The Romans had some very different ideas about sexuality & masculinity/femininity.

Their male ideals revolved almost entirely around war and the military – a man who couldn’t handle a sword well was at a huge disadvantage in later political life, and all men of the upper class were expected to be soldiers in their youth, and politicians in their middle to old age. Anything foreign was seen as suspiciously unmanly, especially clothes and styles from Egypt, Asia and so on. M/M sex, on the other hand, was seen as incredibly manly, as long as you were the more ‘active’ partner, and the older man in the couple.

Meanwhile, the Roman ideal for a woman was based around several legendary matronae – respectable married women who were examples of great stoicism, intelligence and ruthlessness. Many famous Roman men used the good reputations of their mothers to bolster their own PR – in exceptional cases, a really AWESOME mother could redeem the reputation of a traitor or revolutionary.

A woman’s greatest achievement, as you might guess from all this, was to be a wife but especially mother – there were special honorific words to describe a woman who had only had one husband (at a time when divorce was easy and casual) and a woman who bore three children received special social and legal benefits.

Julius Caesar’s father died when he was very young and his mother’s role in educating him and forming his character is integral to his history – though sadly the best compliment they could come up with was that she was as tough as a man.

Meanwhile, the Romans invented the word ‘virago’ to describe women who involved themselves in overly manly pursuits as war and the military, so they had their own double standards!

There were certainly a lot of double standards and social restrictions on women, but many of them are quite different from what is expected because it is a pre-Christian society.
Definitely! My area of knowledge is more Ancient China/Ancient Vietnam, but they also have very different roles for women (which isn’t to say that women didn’t get the short end of the stick, but the axes of oppression are very different). And the amusing bit is the different conceptions of masculinity: manly heroes weep tears, and the highest ideal for a man in Confucian society wasn’t the warrior but the scholar–very different attitudes. Did Roman society have a different conception of males/females, or did much of that translate over into Christianity?

I love intrigue fantasy too! And I’m with you–we need more stories in the female sphere, if only to remind people that it existed and is worth covering…

I often get quite frustrated at the portrayal of Ancient Roman women in fiction because of the way they are so often conflated with Ancient Greek women, many of whom were literally housebound. Roman women of lower classes worked and moved around freely; some Roman women of upper classes were able to travel or exert some degrees of power, particularly in the religious sphere.

I do think you have a very good point that one of the best ways to write “strong,” active women in historical fantasy is to tell stories of intrigue, social politics etc. rather than what is traditionally thought of as the male sphere: religion and public politics, in which only a handful of quite exceptional women got to play the game.

But then, I love intrigue fantasy!

One the other hand though, history is very holey (I mean it’s full of holes, not divinely inspired). Consider the plague. You could set a story during that, and have any societal rules and norms completely overturned because so many people have died. There must be numerous other ‘disasters’ in world history that would allow female characters to break out of the bonds of society and take charge (and no-one was writing down much history to argue with you).

Thus, even in societies that historically allowed women little movement or control over their lives, a sufficiently disruptive even will allow resourceful women to assume important roles.

Upper class women generally pop up in unexpected roles in times of warfare:

(Listed WP links for women like Caterina_Sforza, Khutulun, etc, but spam protection wouldn’t let me post them)

Quite often women took up the reigns of power because their kingly husbands were off to the crusades or some other project.

For lower class women, as you note, the choices were even wider, though the chance to exert ‘real power’ was surely less.
Most of what happened in the lower social classes wasn’t written down, and this affords a lot of room to write in whatever you like. We all know there were female pirates, but we more rarely hear of highwaywomen, though they did exist. The secretive nature of the criminal world is something of a gift to the writer, as the code of silence ensures there’s plenty of historical wiggle-room for all types of characters.

I’m not disagreeing with anything you say above, I’m just saying it’s not all doom and gloom for someone who wants to write historical female protagonists, there’s a lot more freedom of movement within the historical record than one might think.

Colum

Are they, or are they the roles of gods and monsters?

What I mean by this is that most of the history is written about, and by, high-class men. The majority of men are almost as powerless as the women. They do not have control of their own destiny. Birmingham, where I’ve long lived, was famous as a place that, if you could get to it, you could become a ‘freeman’, which implies you were something else before. (I’m not sure when this was, I’d have to go back and talk to people who knew more about this than me. Is suspect it was something set up after the plague, because the plague actually improved the lot of those who survived it, because labour was so scarce that they had greater bargining power, at least in Britain).

Also, not everyone who had to go and fight for their king and country actually wanted to do that. The most well-known case is that of the men press-ganged into the navy.

In comparatively recent times (before the Plimsol line laws, so early 19th century i think men were sent to sea aboard ships that were known to be unsafe, radically unsafe, but if they refused to board severe penalties were levelled against them. These ‘coffin ships’ were often insured for more than they were worth, so the ship-owner had a vested interest in having the ship sink. And if the crew were lost with it, well, there were plenty more where they came from.

We don’t judge the lives of historical women by the standard of Elizabeth, Cleopatra, Boudiccia or Catherine the Great, but it seems to me that we judge men by the standards of Alexander and Caesar. In the future I’m sure they’ll assume that most men lived lives like Gates and Jobs, because those will be the people who’ll get into the history books, and in the absence of other information what are people supposed to think of how the majority of people lived (most people seem to think that in the middle ages everyone lived in castles, after all).

I suspect the men still had things better than the women but I think we are rather ignorant of what their lives were really like, and I don’t think they were anything like as free and in control of their lives as everyone seems to think.

Very few of the narratives that we have are of the average man, who couldn’t even hunt in the forest because the Norman kings had declared the forests their property. We have narratives of kings and conquerors, but they were a tiny minority of the male population, many of whom were, in one sense or another, slaves.

Perhaps the stories of their lives are overlooked because they wouldn’t make fun reading?

Colum

I don’t write much medieval stuff, but the Régine Pernoud book does sound interesting. Maybe I can find it at the library…

Ah, yes, Nero, not Commodus, sorry.

He even tried to sunk his mother’s ship, when she was abroad, but finally was forced to send troops, in order to kill her, because she’d survived earlier several assasination attempts. As for Sparta – Athens were even more female-friendly. In fact, if you were a courtesan, you had a privilage of learning in the best schools, with the best scholars available. I digress: there was a famous political trial of a courtesan called Fryne. Her “barrister” torned up Fryne’s clothes in front of the judge and asked, whether such a beautiful woman could be guilty or not…and he won the case. A year ago, one Polish author wrote a wonderful historical fantasy about Fryne. The Roman Empire, however, wasn’t as friendly for females as Greece. The legal system in Rome was patriarchal, indeed.

Speaking of fantasies: well-done female character was in “The Lions of Al-Rassan”.

by the way – there’s a great book about a role of a medieval female (don’t know the English title, so I’m posting the French one), La femme au temps des cathédrales, written by Régine Pernoud. Good stuff, too!