Women, both real and mythical, should progress through certain stages of liminality in their lives in the Ancient Classical period. These stages of varying liminality and distance from status society are, interestingly, incorporated within the structures of status society as regularized and necessary periods within it.
In classical Athenian society, women normatively shed their blood as they move through stages, from childhood to menarche to marriage to motherhood. Some parts of women's lives, particularly the biological, transcend the purely social. However, in many ways the female body itself is a social construct and is manipulated by society in order that women should reproduce in a socially acceptable format. There are social expectations of a woman's role that combine the purely biological with the purely social: procreation within the marriage situation with access to social status. Women in myth often forestall these bleeding and the transitions they indicate.
These failures to move through the normatively conceptualized rites of passage ensure that the woman maintains her social virginity.
A new full, revised version as an additional analysis for the study of ancient history and marginalization.
