Content Warning: This article discusses death, suicide, and descriptions of self-harm in the context of historical and mythological mourning practices.

Throughout history, many stories of women—written by men, of course—detail their intense grief when it comes to losing the menfolk of their lives: husbands, sons, brothers, and fathers.

In Greek myth, there are countless examples of grieving women scratching at their chests until they bled and tearing their hair out. In Sophocles' play Ajax, when Ajax decides to die by suicide, the chorus describes his mother, “Her beating hands will thud down on her breasts, and she’ll keep tearing out her old gray hair.”¹

Similarly, in Scandinavian traditions, women—both wives and enslaved—were set ablaze on their husbands' or masters' funeral pyres. One of the most graphic descriptions of this comes from 922 CE, when Ahmad ibn Fadlan, a Muslim diplomat from Baghdad, described a funerary ceremony he witnessed for a chieftain of the Rus, traders from Sweden often described as Vikings. In The Risala, he writes about how the man's family would ask their group of slaves, "Which of you wishes to die with him?" After a woman volunteered her life and underwent a ritual killing, her body was placed on a large boat next to the chieftain before it was set ablaze.²

Women's grief and self-inflicted harm after a man's death wasn't always voluntary—wealthy families sometimes hired professional mourners to perform these rituals as a display of not only their wealth, but the importance of their deceased male relative.

In What to Expect When You’re Dead by Robert Garland, he writes that for the elite Ancient Egyptians funerary ceremonies after a mummified body was pulled in a procession by a team of oxen. First, after the body, came those holding a shrine with the important organs. Following that, “Mourning women, often hired professionals, followed, wailing, beating their heads, pouring dust on their hair and rending their garments to keep evil spirits away and gain the goodwill of the Underworld deities.”³

The intensity of women's grief, followed by her subsequent physical damage, is used many times in narratives throughout history and myth as a measure of a man's impact and legacy, suggesting that a man's immortality persists even after his physical death.

As Bettany Hughes writes of the wife of the man for whom the Mausoleum of Halicarnassus was dedicated,

"…a faithful woman's selfless devotion to her husband…a sign that the brilliance of some men is to devastate women by dying."⁴

Although these examples are from accounts hundreds of years old, their effects still resonate today. This commodification of female grief—whether genuine or performed by professional mourners—reflects how patriarchal societies historically valued women primarily through their relationships with men, even in death. The repetition of this narrative across multiple cultures and throughout time demonstrates how deeply ingrained this expectation of female devotion became.

While grieving a lost loved one is natural and often healthy, it's important to examine how gender roles in patriarchal societies have shaped the performance and expectations of grief.

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^1. Sophocles, Ajax, lines 630-631, translated by Ian Johnston

^2. To read more from The Risala: By the River Volga, I recommend this website

^3. From What to Expect When You’re Dead: An Ancient Tour of Death and the Afterlife by Robert Garland page 74

^4. From The Seven Wonders of the Ancient World: An Extraordinary New Journey Through History’s Greatest Treasures by Bettany Hughes