system in Greece, from a communal, traditional, and customary system into a modern, professional, centralized "European" system. This rapid transformation, though necessary for the development of a modern state, had significant repercussions, one of which was the physical exclusion of women from much of the new system. Although women had been capable of defending their significant property rights under the old traditional system, under the new regime they were pressured to delegate their position in the judicial system to male family members, or to lawyers, even though their rights in and of themselves were not yet affected. Thus, although Greek women had some of the most extensive property rights in Europe in the early nineteenth century, they eventually lost the opportunity and the ability to defend these rights, becoming more and more dependent upon male relatives and husbands, which may have contributed to the eventual erosion of these rights.