Who was the target audience for Sophocles' Antigone? Why does Sophocles portray women as he does?

Sophocles' Antigone was written and initially performed in 441 BC. It would have been performed initially at the annual festival of Dionysus in Athens, and thus was as much part of a religious ritual as pure entertainment. The majority of people attending the festival would have been Athenian citizens—in other words, upper class men whose families had lived in Athens for at least three generations, who had received a traditional Greek education. Women would not have been present in the audience and all female characters would have been performed by male actors.

The portrait of women in the play was shaped by the culture of Sophocles' period, which included very different roles for men and women. The story itself was not invented by Sophocles and the basic plot line follows a legend that was already shaped into a tragedy by Aeschylus. Ismene in many ways is a portrait of the ideal Greek wife, and Antigone is a character who oversteps traditional female subservience in response to her other female duties to perform funerary rites. Both these characters thus are developed in terms of what were considered traditional female roles and obligations in Sophocles' period.