Aristophanes also gave a voice to women who lived under a form of gender apartheid hidden from Athenian public life. In the comedy Lysistrata, women on both sides of the great Peloponnesian War effect political change by denying their husbands sex until they end the war between Athens and Sparta. In fact, the artistic freedom that allowed Aristophanes to pen Lysistrata in the fifth century BCE surpassed that enjoyed by Americans and Greeks in parts of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. From 1873 until 1930, the United States prohibited the import and distribution of Lysistrata under the
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