Whereas society sanctions their use of the loom, these women convert its original function into tool for rebelling against their society (signifying male aggression); yet, simultaneously, by operating the loom, they maintain their essentially feminine identities.
Katherine Sullivan Kruger, Weaving the Word 141
But retreat into the gynaikonitis was not always purposeful or even willing. Women were often not permitted to leave, for their own protection from the gaze of non-relative men. Women were confined to the private sphere of the gynaikonitis and excluded entirely from the public sphere of the city or even the public quarters of the house. Women who were not mistress of their own household were effectively imprisoned and kept at their looms.
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As he departs for battle and she fears to lose him, Hector tells Andromache, “go, then, within the house, and busy yourself with your daily duties, your loom, your distaff, and the ordering of your servants; for war is man's matter, and mine above all others of them that have been born in Ilius. He took his plumed helmet from the ground, and his wife went back again to her house” (Homer, Iliad 6.490-497). As Andromache waits behind the walls of Troy, hoping beyond hope that her husband will survive, she weaves. The scene of Hector’s eventual death is made all the more tragic by its juxtaposition with the scene of Andromache “at her loom in an inner part of the house, weaving a double purple web, and embroidering it with many flowers” (Homer, Iliad 22.440-444). Andromache, who cannot go down to the battlefield, fights to defend her husband in the only way she can: by weaving him a garment decorated with flowers that Katherine Sullivan Kruger calls “an ancient symbol for protection” (Katherine Sullivan Kruger, Weaving the Word 54). She uses weaving, her art and the only thing which she can do as a woman, to protect Hector-- and it is not enough. Even as Achilles drags Hector’s body across the plains of Troy, Andromache is weaving him a shield. As she hears the cry rise from the walls and citadel of Troy, Andromache drops her shuttle and ceases her weaving, her futile attempt to seize control over her husband’s fate from within the walls of