Those wealthy ladies who were lucky enough to find themselves with time on their hands turned to the temple in an attempt to occupy their spare hours profitably while enhancing their social status. Religion, the one eminently respectable ‘career’ always open to royal and upper-class Egyptian women, was an approved interest for non-working females just as our modern society actively approves of those public-spirited women who have no need to take paid employment but who undertake a certain amount of voluntary work for charity. Egyptian public life was very much dominated by men, and in all the big provincial centres of Egypt the male élite held important and high-profile positions such as mayor, magistrate or senior civil servant. Their wives were free to take an equally prominent corresponding interest in the local temple where they often served as priestesses, particularly when the cult was that of a female deity. The duties of these upper-class priestesses were somewhat nebulous. Whether or not they were expected to be regular celebrants at the temple is open to question, and it seems very likely that these were purely honorary positions conferred automatically on all large-scale temple benefactors. It would certainly be wrong to class these priestesses as mere temple employees, and it seems likely that they were expected to make donations to the temple coffers rather than receive payment for their services.
Good speech is more scarce than greenstone, and yet it may be found amongst the talk of maids at the grindstone.
Old Kingdom Wisdom Text
The traditional Egyptian division of labour decreed that the man should work outside the home while the woman worked within it. This view was reinforced by the contemporary literature which constantly depicted active men supported by passive wives, and was subtly emphasized by the artistic convention of depicting light-skinned ‘indoor’ women married to sun-bronzed ‘outdoor’ men; in this context, ‘outdoor’ may be taken as a symbol for employment outside the home. Tomb paintings conform totally to the conventional view of daily life, so that we have very few scenes showing women working in anything other than purely domestic contexts, and no scenes showing a woman performing any work of great importance. But, it must be remembered that these tomb walls were painted to depict a way of life which was deliberately both idealized and stereotyped: just as upper-class Victorian and Edwardian morality maintained that a woman’s place was in the home, conveniently ignoring the thousands of women who were forced to work for a living, so the Egyptian scenes emphasize that paid work was, quite properly, the prerogative of men. The scarcity of tomb scenes showing women supervising cooking perhaps gives us some indication of the lack of realism in these conventional images.
As might be expected, the true situation seems to have been less straightforward, and it would be a grave mistake to underestimate the economic importance of the Egyptian woman, just as it would be a mistake to ignore the contribution made by her children who, in the absence of any form of protective legislation, were able to take full-time jobs from a very early age. Many women did, in fact, need to work outside the home in order to supplement the family income. The work available to these women may be divided into three broad categories: those who were both well connected and well educated were able to take professional posts, usually as domestic administrators or supervisors; those with the appropriate skills and talents entered the female-dominated music, weaving and mourning industries; while those with little or no formal training entered domestic service.
Several female job titles have been preserved on tomb walls and funerary stelae.3 However, these titles cover a relatively restricted range of duties, and it would appear that the professions open to women were limited both by tradition and educational opportunity. Once the purely honorary accolades (Sole Royal Ornament, King’s Acquaintance, etc.) and the more lowly servant’s tasks (Hairdresser, Grinding Girl, etc.) are excluded from the list, it becomes clear that the majority of the better-educated women worked either as domestic administrators or as supervisors of mainly female activities.4 Their work was almost invariably indoor work and often, but not always, they were employed by other high-ranking ladies who maintained their own retinues of mainly female attendants. This sexual division of labour is underlined by the many depictions of private life which show female servants attending to their mistresses while their husbands are served by men, and it extended into religious life where, as a general rule, Egyptian male gods were served by male priests and female gods by female priestesses.5 Even young children demonstrate a degree of segregation in their play, so that illustrations invariably show the boys devising their own games apart from the girls.