>>24649516
>is any specific excerpt given why the women are so angry in that play?
Several specifics are given. Relevant excerpts from the First Woman's oration:
>Does he not style us adulterous, lecherous, bibulous, treacherous, and garrulous? Does he not repeat that we are all vice, that we are the curse of our husbands?
>Formerly the old men married young girls, but they have been so calumniated that none think of them now, thanks to that line of his: "A woman is the tyrant of the old man who marries her." Again, it is because of Euripides that we are incessantly watched, that we are shut up behind bolts and bars, and that dogs are kept to frighten off the adulterers. Let that pass; but formerly it was we who had the care of the food, who fetched the flour from the storeroom, the oil and the wine; we can do it no more. Our husbands now carry little Spartan keys on their persons, made with three notches and full of malice and spite. Formerly it sufficed to purchase a ring marked with the same sign for three obols, to open the most securely sealed-up door; but now this pestilent Euripides has taught men to hang seals of worm-eaten wood about their necks.
Later the First Woman remarks that
>What! we ought not to punish you, who alone have dared to defend the man who has done us so much harm, whom it pleases to put all the vile women that ever were upon the stage, who only shows us Melanippes and Phaedras? But of Penelope he has never said a word, because she was reputed chaste and good
which is a specific reference to two of his plays.
But, frankly, all of this is beside the point; what matters fundamentally is that Euripidies *in his own time* was sufficiently widely understood as a woman-hater or at least insulting to women's reputation that the premise and the jokes of the play could land. In other words, the idea that a key part of the oeuvre of Euripides is to redeem or nuance women portrayed as evil is an ex post facto (and probably modern, if I had to guess) idea which the Athenians in their time had no notion of.
Spontaneously I would think that this belongs to the same post-war category of revisionism that portrays Aristophanes' own Lysistrate as a feminist play, when in fact it shits on women relentlessly.
