About the work
Aristophanes probably wrote the comedy around 392 BC, in the uncertain years after the Peloponnesian War, though it is not recorded whether it was staged at the Lenaia or the City Dionysia. It is one of his last plays and marks the shift from Old to Middle Comedy.
Plot
Praxagora persuades the women of Athens to disguise themselves with false beards and their husbands' cloaks and secretly pack the Assembly. Voting as if they were citizens, they hand government over to the women. Praxagora then introduces common ownership of property, shared meals and equal access to relationships, confronting the men of the city with an entirely new order.
Cultural significance
With its looser choral role and its abandonment of the traditional parabasis, Assemblywomen already stands stylistically closer to Middle Comedy than to Aristophanes' earlier work. Praxagora's reform proposals anticipate ideas Plato would develop shortly afterwards in the Republic.