The result of this polity was a singular phenomenon: there were in Athens two classes of women--one carefully secluded and restricted, under the rigid surveillance of law and custom; the other, free to do whatever it pleased, except to marry citizens. Yet the latter class would gladly have exchanged places with the former; while the former, no doubt, envied the freedom and social accomplishments of the latter. The one class consisted of the highborn matrons of Athens, glorying in their birthright, and rulers of the home; the other, of the resident aliens of the female sex, unmarried, emancipated intellectually as untrammelled morally, who could become the "companions" of the great men of the city. Thus, owing to the Athenian conception of the city-state, the natural functions of woman--domesticity and companionship, which should be united in one person, were divided, the Athenian man looking to his wife merely for the care of the home and the bearing and rearing of children, and to the hetaera for comradeship and intellectual sympathy. This evil was the canker-worm which gnawed out the core of the social life of Athens and caused the unhappiness of the female sex. At the birth of a girl in Athens, woollen fillets were hung upon the door of the house to indicate the sex of the child, the olive wreath being used to proclaim the birth of a boy. This custom demonstrates the relative importance of son and daughter in the eyes of the parents and the public. The son was destined for all the victories that public life and the prestige of the State can give; therefore, the olive, symbol of victory, served to make known his advent. The daughter's life was to be one of domestic duties, hence the band of wool, with its connotation of spinning and weaving, was a fitting emblem of the career for which the babe was destined. The plan of a Greek house indicates how secluded woman's whole life was to be. In the interior part of the Greek mansion, separated from the front of the building by a door, lay the _gyncaeconitis_, or women's apartments, usually built around a court. Here were bedrooms, dining-rooms, the nursery, the rooms for spinning and weaving, where the lady of the house sat at her wheel. This was, in brief, the feminine domain.