Women in ancient Sparta their wealth. He attributed the state's precipitous fall during his lifetime, from being the master of Greece to a second-rate power in less than 50 years, to the fact that Sparta had become a gynocracy whose women were intemperate and loved luxury. All Spartan women, not just the richest, would have taken advantage of helot labour to perform the domestic tasks that elsewhere in Greece would have fallen to free women. Activities such as weaving which were considered women's work elsewhere in Greece were not considered fit for free women in Sparta. Therefore, women were more preoccupied with governance, agriculture,
Underclass from the political left arguing that joblessness and insufficient welfare provided are causes of underclass conditions while the political right employ the underclass term to refer to welfare dependency and moral decline. Many sociologists suggest that this latter rhetoric – the right-wing perspective – became dominant in mainstream accounts of the underclass during the later decades of the twentieth-century. Herbert Gans is one of the most vocal critics of the underclass concept. Gans suggests that American journalists, inspired partly by academic writings on the "culture of poverty", reframed "underclass" from a structural term (in other words, defining the underclass in